The Darkside: Independent Thought in an Age of Mass Conformity

The internet has fulfilled the vision of its earliest advocates by democratizing information and the public discourse, but this democratization has had the opposite effect of what they imagined. Instead of developing the capacity for independent thought and nuanced debate, the average person has outsourced their thinking to the collective hivemind. This is largely out of necessity, as the potential for public shaming on a global scale, combined with decentralized economic sanctions, has made approaching controversial subjects far more precarious. This counterintuitive result is consistent with previous forms of mass communication. In his book Propaganda, Edward Bernays lamented that mass literacy produced little in terms of original thought. 

"Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write, he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought."

The fatal flaw of democratization is the fact that it is democratic. Democratizing things has a flattening effect as it requires the new democratized version to be simplified to engage with the lowest common denominator. Perhaps more perniciously, it makes the new democratized version subject to the will of the public. In the new digital, global world, most people's minds are enslaved by an invisible totalitarian regime that they cannot even conceptualize, let alone criticize.

In 2022, the comedian Joe Rogan came under fire for promoting misinformation about the COVID-19 virus. It was during that time that the concept of misinformation came into the public consciousness. Like most ideas in the public discourse, it did not arise organically. It was a coordinated effort from the unaccountable network of institutions that engineer the acceptable parameters of public discussion to sanction independent voices. Creating a panic about misinformation during a time when the official sources had publicly burned their credibility through outright lies was an ironic choice, but a necessary one. To understand why, watch this now infamous video of the Dr Fauci, the man who represented the public face of the expert class during the pandemic, sneering at the idea of the public needing masks.

It is hard to imagine the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases talking like this in 2020, when the moral panic over refusing to wear masks occupied so much space in the mainstream media throughout the pandemic. The period right before the pandemic dominated public discourse was an interesting one. You might even remember the take that it was racist against Asian Americans to be concerned about the virus. The rationale for advising the public against the efficacy of masks was revealed to be the concerns of the public health community about mask shortages preventing health care professionals from getting the equipment they need. Admitting to outright deception along with gross negligence in pandemic preparation should have been the nail in the coffin for experts' ability to control the narrative. Instead, the opposite happened, thanks to the concept of misinformation.

The independent podcasters, bloggers, and social media users who recognized this in real time were soon targeted by smear campaigns, with Joe Rogan being the most prominent example. The very expert class that failed to stockpile the equipment necessary to handle the demand spike of a pandemic and lied to the American public urged Spotify, the platform that hosted Rogan's podcast, to “take action against mass-misinformation events”. The pressure on Spotify to censor Joe Rogan subsequently erupted from multiple fronts. Musicians publicly demanded that Spotify remove their music. Journalists wrote articles accusing Spotify of endangering the public by allowing Joe Rogan to speak unfiltered. The concentrated effort to "cancel" Rogan culminated in a video compilation of Joe Rogan using the word "nigger" on his podcast. Spotify ultimately capitulated to activists, not by terminating their relationship with Rogan, but by adding a content advisory on podcast episodes where Covid-19 discussion deviated from the official narrative. The message was clear: support the official narrative or else.

In the Orwellian world we live in, proponents of censoring misinformation often discuss creating safe spaces. They demand "safe spaces" be built in every facet of society that has cultural heft. When news of college professors offering "trigger warnings" before lectures that might contain controversial subjects reached the mainstream, they were initially met with mockery. Their opponents do not laugh now, as the rules invented in academia about what is offensive now completely dominate public life. In the new global safe space, everyone lives with an unspoken fear of cancellation.

The legibility of the internet creates a decentralized panopticon as a natural byproduct of its interconnectivity. What gets measured always gets managed. However, we can see avenues towards escape by examining the very institutions and people who silence us. Though the enforcement mechanism is decentralized, the production of the rules governing cancel culture is not. The nexus of theories motivating cancel culture originates on college campuses. The link provided highlights the difference in concern about cancel culture between the college-educated and the rest of the population.

