The Ministry of Truth

We live in a divided world, where the flow of information can sometimes be overwhelming.  Those producing that information have their own interests to promote and rarely publish anything that counters their prevailing view.  Newspapers for example have long been biased, even before the internet became so widespread, for many decades prior, those publications had their own political affiliations and they weren't often subtle.  Front pages have openly stated which political parties the publications support.  With the rise of the internet and self publication however, the origin of information and the bias that it carries has become more nuanced.  Through "churnalism" a story is published by one source, reworded and published again by another, and so on and so forth, often with the original source hard or impossible to find.  It can be even harder to pin down a publication as to which way it leans more than the other, even articles that at first glance seem to support a given cause even with headlines that state this to be the case, often have a body that leads the reader to an alternative conclusion.  The attempt to persuade a reader to accept a view point with arguments you know they will reject can be more effective at controlling opinion than sincerely trying to appeal to them with logic and reason - in other words poisoning the well can be easier than trying to get someone to drink poison.

The world is filled with outlets now which produce a constant stream of propaganda not just for political parties but also for nations, corporations, and even individuals themselves.  This flow of information accumulates in time and solidifies to form mountains with nuggets of truth buried deep within.  Finding that truth has become much harder as the mountains grow higher.  So much so that it is a near impossible task to complete alone.  That in itself can lead some people to give up on the search entirely and actively choose to live in ignorance.  If you do however choose to keep searching for truth, the moment you introduce others into your search for truth, is the moment their opinions begin to influence what information is kept and what is discarded in search of truth.

In times of war, it was common place for governments to create entire departments dedicated to producing propaganda.  In the UK during the First and Second World wars there were initially multiple departments and eventually a Ministry of Information created specifically to produce propaganda both within the UK and outside it.  The Ministry of Information was also tasked with monitoring the populous as a whole to gauge the effectiveness of propaganda.  The ultimate aim was to influence and control what people thought and felt.

Today, private companies deal with this as part of their marketing strategies.  Mindshare is defined as the percentage of a person's mind you can occupy with your product, with your marketing strategy aimed at increasing that percentage and the percentage of people you can reach, and then finding a way to leverage that to sell more of your products.

There are organizations who in essence, attempt to find truth and catalogue it.  Whilst the first examples many people will cite are Google and Wikipedia, neither is reliable.  The former, despite its claims of not censoring the internet, does indeed manipulate the ranking of search results based on various criteria that it defines.  In other words you see what Google wants you to see, and what Google deems to be relevant.  There was a time when this was based on popularity of a website but that time has long since passed.  Popularity alone does not get a website to the poll position in Google.  Likewise whilst Wikipedia claims to strive to print only that which is true and verifiable, its rules that surround content prevent many sources from being used.  The creator of a product, service, or company, or any other subject matter of articles on Wikipedia are not permitted to edit their own articles directly - so for example Google cannot provide information about Google for the article about Google.  This is what is referred to as a primary source in Wikipedia and it is not allowed.  Beyond rules such as these that effectively force content to be inaccurate, the moderation of content on Wikipedia is incredibly militant.  If you have ever contributed to the website with regularity you will be aware that most pages end up with one or more users who treat them as pet projects and actively moderate every edit that is made to them.

At the heart of everything we are discussing here is the concept of community contribution and moderation.  The idea that a collective is a better judge than an individual, despite evidence that shows a collective is much easier to manipulate than an individual.  Nevertheless the principle prevails, but perhaps the only real reason it prevails is that it is cheaper to use thousands of volunteer unpaid moderators than to actually hire moderators that follow strict guidelines.

Regardless, the point remains that if you want to find an answer you can trust, the only real solution is to find it yourself - the trouble is that's not always easy and for many areas of our lives we often fail to trust even our own instincts and our own judgement.  Where then can you turn to?

In George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth was a government organization set up to find and deliver truth to the populous at large.  The name is a misnomer, as in reality the task of the Ministry was to write and rewrite history as and when needed to fit the needs of the state.  When Big Brother - the entity which controlled society - needed history to make one assertion, all references to it were changed in order to fit that assertion.  When this assertion changed, all references needed to be updated in order to rewrite history to conform to the recollection the government mandated.

Whilst the Orwellian Ministry of Truth was a misnomer and didn't live up to its name, the concept of having a centralized entity or organization that was both accurate and reliable is something which we have been trying to create as a society for decades now.  As the internet grows in size and the number of sources of information increases, there is a desire to simplify the process to the extreme and have one single intermediary that you can turn to who will answer all of your questions.

Initially, people used Google to find websites where they could find answers to their questions.  If you wanted to know what date a holiday fell on then you looked up calendars of public holidays for your country and then looked at the calendar.  In time however Google evolved, it did not simply direct you to information but it gained the ability to serve that information to you directly in its search results.  Our behaviour was then modified, we stopped looking deeper and simply asked Google what date is this holiday and the very top of the search results page would display an information box that told you what date it was.  This was convenient, but with convenience came complacency, whilst this is an objective fact - something that is empirically true, a date is either correct or incorrect, this feature of Google has evolved further still.  Not only does it answer objective questions but it now answers subjective questions too, providing answers to questions that are not empirical.  For example you can ask Google how long does it take to digest meat.  Right now the answer it will give is a quote from the Mayo clinic stating that it takes 33 hours for men and 47 hours for women to digest meat.  The trouble is that is not a definitive answer, and it is subjective as it will either be accurate or inaccurate depending on many different factors.  The age of the meat, the quality of the meat, how it was cooked, how long it was cooked, whether you were almost full or had an empty stomach when you started as well as your overall health, the state of your stomach and the integrity of your gastrointestinal tract.  None of that is provided in the information box at the top however.

The complacency of asking Google and accepting whatever answer it gives is something that has made our depth of reasoning become quite shallow.  The evolution did not stop there however.  Google along with many other tech companies developed virtual assistants, theirs being OK Google, whilst Apple has Siri, and Amazon has Alexa.  In all cases these assistants take up the role of an intermediary.  No longer do you type the question, and read the answer, and maybe read the background information if Google provides any, instead, you ask the assistant for the answer.  This takes away even more information by removing the context it was originally published within and leaving you with an isolated statement that may have multiple caveats attached that may even be grossly optimistic or entirely unrealistic.

The Ministry of Truth has been realised in our everyday lives through our dependence on search engines and the information that they provide us.  If you can manipulate the information people find online then you can manipulate people, period.  We have opened ourselves up to an unparalleled and unprecedented level of control and the worst part about the whole thing is that we do so willingly and feel as though we can't live without this technology.  The prospect of doing so is so huge and overwhelming that we give up at the thought of it and simply surrender to it.  We can no longer live without Google.