The Latest in Truth

As algorithms shape reality and institutions waver, we can reclaim our role as creators of trust

More is less. Credit: Author

Dear Designer,

Per my last letter, none of us know exactly what to do with ourselves when it comes to living in or near autocracy.

Our forefathers didn’t know what to do either. The reason that immigration was so high in the United States and Canada one hundred years ago is because our grandparents and our great grandparents left their home countries (from Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Russia, China, Ireland and Scotland). And so it’s the same with most immigrants (from India, Mexico, Philippines, Nigeria and China).

As a designer living in north North America, what is to be done?

I emigrated from the U.S. to Canada in 2005. Having lived through 9-11 — I was working in Soho, one mile from the World Trade Center and its aftermath — my wife and daughter and I made the decision to find a more politically secure and less financially crushing environment to live. Canada has been a good home to us for nearly twenty years now. It continues to offer tremendous advantages — a mostly peaceful environment with a mostly progressive attitude towards social order and small business opportunity.

But the chickens are fully coming home to roost. The rise of real autocracy in the United States last week and the very strong possibility that a mini-me autocrat will take the reins in Canada is making me sit straighter. There are no guarantees in this life. And, as we know, everything is always changing.

I have been a student of political precarity since graduate school. I spent a year on a fellowship in Poland researching and creating visual art after the fall of communism and autocracy there. As a Jew, I have read too many books about the rise of Nazism and the sophisticated models that those in power have used to manipulate and control societies and individuals. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno have been on and off my bookshelves since college.

The past is prologue and the prologue is now past

There is something different now.

We are no longer in a period that can be described to be “like” the 1980s or the 1930s or the 1920s — times of tumult and trepidation. For me, it is a real and almost calculable feeling of deja vu, inherent to my Jewish identity, studies and genetic makeup. It’s not a verisimilitude or a simulacra. It’s not an analogy or a metaphor or a parallel.

It’s real. This change in our landscape is real.

We are here, witnessing a change in regimes and a concomitant change in the social order that is making all of us sit up straight.

This is a feeling in the bones, something deep, something that is profoundly challenging and new. Again, an analogy. When birds take flight all at once from a frozen lake, merging their small bodies into patterns of chaos and order, when their cry is in unison and sharp and long, we know that something is afoot. What is happening that they know?

Another analogy, because that’s what we have. Jews, it’s often said, are the ethnic canaries in the coal mine. Having escaped victimization, marginalization and ghettoization since 1,500 B.C.E., we are genetically predisposed to recognizing the liminal changes to the landscape. Like those flocks of birds, many of the Jews that I know are reporting that something is off.

I don’t want to discount this feeling — or these feelings that I’m hearing from others. Whether it comes from a spiritual or epigenetic experience, it’s important to believe in what your body and brain deeply know.

From untethered to trapeze

But I am also a rational idealist — a term of phrase that derives from Keirsey and Myers-Briggs (I am a consummate INFJ, a strange admixture of contradictions that somehow make up less than 2% of the population). And as a logical empath, I generally need some proof to validate my odd discretionary feelings and odder responses to environments.

So, I will reframe my sensibilities here, too. As someone who cares about mass communications, what are the visible patterns of this shift? Are there any less liminal and more concrete indications of what the markers of these rumblings resemble? What can we say about the present times that indicate a massive shift is happening (besides elections themselves) and that we are to encounter waves of at first incremental and then larger and lasting change?

There are two key markers that I’d like to consider, dear designer.

The first marker is about the nature of thinking itself. We are cognitive beings — able to conjure condominiums and to speculate about spacecraft. We can design nearly anything that comes to mind. And contemporary life allows one can bring those ideas to scale easier and faster than ever before. In a matter of days or weeks, one can share the objects of our minds to willing audiences. Mass communication depends on this endless cycle of public thinking. Descartes’ first principle of “I think, therefore I am” is today “I think, therefore we are.”

Are we thinking?

