Web of Deceit

The Almanac guide to meme parasites

Before I met my ex-wife, I thought a liar was someone who told falsehoods. But that’s how children lie. It’s how normal adults white lie.

“Of course I want to go to your daughter’s wedding. Thank you for inviting me.”

A liar’s lies are much more effortlessly sophisticated. A liar often tells the truth, for example, just selectively. They omit clearly relevant facts so as to leave you with a false impression, usually to elicit an emotional response (anger, sympathy) designed to manipulate. Social media algorithms do the same.

A liar doesn’t really care if you believe them, although they’ll pretend they do to keep up the appearance of truth. Rather, the goal is to get you to relent. It doesn’t matter if you grumble the whole time or swear it’ll never work again. A success is a success.

And they’re damnably persistent.

If you break down normal everyday speech, you’ll find most people have an assumption of honesty. That’s not to say we believe everything someone tells us, but we typically believe that THEY believe it, that they are not consciously misrepresenting their own internal thoughts and deliberations.

Persistence is a marker of that, of honesty. If someone consistently reports the same thing, we tend to accept that they believe it, regardless of whether we do. Indeed, studies of persuasion have shown that mere repetition is often enough to convince someone that a statement is true. At a minimum, that another person would go to all that effort at least makes their statement seem more likely.

“Jeez, he’s really on about that UFO stuff. Maybe there’s something to it.”

Yes, people are lazy and rarely check anything for themselves. But you can also think of it as a kind of cognitive efficiency. It’s much easier to rely on the assumption of honesty which, let’s face it, is usually correct in small everyday circumstances. Society couldn’t operate otherwise. Think about how hard life would be. How would you get through even one day if you had to independently verify every road sign, every price at the grocery store, everything everyone told you at work, every email from your bank, etc.? There’s simply no point to living in bands if the individuals in it are not going to cooperate.

That cooperation is what liars exploit. The casual liar, the street hustler, can be defeated with time. They’re looking for the quick win. Wait a bit and they’ll lose interest. But the worst kind of liars are patient. Gaslighters, catfishers, and state security services may develop a lie over months or years. Partisans do it over decades, even centuries.

Partisans are liars, or rather liars are partisans. A liar’s interest is herself. A partisan’s interest seems external, but in truth so much of their identity has been leached by the interest that there is effectively no difference, which is why they react so strongly when you criticize. An attack on it is an attack on them.

As an aside, that’s a good test of partisanship. How angry do you get when one of your beliefs is criticized?

There have always been liars, people who would exploit the mechanisms of normal human interaction, but the damage any one of them could do was limited by an evolved response that is as old as us. Norms and mores, more than laws, are the social firewalls and virus checks meant to limit the damage from exploits of the human network. On the one hand, there are clear benefits to openness and cooperation. There's a reason African hunting dogs, which live in large cooperative packs, have the highest success rate of any predator. We accomplish more together.

But cooperation and openness create opportunity for parasitical exploits. Sufferers of the dark triad of personality traits—liars, psychopaths, and narcissists—are exactly such behavioral parasites. As soon as you have the emergent properties of society and culture, you create a habitat for them in exactly the same way that every large herd of herbivores sustains its own population of biting flies.

That means, by the way, that the dark triad is not an illness, like herpes, but rather the normal evolved function of human society and any human population will come to express them. Pick the best people you can to start a colony on Mars, each completely free of the dark triad, and some of their descendants will still be liars, psychopaths, and narcissists. I suspect pedophilia is similar (but for different reasons).

For all of our history, speech and body language were the wires of the human network. It was how our brains passed information, as between nodes of an intranet. Writing radically altered the length of those wires and so permitted the kind of server-client relationship you see in church or state, functions previously mediated by the cult of personality. Neither Xerxes nor Leo III could’ve administered their empires without writing.

But it was printing that created the first human internet. Ideology—which is to say partisanship—requires printing, or some kind of mass media. People shared beliefs before printing, and their brains were biologically the same after. Those things did not change. Rather, printing altered the human network, the way our otherwise unaltered brains are connected. The fitness landscape of meme-space changed, and so some kinds of ideas died out and others evolved to take their place. The same happened with broadcast media.

Those technologies came with built-in immune systems. You had to have access to the very expensive, very physical means of production in order to exploit them. It’s not that they carried more truth. It’s that the lies they carried were basically the same lies that were told before, with a few more competitors.

If anything, mass media strengthened the centrality of power by creating a single point from which to broadcast. I’m not sure the British Empire could’ve administered a quarter of the earth without print. Genghis Khan couldn’t, and neither could Alexander.

Those kinds of big lies are what the world historian William McNeill called “macroparasitism” to distinguish it from plagues and famines and tapeworms, which he collectively called “microparasitism.” His book Plagues and Peoples explained world history as the interplay between the two.

The internet, and the smart phone in particular, also changed the way our brains are networked. Unlike physical media, however, you do not need access to the means of production. In fact, there are almost no limitations to access at all. Unsurprisingly, the biting flies of humanity swarmed in to exploit the virgin meme-space this created. We’re all familiar with the result.

Consider how many large network hacks there were in the 2010s, from Yahoo! to Equifax. Hacks are sort of like “infections” borne through a new type of human network that has no intrinsic “immune response.” (Most hacks use the internet to convince a human to do something rather than use the internet to tunnel through technology, meaning they’re fundamentally exploits of the human rather than the machine network.)

The sudden widespread use of two-factor authentication is a direct “immune response.” Just like the earliest social mammals, we’re trying to reap as many benefits of openness and cooperation as we can, recognizing the need for some selective limits to inhibit exploitation by parasites and free riders.

But as difficult as cybersecurity continues to be—locked in an eternal arms race like parasite and host, predator and prey—it’s still considerably easier than the battle to secure meme-space, which is a key feature of our historical moment.

This should be encouraging. Seriously. You are participating in humanity’s reaction to an entirely novel problem, one that’s only really existed since 2008 and only became epidemic since 2013. We simply haven’t ever faced this before.

There is a real danger that, out of fear and disgust, we’ll sacrifice openness and cooperation for authority and security. The current attempts to outlaw “disinformation” are a manifestation of that, but it’s possible that that angry response is something akin to inflammation and may subside as we get the parasites under control. (But then again, maybe not. Western society may be developing an autoimmune disorder whereby it begins attacking itself.)

Right now, we’re experimenting with solutions. A tiny example is Ground.News. To be clear, I’m not recommending it—although I did subscribe and am checking it out. This isn’t a single solution. There is no single solution. But this TYPE of thing, in conjunction with a constellation of related things, could succeed in retaining the maximum openness possible for a minimum necessary limitation of parasitical exploits.

Every creature gets sick. There are viruses, for example, that target particular species of trees. There’s even a species of parasitical fly that only targets crickets. There is no parasite-free solution. An open society will always have to deal with some number of liars, psychopaths, and narcissists. (Psychologists have recently added a fourth member: sadists. Yay.)

But there is a very good reason why it seems worse now, and there is every reason to expect it will get better.