Virality Is Not Neutral
Truth is often slow, conditional, qualified, boring, dependent on context, and expensive to verify.
Information designed to spread is often simple, emotionally charged, absolute, repeatable, resistant to nuance, and cheap to produce.
These are not moral judgments. They are mechanical properties. A system that rewards reach will preferentially amplify information that is easy to repeat, not information that is careful. Over time, this creates a predictable distortion: what spreads best dominates what is most accurate.
This isn't new. What is new is the speed.
An Assertion, Not an Equation
Here is the claim, stated plainly:
truth = 1 / narrativeControl
This is not mathematics. It is an assertion about pressure.
Narrative control means the ability to sustain a claim without having to answer to reality. The more control you have over the story, the less you need correction. The less correction is allowed, the less truth survives.
As narrative control rises, truth doesn't fade politely. It collapses. Not because people become evil. Because correction becomes optional.
Why Truth Is Economically Weak
Truth has a structural disadvantage that has nothing to do with morality.
Truth is effectively public domain. Anyone can repeat it. No one can own it. It offers little differentiation. It does not lock in loyalty. It does not scale cheaply.
Falsehoods and narratives are different. They can be branded. They can create identity. They can monetize outrage, fear, and belonging. They can survive even when contradicted.
In other words: Truth is expensive and non-excludable. Narratives are cheap and monetizable. Markets do not favor accuracy. They favor retention.
This means that even in good-faith systems, truth is underproduced and underprotected. No conspiracy required.
Expertise vs Loudness
An engineer is constrained by reality. If a bridge collapses, the story ends.
A loudmouth is constrained only by attention. If the claim spreads, it succeeds — regardless of whether it survives contact with reality.
This is the core asymmetry: Expertise answers to consequences. Narratives answer to reach.
As systems shift from consequence-driven feedback to attention-driven feedback, accuracy loses its advantage. This is not about intelligence. It is about incentives.
Acceleration Changes Everything
Artificial intelligence does not create misinformation. It removes the last remaining friction.
AI collapses the cost of producing fluent narratives to near zero, while the cost of verification remains unchanged. The imbalance becomes extreme.
Propagation accelerates. Correction does not. The slope steepens.
What used to take years now takes weeks. What used to take weeks now takes hours.
The result is not sudden collapse, but rapid drift.
Drift Is the Real Danger
Systems rarely fail all at once. They drift.
Correction takes longer. Expertise is sidelined. Confidence becomes cheap. Repetition replaces verification.
Eventually, claims no longer need to be right — only popular.
By the time failure is obvious, it is already embedded.
What Can Be Done (Without Illusions)
There is no solution that restores truth as a default outcome.
But there are ways to slow decay:
- Make confidence expensive
- Require multiple independent supports for strong claims
- Penalize certainty without evidence
- Slow propagation where correction cannot keep up
- Refuse answers when justification is weak
These are not philosophical fixes. They are stabilizers. They do not guarantee truth. They reduce damage.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
Truth does not win on its own. It never has.
It survives only where systems force claims to answer to something other than attention.
In environments optimized for reach, narrative control will always beat accuracy unless deliberately constrained.
This is not pessimism. It is acknowledging the physics of information.