With Enshittification, Quality Amnesia (Qualitynesia - "If wearing rose-tinted glasses is the act of thinking something was better in the past when it objectively wasn’t, this is its opposite: forgetting something was better in the past when it objectively was") and tragically now, with Disinformation Bubble trending too, I wanted to think harder about what it would take to check and reverse this trend as the founder of a company with two AI products that are designed to check bad and false information. As Sarah O’Connor memorably puts it, "Even using headphones from the 1990s, I was staggered by the richness of the sound. My ears didn’t deceive me. CDs have a bit rate of 1,411 kilobits per second, which is a measure of how much data is used to represent sound. Spotify Premium ranges from 24 kbps to 320 kbps, while free Spotify listeners are limited to 160 kbps at best... Neil Young, who grudgingly returned his music to Spotify this year, complained that 'there is so much tone missing that you can hardly feel the sensitivity". I was similarly shocked recently when I listened to Gotta Serve Somebody by Bob Dylan on a basic Audio-Technica setup and heard the vocals sounding so much richer and like live music than I had ever heard as I only discovered the song post mp3fication. (Shoutout to family who have always tried to get me to appreciate classical music and have a musical ear.)
I remember listening to VentureCast, the OG VC podcast, with great interest and curiosity as I contemplated what career to pursue during Business School. I first heard of August Capital and VC as a career in Adam Grant's classic Give and Take. Adam still has one of the most interesting and fact-checked podcasts around.
I remember that what drew me to the innovation ecosystem was an emphasis on informational quality, even in a casual medium like a podcast, in part because of the two hosts David Hornik and Howard Hartenbaum . I never imagined that it and the social media ecosystem could fall so fast and so far. I have detailed my shock with the informational integrity in Southeast Asia's Startup Ecosystem before and the sad realization of the challenges this poses for risk capital and the startup ecosystem. I have also detailed my distress at seeing so many startup heroes fail so badly at basic fact-checking in their podcasts last year, and I also made an honest mistake in my first podcast and have fessed up after discovering how easy it is to do so without fact-checking if you have a supportive and agreeable podcast host.
The audio channel might be suspect not only in terms of sound quality and the ability for people to process information dialectically to begin with, without a tool like www.Facticity.AI . A hypothesis worth looking into is whether our standards for the audio format and written format are different, with the former focused on entertainment and the latter focused on informing. Recently, Sam Harris has written in an essay ëntitled The Trouble with Elon, "The problem with Elon, is that he makes no effort to get his facts straight when discussing any of these topics, and he regularly promotes lies and conspiracy theories manufactured by known bad actors, at scale." One such thesis Elon has been promoting is that some left-wing tech billionaires are afraid of the release of the Epstein List, saying, Reid's "certainly ideologically unaligned with Trump anyway, but I think he's actually concerned about the Epstein situation... that the DOJ might actually move forward." Reid Hoffman in particular, has complained most recently in this podcast about Elon and others, "spreading a lot of lies and mis/disinformation" about Reid. The problem with such claims being made to mass audiences and sometimes not even publicly transcribed is that they force people on the defensive, and there might be no recourse, especially if the evidence for debunking such claims is mainly negative and hard to disambiguate, without the complete recording of every interaction between people and even what may be in the Epstein files may prove inconclusive and very one-sided even if fully released:
Guilt being proven before innocence is one of the things that seem to be giving way in the pursuit of absolute freedom of speech. Another thing is the different communication styles and even thinking between the left and right as pointed out by the New Yorker.
Maybe enshittification of the information ecosystem through the audio-visual channel is inevitable when the most important conversations and speeches people should have are only remembered as soundbites on X, IG Reels, TikTok, etc. Will write a subsequent post on how an intuitive or counter-intuitive thesis carefully explored, qualified and substantiated (together with epistemic humility necessary for correction and reflective equilibrium "Arguing as if you are right and listening as if you are wrong") might be better than the extremely certain but could be Delusional-Contrarian-Never Bet Against Elon scale of reality creating that we seem to be living in, where vulnerability to populism on social media anywhere could also mean vulnerability everywhere. Not everybody is a tech billionaire with the financial, intellectual, and cultural capital to keep themselves safe against death threats caused by influencers going wild on podcasts. How will the average person be able to voice unpopular opinions in an age where social media seems poised for perhaps too much masculine energy, which might descend into empowering the lowest common denominator and create a tyranny of the majority? Or how will smaller countries or corporations cope without our Misinformation Monitress / Monitor © to help them debunk false news about them spreading that we are creating and looking for media and communication partners for? Maybe we can make a difference by using www.Facticity.AI as something that can feed a rotten tomatoes or steam game review system to keep track of when Polymarket and Podcasts flip a Traditional Media prediction or societal expectation or vice versa.
As in the hymn When a Knight Won His Spurs lyrics, "And the knights are no more and the dragons" are being reborn. Please follow, like, reshare, and repost our Newsletter if you like the idea, and we will try to make audio fact-checking of podcasts available soon as we have already done for any video on short-form video platforms.