The Most Important Question of 2025
Cosplay is everyone's main hobby.
"We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying." — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
George Hotz is one of the most interesting personalities in tech that you've probably never heard of. He was a student at the Johns Hopkins Center For Talented Youth. At 17 he was the very first person to jailbreak an iPhone. He started Comma.ai, which allows most cars to have self driving mode like a Tesla with just a couple of cameras on the dashboard and a device that hooks into your OBD-II port. He started Tiny Corp as a distributed competitor to NVIDIA to allow the everyman to run their own AI compute and "democratize the petaflop". In other words, he's brilliant. And opinionated.
He was on the second to last PirateWires episode with Mike Solana. Mike brought up the LA immigration riots and the Waymo vandalism and asked for opinions. Here's George:
"I don't trust the news. I think it's all fake. I think just, how do we know there's anyone even there? It's all just deep fakes. What are they trying to manipulate you to believe? Right? Like every time I see something, I'm just like, is this happening? Did anyone here see it? Did anyone here see it with their own eyes? And you're sure someone didn't shove a VR headset on you? I think it's all fake. It's a TV show. It's good. I mean, are you sure that what you saw was an actor's using the Fielder method?
It's just impossible for me to engage with any of this stuff on the surface level. I think that it's all, again, like whatever you're being fed, the algorithms are so much more intelligent than any single one of us. So they're designing to manipulate you to believe something or to feel something. And the question is what, right? It's not forget the surface level event, right? Forget the airborne toxic event. It doesn't even matter what it is. The question is just, why are they doing it? Right? Like it's all just such nonsense."
The "airborne toxic event" reference, in case you were wondering, is an homage to Don Delillo's White Noise. I read it in college, thought it was crap at the time, and a decade later realized it was simply ahead of its time.
“For most people there are only two places in the world: where they live and their TV set.”
—White Noise
DeLillo's concern was not what was happening but how it is used. Whether he knew it or not, DeLillo was a disciple of Marshall McLuhan. He believed that TV and entertainment dissolved the boundary between the event and the image. That the image, in fact, became the event.
This subtle move is striking in how it warps reality. The control of the dispersion of the image itself is actually a control on reality. If we don't understand what is fake and what is real, then there's no knowable reality and we simply live in a cycle of instrumented attention. Videos are delivered to us and we like them not based on their "truthiness" but based on our engagement.
With the information technology we've been able to build in the last twenty years, George has touched on the most existential question of the 21st century.
Ready? Here it is:
How do we tell the difference between a strongly held belief and someone performing their belief based on what the algorithm feeds them?
The original dream of the internet was that the democratization of information would distribute this knowledge and help us develop wisdom. But we've turned algorithms into a weapon with information as its fuel. Every truth is manipulated to correspond with our identity — that is, the beliefs previously fed to us. They feel good and they seem right. The world is simpler with our sound bites in tow, and that is safe.
Everyone wants to shout: "Look! I've done the work! I have the sources! I have analyzed the contents! My beliefs are true and core to my identity." The subtext often being: "This is acceptable."
Are you getting Vaclav Havel vibes? This goes well beyond the greengrocer. He simply wanted to be left in peace:
"The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: 'Workers of the world, unite!' Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?
...
The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: 'I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.'"
We perform the labels that have been presented to us. Democrat. Republican. He/Him. Entrepreneur. Nomad. Texan. Climate. Bitcoin. Freedom. Socialism. MAGA. HODL. Tax The Rich. E/ACC. Buy Local.
It is no longer enough that our performance is merely acceptable. Now we brandish our labels and compel allegiance. We demand that you — my neighbor, my constituent, my fellow citizen; you must believe this too.
And yet we give The Other no quarter. No concession. No heretics may be spared. WE have done the work, clearly, but THEY have not. We see their blistered thumbs. We recognize the deleterious impact of the algorithms carved in their skin. We know that they have been manipulated where we are pure. They are shaped by the algorithms and we are immaculate. They are marked and we are righteous.
Our common myths and noble lies have been stripped away. Postmodernism has told us that we can each live our own truth. But what is our truth? It is what is given to us. It is doled out in little drips of dopamine composed by the algorithms.
Instrumented attention is just another capitalist market. A front to procure as many eyeballs and bundle them in packages to the highest bidder. We did this once with newspapers and TV chyrons. Then our tech evolved to Google's Vickrey auctions for ad space. And now we have AI algorithms generating infinitely scrolling feeds.
They is really just a bunch of algorithms.
I really want to know the answer to this question!
How do we tell the difference between conviction and performance when the algorithms have made both feel identical?
So what are your beliefs? Are you sure?
What do you do when nobody's watching?
And what are mine? Am I just performing intellectually?
