Ep51 -- Believing Is Seeing

 Probably the coolest class I took in college was called Film as a Subversive Art.  It was taught by Amos Vogel, who was the founder of Cinema 16, which was a renowned experimental film society in New York from the late forties to the early sixties.  I had no idea how fortunate I was to learn about avant-garde cinema from Vogel, but the syllabus was like a comprehensive Overview of the most important works in the genre. 

We watched Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera,” Buńuel’s “Un Chien Andalou,” Marker’s “La Jetee,” and so many others.  But there was one film that provided a rather unique viewing experience.  It was Tony Conrad's work of what's called "structural filmmaking" called the Flicker.

 The film begins with a ragtime tune played on an old gramophone and a somewhat ominous warning message in curious handwritten text on the screen.  It reads: 

"WARNING: The producer, distributor, and exhibitors waive all liability for physical or mental injury possibly caused by the motion picture The Flicker.  Since this film may induce epileptic seizures or produce mild symptoms of shock treatment in certain persons, you are cautioned to remain in the theater only at your own risk.  A physician should be in attendance."  

Then there's kind of this pop art text that reads Tony Conrad presents "The Flicker,"  and then the film begins.  And for the next 25 minutes or so, there are increasingly rapid flickers, caused by black frames appearing in greater and greater frequency until you're almost overwhelmed by this strobe effect.  And then the flicker slows and eventually, mercifully, the film ends.  So what was the point?  Well, from an intellectual or academic viewpoint, if a movie is just a series of images passing before a light and projected on a screen, then the flicker is just as much a movie as The Godfather or Dr. Strangelove.  But for the purposes of this podcast, what was most interesting was the audience reaction to the film.  

Specifically, when asked what they saw on screen, many students reported seeing quite elaborate images: trees, mountains, animals, even people.  But as Vogel reminded us, this movie was nothing more than a series of black frames passing before the light of the projector.  So why did those students believe that they saw things in the movie?  Well, for one thing, while yes, you can say that a movie of nothing more than just black frames flickering is still a movie, any reasonable person would expect that a 30-minute movie should offer up something more than that.  And so I guess as a defense mechanism against realizing we've been duped into wasting half an hour, some people's brains made up something where there was nothing.

This phenomenon that I wanna call believing is seeing as opposed to seeing is believing, is particularly salient these days as revenue-hungry social media outlets and self-interested politicians worked tirelessly to impart a certain reality into our heads. One that is often markedly different from that which the objective facts on the ground would impart if they were encountered more impartially.

So in this episode, I want to talk a little bit about this phenomenon of believing is seeing.  Why it's so powerful, how we can recognize the agenda behind it, and how we might be able to get back to a more broadly shared understanding of what's going on around us.

Stay tuned.

I'm Craig Boreth and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting a manmade culture that's out of sync with our human nature and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind. 

But first, a word about a sponsor. 

This episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you by Google, and specifically Google's new AI search assistant AI Overview.

But before getting into that specific feature, let's take a quick look at what Google's been up to more generally.  First of all, they've recently lost three federal antitrust cases in the last year and a half.  And considering how loath the federal government is to bring any antitrust cases, it's a pretty big deal.

And also Ted Gioia, who is a great writer here in LA who focuses on music and culture, but writes about a lot of issues with really great insight. He wrote a piece back in January on his Substack, "The Honest Broker" titled "Google Is Now the East India Company of the Internet."

 The East India Company was founded in 1600, and over its almost 300-year lifespan it became unfathomably huge and powerful.  At one point, it controlled half of all trade on the planet.  It effectively controlled entire nations, and at one point had a standing army of 260,000 soldiers. About twice the size of the British Army around that time.  And yet, by the late 19th century, it collapsed under the weight of its own greed, overreach, and the hatred of millions of people around the world held under its economic and physical subjugation.  Gioia suggests that Google. And other massive internet companies might want to use the East India Company as a cautionary tale since they are trying to do the exact same thing in the digital world as the EIC did in the real world.  Both Google and the East India Company focus on trade routes, on connecting buyers and sellers. Google needs servers. The way the EIC needed ships.  The E's rate of return on every voyage was enormous, and their growth was meteoric. Scalability in today's terms.  To establish a veneer of respectability, even as they were bullying their way around the world, the EIC created its own coat of arms and a fancy Latin motto translated as: God is our leader.