"College graduates also stand out as being more likely to have heard of cancel culture: 77% say they have heard at least a fair amount about it, compared with 63% of those with some college education and 45% of adults with a high school diploma or less formal education"

College produces the managers, academics, bureaucrats, and politicians that govern us while creating a walled garden that insulates them from scrutiny. It is where young future elites learn to think, have sex, and more importantly, rule. They learn to rule by doing exactly what college is for: studying. Studies don't create and enforce rules by themselves; they justify them. The misinformation smear is so effective because studies trump firsthand observations of events in the age of global democratization. This is because, as a byproduct of controlling the credentialing process, colleges propagandize those whose jobs rely on studies and, more importantly, the people who perform the studies.

This invites the question, what is stopping people from reading academic studies and drawing their own conclusions? Better yet, what is stopping people from conducting their own studies? The simple answer is access. The areas of study, the technical training needed to design studies, and the financial resources needed to conduct studies are systematically gatekept from the general public. For this reason, the thought of independent study draws a reflexive sneer from anyone in polite society. Independent research is for cranks, conspiracy theorists, and schizophrenics; not the type of people to associate with if you're looking to go places. This attitude is captured perfectly in the following meme.

How do we know a medication is effective? How do we know that a tax policy is going to increase economic growth? How do we know what causes climate change? We answer those questions using experiments. An experiment is a test to determine whether or not there is a causal relationship between two variables. It's how scientists discover and test all knowledge across domains, whether it's medicine, physics, engineering, or psychology. Experiments typically consist of an independent variable, a dependent variable, and a control. The independent variable is changed in the experiment to see if it affects the dependent variable. The control variable is something we keep the same across experiments to ensure consistency.

Experiments are a great way to share knowledge because, in theory, anyone with the same resources could perform the same experiment to confirm the results. That's why scientific conclusions can be demonstrated to elementary school students by their teachers via experiments. It is an extremely effective learning instrument because it removes the teacher as the arbiter of truth. The results speak for themselves. Unfortunately, after graduating from high school, most people's engagement with the scientific process ends. The ones that do continue to engage are corrupted by higher education's ideological programming. This has resulted in something that threatens the integrity of the entire sense-making ecosystem: large numbers of studies that fail to replicate. 

If replication is the foundation of science, how has the expert class managed to maintain complete dominance over the narrative? The answer is simple: most people can't speak the language of science. 

“Mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots in words.”

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Taleb captures the essence of the problem succinctly. When journalists implore social media platforms to censor users who spread misinformation and promote users who promote "the science", the last thing they want are highly visible social media posts where users attempt to replicate the result for themselves. They instead expect blind obedience to the instructions, motivated by research the journalists probably didn't even read. After all, doing effective research requires extensive training and resources to produce and properly validate results. That's why the scientific community has managed to maintain credibility despite the scale of the crisis. Concepts like faulty experiment design, p-value hacking, and low statistical power are too complex for the average person to comprehend. At PBO, we are dedicated to understanding this language to see things that are hidden in plain sight. This is the way of the Darkside.

The Darkside is not about cynicism or conspiracy—it's about developing the intellectual sovereignty to navigate an information landscape designed to exploit cognitive weaknesses. While others outsource their thinking to platforms, algorithms, and credentialed authorities, we build our own capacity for discernment. Mathematics becomes our lie detector for statistical manipulation. Epistemology becomes our compass for navigating competing truth claims. History becomes our pattern recognition system for identifying recycled deceptions. 

Better thinking translates into better decision-making, and in a world of declining life expectancies and decreasing standards of living. avoiding the mistakes of the masses is paramount. That's why we are committed to building a community dedicated to independent scholarship and independent action. If you understand your world, you can shape your world. This translates directly into improving your ability to earn income, build communities of like-minded people, and navigate the complexities of modern romance.

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