There soon will come a time when, despite using all the resources available to us, we will simply not be able to tell what is actually true. This, as we’ll soon see, is what happened at the Berkeley protest. Let’s look at two other examples.
First, consider a recent hoax in which, with the aid of bots, the Twitterverse was convinced that a Louisiana chemical plant had gone up in flames—local news even reported on the fire. They eventually got the facts right when they sent a reporter to the scene, but what happens when local news gets replaced by distributed networks?
In other words, what will happen when anyone can produce a news story? In a case like this false fire, social media might have two versions of the same story. One would say there was no fire— showing a video of the unburned site—and then there would be another narrative, with photos purporting to show the explosion and its victims.
Now, what does that mean for a future allegation of, say, the use of chemical weapons in Syria? Or of some kind of warfare engaged in by the U.S. government? Will the public be able to discern what is actually real?
In the second example, mal intent wasn’t even a factor. On December 27, 2016 (two days after the family Christmas party), a protester threw some firecrackers at a government building in Bangkok. This triggered a Facebook alert for an “explosion” (based on an unnamed “trusted third party”), and users proceeded to mark themselves “safe.” The Facebook alert linked to a news story that referenced BBC “breaking news” footage of an explosion in Bangkok . . . that had happened a year earlier. News outlets saw the BBC logo and, in their rush to cover what appeared to be a major breaking story, overlooked the date on the video and hastily posted their own stories about the explosion.2
Of course, the error was quickly discovered and the Face-book alert was taken down. In the old days, newspapers wouldn’t even have had time to take the story to print, television news outlets that covered it would have run a correction, and that would have been that. But with news traveling at the speed of links and clicks, news of the “explosion” spread around the globe within minutes—and continued to spread even after Facebook corrected its error. And so, if you Googled “December 27, 2016, bombing in Thailand,” there was a good chance that your top search result would be a story based on inaccurate data.
It’s not always accurate to call instances like these “fake news.” They can occur without any intentional deception. An inaccurate news story—even an accidentally inaccurate one— creates a “digital echo,” and though the original source may be corrected, the echo—reverberating across distributed networks—endures forever.
What Really Happened in Berkeley (We Think)
Recall that we had three competing narratives about who was responsible for the violence and vandalism at Berkeley. Our first narrative blamed the students, our second blamed anarchists paid by conservative institutions, and our third blamed the same anarchists—but had them paid by the far Left.
Unsatisfied with the UC Berkeley Police’s explanation, Ori continued to dig. He talked to a student who used to work for U.S. intelligence but got no answers. He asked other faculty, but they were equally perplexed. Ultimately he remembered that one of his students had written a paper on anarchist structures and turned to him for insight.
The student didn’t want to talk on the phone, so Ori met him at a dive restaurant near campus.
“So, do you have any info? Which narrative is correct?”
“None of them,” the student said. “They’re all wrong.”
And so we present narrative four, as told by Ori’s student.
Anarchists did indeed attend the protest. They smashed the windows of Amazon and bank outlets within the student center to express their dissatisfaction with the economic divide. They weren’t paid by anyone—and in fact were so wary of being found out that they didn’t even communicate via social media.
At some point during the night, a heat lamp fell down and caught fire. There were no Molotov cocktails. These kids didn’t know how to make one.
But when the media reported that firebombs had been thrown, the UC Police thought the campus was actually under paramilitary attack. Instead of making arrests, they retreated in the face of what they believed to be a superior force. The situation therefore wasn’t contained and continued to spiral out of control. In other words, the digital echo affected real-time police action, which allowed the situation to escalate.
We underscore that no law enforcement individuals acted negligently. Just like Uncle Shoe Store, they responded in a rational manner to the information presented to them. That information originated from unreliable sources but was quickly amplified by being retweeted, reposted, and repeated, to the point where it appeared legitimate.
They fell victim to the digital echo. It could happen to any of us.
In a world where verifying facts is becoming increasingly difficult, inclusion is imperative. It gives us sources as close to the ground or the action as possible, providing our best chance of getting at the truth.
Despite our best efforts, there will still be times when truth cannot be reliably distinguished from fiction. In the absence of verifiable truth, competing narratives will vie for allegiance. When we are forced to compete in a battle of narratives, inclusion is still our best weapon: only by leveraging a diversity of voices can we create a winning narrative.
CHAPTER 2: THE POWER OF NARRATIVE
McDonald’s vs. McVegan
To begin our investigation, we remain on Sproul Plaza but go back in time.
Twenty-two years before the Milo Yiannopoulos protests, in 1995, Ori was pulling a metal wagon along Sproul, the very spot where the agitators—whoever they were—would wage their attack. Ori normally walks with a hurried stride, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from his pace that day, which was nearly a crawl.
His load was heavy: two folding chairs, a card table, twenty stacks of pamphlets bound with thick blue rubber bands, and a dozen or so signs affixed to cardboard backing, all balanced atop a red wagon that had started its life as a toy for kids. Now, having been donated to the cause, it was covered in political stickers. The wagon’s front left and rear right wheels wobbled under the weight of its cargo. Tadamtumtruph, tadamtumtruph, tadamtumtruph, they groaned as they rolled over the smallest bumps in the concrete.
There were also psychological reasons for Ori’s slow pace. He wasn’t just pulling a heavy wagon; he was feeling heavy as well. Simply put, he dreaded arriving at his destination a few hundred feet away on Sproul Plaza, along one of two rows where student clubs “tabled” about their particular causes.
He found an open spot between the lacrosse club and an environmental group.
Ori began by unfolding the card table, then organized the pamphlets into four neat rows. Pamphlets on animal research at Berkeley were in the first row, information about the abuse of primates in the second, the philosophical arguments for animal rights in the third, and miscellaneous pamphlets explaining the history of animal rights in the fourth.
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