Of Betrayals, Victories And Blockchains
Comms wars are shaping our reality, but we can fight back
We are in the midst of a communication war. From what we consume on TV and internet to our visits to shopping malls and our news consumption patterns, there is a constant battle for our attention. Surprisingly, the same mechanisms that influence our choices offline also nudge our decisions online, providing a powerful tool to communicators. So what is the truth? Do we really have a grip on reality?
In The War For Reality: How to Win in the World of Fakes, Truths, And Communities, Dmytro Kuleba, the former foreign minister of Ukraine, approaches the subject from the unique perspective of his country's war against Russian aggression. While the book provides deep insights into the communication war being waged in Ukraine alongside the physical war, the lessons learnt can be applied universally.
The book says that the truth lies somewhere between fakes and real truths because everyone can have a different version of the truth. The internet is the natural battleground for communicators. Particularly because of the innate power of images and videos to evoke responses from our brain. This is also the reason behind the rise of GAFA – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple – who have figured out how to hack into our brains. Note that these organisations have no qualms about working with local govts of any kind. And authoritarian countries like Russia have taken advantage of this, says the book.
But can blockchain tech rid us of our sin? It certainly narrows the scope for manipulation. But the 51% rule and blockchain oracles present a dilemma. The requirement of approval by 51% participants to change a fixed blockchain fact is a high bar, but not impossible to overcome by corporations, billionaires and govts. Similarly, blockchain oracles have to rely on users and available data to adjudicate a contestation over a fact. For example, Ukraine claims that Russia occupied Donbas, whereas Russia insists on a civil war happening there. Both sides would want to introduce their facts in blockchain. But for blockchain oracles to make a decision it would have to rely on data that itself might be manipulated or incomplete.
What about persuasion? Can critical thinking be incentivised? As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman postulated, human thinking can be of two kinds – instinctive and rational. The former is immediate and emotional. The latter needs to be constantly switched on by human effort. Therefore, people often make the easiest, and not the most rational, choices.
Yet, it's possible to nudge people towards making desired decisions. Supermarkets in Ukraine started to mark Russian goods with the Russian flag after the beginning of the war in 2014. This immediately saw Ukrainians refuse to buy these goods. So, apart from internal effort, rational choices can be facilitated through external nudges, the book says.
Of course, manipulators also have the same tools at their disposal. This is why it's important to control our emotions. The book says communicators of aggression and temptation are aware that sex, internet and drugs have just the same impact. The goal is to produce dopamine. In this context, betrayal is also a very powerful emotion, while peace is meaningless to those who have not known war. Therefore, 'betrayals' and 'victories' are easily controlled by the toggle switch of communications. Politicians know this very well, and now have sophisticated tools to manipulate people more efficiently.
So, what should we do? Filter emotionally charged news and conspiracy theories, actively search for positive information, don't look at the world through the lens of 'betrayals' and 'victories', and don't get tired of fighting for real values: tough but doable.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.
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