The Information Age comes with a lot of perks, but chief among them is the opportunity to manufacture our own truths. Knowingly or not, we became locked into echo-chambers and rabbit holes that feed us our preconceived opinions repackaged and disguised as supporting evidence. It’s difficult to escape this mirror-news, so difficult that entire apps’ and websites’ sole USP is the ability to provide unbiased and balanced reporting. You have to work, actively work, to see both sides of the argument nowadays. As the internet marches closer to dead internet theory, and we continue to, essentially, repeat ourselves louder and louder into the void, we exterminate the ability to be wrong.
It’s actually not difficult at all to be wrong, but it’s increasingly unnecessary, or perhaps avoidable – why suffer the ego death of be wrong when you can step into a new truth? Write one? Sometimes it’s empowering – reclaiming oppression, rewording abusive histories – but this is almost always done with the understanding that there is some repurposing happening; we choose to accept a new truth, with the knowledge that we are in fact making a choice, rewording the story. Even though it works, it soothes, we’re aware of our self-deception, to some degree. This manufacturing of truth isn’t like that; it’s far more intellectually sinister, far more malignant. This is rejecting debate and compromise, and so understanding, in favour of cognitive invincibility. I can’t be wrong. Here’s a study. Here’s ten.
We build tall castles to protect our truths, only to find our skyline compromised by the peaks of everyone else’s intellectual realities; incongruous but equally dominant, equally real. This is what it is to play the game; in order to ordain our own truths as really real, we have to accept, allow, that everyone else’s opinions become truth as well. So, we fight. It’s the only way to resolve this busy airspace. To be the only one left standing.
We don’t need to understand each other anymore. There’s no utility in it, no functional value. We can just be right instead. And there’ll be hundreds of online comrades telling us that we’re right and they’re stupid, and how could they possibly think that, and that our opinion is the one and only fact. And when we don’t need to understand each other anymore, when there’s really no marginal utility to be gleaned, why would we? Who would bother with the effort?
Now we care about being right. And being right won’t keep our communities alive, our children fed and our houses standing upright, but in the immediate context of the arguments we’re in online, why do we care? We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, and when we do come to it we’ll all have our own
opinions on how it should be dealt with, and we’ll all be right of course. And nothing will get done.
The difficulty is, avoiding compromise and understanding doesn’t play well with social connection. It’s not enough to be told by our army of chatbot friends and ai-generated partners that we’re right; we need the person standing opposite us to think it too. Conversation becomes a battleground, a courtroom where the most persuasive agent wins. Walk away from a conversation wondering who won, as though that’s a normal reaction. As though that’s the goal.
So when we’re told we’re wrong, rather than seeking to understand we reject. Hole up and run off, fight or flight, whatever the reaction may be, it won’t be productive. It won’t be accepting or considerate, because it doesn’t have to be. Because we can choose to be right instead. There’s no more accepting your lot, no more putting your hands up and admitting that you were wrong and thanks for correcting me and changing your view, or at least considering it.
It’s providentially your way or the highway, and we’re increasingly happy to let people take the highway.
When we find people who are happy to compromise, who seek to understand, who know how to be graceful when what they wanted was to be right, we cling to these people. We wonder what it is about them that makes us feel so heard, so happy, so understood. But it’s not a circus trick, or the payoff from a 15-minute charisma on command YouTube video, or a genetic gift. It’s being human; cooperating.
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