Agreed.
> people will find more trustworthy signals.
I would really like to believe this but the world is clearly experiencing a massive crisis of trust because we have failed to find reliable trustworthy signals now that broadcast Internet communication makes it so easy to create and spread nonsense.
Hmm.
I think you could tell a couple of stories:
- "It used to be that media was used to broadcast journalism to the public, but now the internet allows lies to be spread faster than they can be caught".
- "It used to be that what the public found out was gatekeeped by a particular set of people, but now the internet allows the public unfiltered access to the truth".
The public used to have a limited set of narratives they had access to because creating and broadcasting them was expensive. That naturally limited the set of narratives available to those who had some level of power and wealth. The upside, if you feel that any level of power or wealth is ever earned, is that those broadcasting have presumably done at least something of value to society to partially earn the right to broadcast. The downside is that much of it may be unearned, or the value they provided may have only been to the elite few at the expense of the many.
Today, narratives are so cheap to produce and broadcast that the public can choose whichever one suits their whim or preconceived notions.
It's not entirely clear to me which of these scenarios is better. They both clearly have deep structural flaws.
A low-trust society is a significantly less productive and safe place to be. We don't want to go back there.
Photos went through the same thing: they used to labor-intensive to fake and generally accepted at face value, now that everyone can easily manipulate them with photoshop people are much more suspicious. That's how we got to people using video as proof instead of simple images. Now faces in videos will lose this trust, and people will find more trustworthy signals.