Truth Doesn't Scale

I know I always say it, but Nicholas Carr as incisive about tech as ever:

Handing off authority for fact checking to “the community” has practical advantages for Meta, as it did for X. The community doesn’t send invoices.

Fact checking, like content creation or open source, is unpaid labor. Democratizing it 1) lowers the cost, and 2) provides you a scape goat: the supplier.

Chalk it up to yet another misunderstanding by Silicon Valley: everything does not get better as it gets bigger and more streamlined.

The desire to “scale” fact checking, to mechanize the arbitration of truth, is just another example of the tragic misunderstanding that lies at the core of Silicon Valley’s entire, grandiose attempt to remake society in its own image: that human relations get better as they get more efficient.