When God leads, nothing can harm.  Which is pretty much the "don't be evil" of the 1600s.  They kept on buying ships, running trade routes, eventually leasing ships to other companies. They controlled entire ports much the same way that Google controls access to webpages. Eventually, they owned the shipbuilders themselves.

That's called backward integration these days, like when a software company starts making hardware, like phones.  Over time, the EIC got so powerful that it didn't even need to deal with trade. It just stole competitor ships when it wanted to, started wars, subjugated peoples, often taxing its subjects rather than doing any kind of commerce at all.

Now, of course, opium was extremely profitable for the EIC and as Gioia notes, "there are only two businesses that call their clients users, drug dealers, and internet businesses. The East India company is a role model for both."  eventually you make enough enemies and you screw over enough people, and what once appeared to be an invincible juggernaut collapses.  Okay,  so getting back to Google's AI Overview,  if you're old enough like I am, you remember when the Google search engine first appeared. It felt kind of miraculous. It was just way better and faster than any other search engine that existed at the time.  They had the whole "don't be evil" thing going on, and said stuff like, "We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible."  They had a cool name. The homepage was super simple. It was a great product.  Fast forward to today,  and Google's use of AI to summarize information at the top of a search seems kind of cool.  Until you start to think about it. And one company called House Fresh, which does really great home air purifier reviews, did a really deep dive into AI Overview and found it to be less than objectively positive.

First of all,  AI Overview is just another thing that Google has put between you and actual organic search results.  HouseFresh did a search on "dinosaurs," and Google delivered first a carousel of 50 different dinosaurs, all with links to other Google searches. Then a block of sponsored ads, then a dictionary definition. Then a "People also ask..." block, and a video block, and a "People also consider..." block, and a "People also search for..." block. Okay.  Remember that line about Google wanting you to leave their site as quickly as possible? Well, this search returned 69 opportunities to click on new Google searches and 28 opportunities to click on an ad, and only 11 chances to actually leave Google. And three of those were links to YouTube, which Google owns. 

Okay, maybe it's worth it. Since AI Overview will be distilling massive amounts of information to give us a truly useful summary, right?  Well, not exactly.  Let's set aside the fact that all those websites providing information to Overview are probably not too thrilled that users will very rarely, if ever, actually link through to their sites.

Haresh found that 43% of the citations on a product review Overview came from the product manufacturer,  and almost 20% more came from sites that contain no information about the product at all.  Haresh also found that the reviews seem to follow a certain script.

The [model] air purifier is a [worthwhile investment/generally considered a good value for its price/a worthwhile purchase]. It's [praised/well-regarded] for its ability to [clean the air/remove particles/clean large rooms]. Whether the product is worth it depends on individual needs and priorities.

Interestingly, AI Overview followed this script even for products that don't exist. 

Now I get it. It's the early days. It might just be that AI Overview and other chat bot products just need more refining, and I suppose that may be the case, but if you think any tweaks to AI Overview will take anything into account other than maximizing revenue for Google,  that they'll somehow revert back to those Halon days of the late nineties when Google made a great product and didn't squeeze every penny from its advertisers and every moment of attention from its users,  I gotta tell you, that ship has sailed.

And we are back. 

Another memorable class I took in college was called Deviance and Social Control, which is taught by a former Black Panther named Elijah Anderson. He was this super soft-spoken guy who had some amazing stories to tell of the sociological research he did in the projects of Chicago while he was a grad student there.

But I remember early in the class, and this was at Penn in West Philly, and for a lot of the students, they'd only actually been living in an urban environment for a few weeks,  and he asked the question,  if you were walking down the street alone late at night and you saw three young black men walking toward you.

Would you feel uneasy?  I mean, like imagine yourself in that situation. The moment you register that these three men are walking right toward you. What do you feel?  What's the automatic reaction you experience, possibly even before you consciously register what's going on?  Do you feel a little jolt of nerves in your gut?

And he asks us if that was the case, to raise our hands.  And a few hands sort of nervously went up, and then Professor Anderson raised his hand. He said, I'll admit it.  I feel that.  Now, I don't know if he was bullshitting or not,  but then more and more hands went up around the classroom.  And that little jolt of nerves, that's a result of "believing is seeing." Somewhere in your psyche could be all over the surface, could be way deep down.

