History-writing and random thoughts

My research has undergone some changes since it started and I feel like I owe my (m)eager reader group a progress update.

I spent the last year as a research fellow at the Humboldt Institute of Internet and Society in Berlin, mostly located in Reykjavík with collaborations online. I cannot describe fully just how valuable the fellowship has been for my research, to get the chance to speak to fellow geeks , academics and web-enthusiasts, especially leading global researchers in the field. I’ve also gained access to other academic research groups and networks, all of which is critical for my research and for opening the doors for Iceland into a wider conversation about what’s going on in Cyberspace and how it influences global affairs.

Most of my studies are conducted through the Internet with either virtual attendance or visits abroad to attend seminars, workshops and meetings.

I’m really hyped about how well things have been going, not least to be able to join the Internet Governance Forum this summer as a member of the IGF’s GIGANET academic network. I plan to rub shoulders with some very important people and ingest as much knowledge as possible from peers and global thought leaders. Admittedly, I feel starstruck over becoming a member of a very esteemed club, but am still far from able to present results of my research, although original thoughts are forming (I promise!)

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History writing

I’ve been thinking – yet again- about history writing and how AI influences how knowledge is established and contemporary history written in real time.

We’ve all heard that history is written by the winners, and while that is true, for a brief decade in time from ca 1998-2009 maintained that: “History is no longer written by the winners, but those who are best indexed online”.

However, the brief historical situationship between winners, writers and search-engines was soon over, converted into a winner-writes-all situation where Google controls what content is found and what history gets written.

I used to use search engines in my academic history-writing, looking for the right answers. But now I use AI and look for the right questions to give me answers of value.

We’re exiting the phase where search engines wrote history by controlling the content that you could find online, and are entering a phase where Artificial Intelligence writes history and sways minds with historical revisionism in real time.

AI models are now writing essays for students and establishing a foundation of knowledge based on the information that’s fed to their training models – from academia. While these models are simply going by what is common consensus from the data they scanned and with academia as the primary source of their knowledge-foundation, we’re at risk of entering a period of feedback-loops where academia asks AI and then feeds the answers back into AI for training.

Journalism as the ‘fourth branch of democracy’ is critical for the health of democracy. So is academia. But both journalism, news outlets, academia and academics/nerds have been under a coordinated assault from both ‘hostile actors’ like Russia but now increasingly from the US right and techno-capitalist corporations that back up this breakdown in the production of human knowledge.

There is way more than truth at stake. We’ve all been told lies before, believed them and nothing serious happened… except to the victims of that lie. Now truth itself is under attack and the goal is not to get us to believe the lies, but to get us confused, emotionally drained, questioning everything and paranoid.

Because when you’re paranoid and facing an onslaught of information that’s mostly false – it creates paralysis in the human psyche and we start making BAD DECISIONS.
THAT is the goal of the propaganda machine, to change our behavior and cause chaos and inaction.

Never in history have we had more educated people or scientific research. The benefits of the scientific quest are everywhere – and don’t need to be justified. But those who adhere to ‘accelerationism’ believe that a total breakdown of truth, knowledge, journalism and academia is needed in order to build a new society. It is the Chinese cultural revolution, but this time executed by techbros and US Christian nationalists. This is not a drill.

It falls on us to stand firm in the defense of truth, journalism, academia and scientific research as the ‘final boss’ of human knowledge.