How much are most of us are learning, ideating or deliberating these days? Are we (and am I) riffing on contemporary events and entities placed before us — or are we actively using our immense capacities to dream and invent and circumnavigate to create new worlds and new stories? Are we resting on our laurels while the machines increasingly do our thinking for us? Do we actively seek out the foundational history of the world and build upon the thousands of systems and languages and beliefs that have been handed to us? Or do we take what is here, what is now, what is presented, what is easily retrieved, and make something “new”?

Are we using our big brains to think or are we mostly reinventing what was handed to us 10 minutes or 10 moons ago?

I ask this in earnest because what worries me most is that we are increasingly repeating our own thoughts or uncritically rehashing others’. If we disengage from the fathoms of history and only surface what is timely, we will inevitably let the machines do our thinking. Our great advantage as inheritors of wet neural networks is to tap the depths, to summon the wellsprings of our traditions and our beliefs and our histories — to create recipes for human challenges that are draw upon all that we are.

One more note about this. There are many folks that would say we need to listen to indigenous wisdom to glean what we can. While I agree, to my mind there is also something colonizing and reifying about the appropriation of indigenous knowledge, as well. And yet there is something important here - that we need to look at the deep past to reconcile with the complex future.

A second and related marker is trust. As cognitively sophisticated animals, one of the values that create meaning and continuity in our societies is trust — the capacity to accept, without constant and incessant validation, that something is true and worthy of our time and resources.

Do we trust?

With the rise of algorithmic mass communications, it’s harder to know what is and is not factually accurate, or even presumably authoritative. The oligarchic set (owners of X/Twitter, Facebook and TikTok) probably tweaked their algorithms to help swing the electorate’s vote in the United States. More people are getting their news and ideas from social media than ever before. Fewer independent newspapers and magazines exist and for those that remain, it’s difficult to afford paying for the hard work of fact-checkers and analysts. Last but not certainly not least, the rise of AI has made making online content as easy as pushing a few buttons (60,000 AI-generated news articles are published every day).

At the same time, so many armchair observers like me (gasp) are using platforms like Substack, Medium, LinkedIn and Patreon to publish their ideas to increasingly willing audiences. (Thank you, dear designer.)

The numbers of independent voices are growing, yes. But how do you know if what I’m telling you — or anyone else on these platforms — is true or somewhere to close to truth?

In both cases — independent thinking and ascertaining truth — it is reputation that will sustain and assure us.

Former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour recently reflected on her long career as a lawyer, a justice of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda:

The search for the truth is becoming more elusive. At a time where access to information is easier, wider, and faster than it's ever been. The deficit seems to be in the filters through which we access that information. The traditional filters, news media, scientific sources, political leaders, the so-called elites have all been under attack and at times replaced by influencers who often have no other credentials than their popularity.

I’ll leave you with this. Visual artists and designers have the capacity to think independently and to create public trust in ways that most do not. We are purveyors of ideas and makers of movements.

What can we do? Maybe it’s just that.

Yours,

---

Image of the Week

Gilrod, Louis Lyricist, Jack Arranger Kammen, and David Composer Meyerowitz. Die Fire Korbunes. New York, New York: Theodore Lohr, 1911. Sheet music cover for Yiddish song. Credit: Library of Congress.

In March 1911, a massive fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York’s Greenwich Village. The doors to stairwells and to outside exits were locked tight in order to keep factory workers from taking too many breaks. In all, there were 146 deaths, most of them women and girls of Italian or Jewish decent — recent immigrants to the United States. Some people jumped to their death from high windows to escape the heat and flames. About 400,000 people went to the mass funeral. After this tragedy, new laws were put into place and unions spoke up more loudly for unprotected employees. As well, songs were written and plays were performed in the aftermath, commemorating and remembering what did not have to be.

---

Quote of the Week

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

~ George Orwell

---

Thanks for reading, dear designer.

Tell the truth: let me know what you thought about this piece in the comments section?

If Dear Designer has been forwarded to you, by goodness, you can get your very own subscription here. This newsletter is free and so are you.