But somehow you've learned to associate young black men with danger.  And Professor Anderson's point was, that's okay. Feeling that anxiety is neither good nor bad. It doesn't make you a bad person. The key is what do you do with the knowledge that you feel, that feeling.  Acknowledging it, interrogating it. And dismantling it with each real-world experience that contradicts it. That's the key.  And that idea has stayed with me ever since. It's the adage that you shouldn't believe everything you think.  So, in this episode, I wanna talk about how "believing is seeing" has created the political and economic climate in which we live right now.

The result of particular ideologues, those with power and influence, holding a certain worldview, and then interpreting past events and laws that align with that worldview, who then set the dominant political and economic agendas based on that worldview, regardless of whether or not that original interpretation was legitimate and correct.

I first encountered this phrase, "believing is seeing" while reading about Robert Borks 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox.  An article about it appeared in the Antitrust Bulletin called "The Profound Nonsense of Consumer Welfare Antitrust" by Sandeep Vasan.  It's actually very readable and eye-openingly informative. I'll post a link to it in the show notes, and you should check it out.  Now, most people of a certain age  will know Bork from his failed Supreme Court nomination in 1987.

And I realize this may be difficult for some younger listeners to comprehend, but there was a moment, way back in the day,  when the Democrats actually stopped the GOP from getting what it wanted,  rather than just sending strongly worded letters or giving hours-long speeches before unceremoniously getting their asses handed to them.  They painted Bork as a right-wing ideologue who wanted to end legal abortion, roll back the Civil Rights Act, particularly voting protections, give all kinds of unchecked power to the executive branch, and so on.

And yet I would argue that even though he was never confirmed to the Supreme Court, Bork played a hugely important role in ushering all those ideological agenda items into reality.

And he did it  10 years earlier, before his nomination, with the publication of his book, The Antitrust Paradox, in 1978.  I kind of feel like we've been in the same era of American politics and economics, the sort of zeitgeist, since the late seventies. Some would call it the Reagan era,  but I think it's more accurately named the Bork era.

If you look at all the historically outlying elements of our current political and economic climate, with extreme inequality, historically low taxes, historically weak labor power, and so on, and rewind backwards, you'll find that the big bang that started it all was the antitrust paradox.

So what is the paradox of the antitrust paradox?  It is that, according to Bork, antitrust law (i.e., government intervention into the mythical free market)  oftentimes hurts consumers by protecting smaller, more inefficient companies.  It's like social Darwinism for corporations.  Therefore, again, according to Bork, bigger companies aren't necessarily bad because their efficiencies can allow them to produce goods more cheaply and pass those savings onto the consumer.

Right.  So his conclusion was that the only time government should step in with antitrust measures is if consumer welfare is impacted.  Okay. That sounds innocuous enough. Maybe even positive. I mean, looking out for consumers is a good thing, right?  Sure. But it was never intended to be the most important and certainly never the only criterion taken into account.  The antitrust laws that Bork was looking at,  such as the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890,  were intended to guard against corporations and their leaders becoming too powerful, both economically and politically.  And one of the factors to take into account was consumer welfare, but there were many others. 

Now, what I believe happened is that when Bork went to the University of Chicago for both undergrad and law school, he no doubt picked up the Neoclassical economic theory dominant there, stressing free markets and minimal government intervention.

With regard to monopolies, Neoclassical price theory allowed that certain efficiencies could be gained by consolidation, which would actually benefit consumers. And so when it came time to interpret the true meaning of the Sherman Antitrust Act and others, Bork used that same lens to do so.  The problem is those Neoclassical ideas didn't exist when the law was passed, so it's highly unlikely that they were included in the original intent of the legislation. As James Boyle wrote in 1991 in The Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities:

"Most historians would agree that one of the goals of the antitrust rules was to prevent the concentration of economic power in American society.  Those who wrote and passed the statutes believed enormous concentrations of economic power to be inherently subversive to the American Republic.  But this is exactly the kind of egalitarian claptrap Mr. Bork will not tolerate.  Consequently, he feels free to apply the wisdom of modern economic analysis to rectify the errors of Congress and the court."

So, for Bork, antitrust is all about maintaining the efficiencies that don't harm consumer welfare. But what about all the other kinds of welfare that are essential to healthy society, like citizen welfare, societal welfare,  worker welfare, environmental welfare, democratic institution welfare.  Those are just not really important considerations, and we see the consequences today of ignoring them for the past four plus decades.  

Okay, so Bork publishes this book that presents a novel IE bullshit interpretation of long-established antitrust law. Then, a year later in 1979.  The Supreme Court makes a decision in the case writer versus Soone Corporation, citing Borks book and concluding "Congress designed the Sherman Act as a consumer welfare prescription."  Fun fact, it most definitely did not. But Bork said it did. The Supreme Court agreed, and we were off and running.  

So, wherever it came from, this belief that businesses can never be too big and powerful as long as they don't harm consumer welfare, which, by the way, the Supreme Court very conveniently didn't specifically define it doesn't matter. Bork had a vision that that's how it should be interpreted, and his unfounded belief has become our unfortunate current reality. 

When you look at trends over the past 40 years or so through this lens, suddenly it makes perfect sense why we've had massive corporate consolidation and dismally stagnant wage growth.  As long as inflation stayed reasonably in check, then it was anything else goes.

And as we start to understand the history, we see a straight line from Borks 1978 book and those unfathomably wealthy corporate titans, up on the deus at the most recent presidential inauguration.  

So believing is seeing. Bork had this belief about how antitrust law should work, seemingly based on a social Darwinist understanding that the rich and powerful are rich and powerful because they're the best, smartest, most talented, and government has no business fiddling with the natural order of things.  So he interpreted the text of those laws to fit those beliefs. It's the natural order of things, right? Don't blame me, I'm just the messenger sharing the capitalist gospel. 

Bork considered himself an originalist who loathed judicial activism, and yet writer v Soone set the stage for countless unoriginalist and judicially activist decisions that would massively impact American life.  

I have to assume Bork didn't see it that way. He just saw the natural order of things, or maybe he knew it was bullshit and he just didn't care. Honestly, it doesn't make any difference.  You can feel morally superior by calling Bork a hypocrite. But he certainly has had the last laugh since, even though he never made it to the Supreme Court. That book of his has done more than just about anyone to create the Boian near Utopia that we're now living in. 

And the key point is it was all predicated on stuff pretty much just made up.  Guy writes book that radically reinterprets a law.  Then the highest court in the land cites book in a pretty innocuous case and effectively changes the law, and that's why it's such powerful gaslighting, because it appears on the surface to be perfectly reasonable and totally legitimate.  And it kind of is within the structure of American government. I mean, the Supreme Court decision was unanimous. But it was the first stitch in a new reality made up out of whole cloth. It became the guiding principle that has influenced every facet of American politics and industry for almost 50 years. 

We also have to remind ourselves that "money is speech" was also something just made up out of whole cloth. Presidential immunity just made up. The Second Amendment, ensuring the private right to a gun just made up. By the way, this is something Bork agreed with. He knew the Second Amendment was about the right to join an armed militia. After all, that's what the words say, not the right for a private citizen to own a gun.  And on and on and on. 

But within the power of intentionally manufactured reality lies, I think the key to seeing the truth of it and maybe changing it,  like American capitalism isn't the one and only form of capitalism. It's the one that's been made up, and to once again, quote David Grabber, "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it's something that we make, and could just as easily make differently."  

And I think there is a way to prime people's minds for understanding the constructed nature of our reality. And that is to travel to see how other people live, and to hopefully realize that our reality is the result not of some natural laws that prescribe how things must be, but rather the result of countless human decisions. 

Even the invisible hand of the market, which Libertarians believe just kind of exists out there beyond the realm of human meddling, is based on agreed-upon public rules.  Of how we'll interact within that market. Rules that are enforced by public watchdogs, without which the entire venture would very quickly collapse into chaos. 

So go see how people live differently. You'll discover some things other cultures do better, and you'll no doubt gain a newfound appreciation for things that we do better. But it's not the specifics that really matter; it's just the understanding that things are changeable.  But you know, I'd say that grabber quote is a bit too optimistic given the current state of affairs. 

I would say that the world is something that we could just as easily have made differently.  I don't think it's at all easy to make it differently from what it currently is,  but hopefully it's enough to just know that it can be that will keep us all fighting the good fight.  

That's it for this episode of the Great Ungaslighting. If you found it interesting, please share it with anyone you know who might also appreciate it.  And until next time, be kind to yourself cut each other some slack, and use your damn turn signal.