The Coming Death of Wikipedia, Social Media, and the Internet As We Know It
I participated in a most peculiar podcast a few months back which you can now enjoy along with these oddball reflections.
This is the fourth installment in our new premium series offering insights about artificial intelligence for writers, artists, and creatives across mediums to learn more about how to use these extraordinary new tools and understand their impact on the future. We’ll offer ideas both in theory and practice, looking at big-picture concepts about AI and also specific techniques you can use right now. Please join us and share your discoveries, too.
See the first article for free here:
While this article is free for all readers, most installments in this series are for premium subscribers. Some of the next articles will be, “9 Key Insights from 9 Books to Start the AI Conversation,” “What I Learned In My First 3 Months of Making AI Videos, Part I” and “15 Key Insights from ‘Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future.’”
If you enjoy our work and want to support our many missions, then please consider a premium subscription:
Earlier this year, I received an invitation to appear on a strange podcast.
My friend Aaron Bandler, an investigative journalist at the Jewish Journal, had recommended me to join a podcast discussion about a subject that I used to focus on for years—and have accidentally become one of "the world's foremost authorities" on:
The anti-Israel and occasionally outright anti-Jewish biases of Wikipedia.
As I've written about previously, this is much of the reason why our book publishing company sports a Zionist orientation. It's also why I focus on writing about global antisemitism today: because of my time working with the late Jack Saltzberg as his director of research for his nonprofit activist start-up The Israel Group. From 2018-2021, I worked with Jack for 20 hours a week investigating and countering ideological bias against Israel on Wikipedia. While he was alive, Jack was actually the “world’s foremost authority” on the issue.
But I am really fucking burnt out on all this at this point, for many reasons, foremost among them that I came to the conclusion some time ago that there really was no “solution” to the problem I'd been tasked to investigate, that had comprised half of my income for years.
It is tremendously frustrating to put in that much time and energy on trying to counter a problem, only to ultimately accept that it really couldn't be done. It was a fruitless fight. Wikipedia is the way it is because of the structural biases built into its organizational rules and the innate assumptions about human nature that are cooked into the whole Wiki project. This thing has been running for over 20 years, and this is what it produces. The anti-Israel bias and general naïve, left-wing orientation is a feature, not a bug.
So while I've generally had enough with writing about the issue, if others want to learn from Jack's and my years of experience here, then I'm happy to answer their questions and explain why I've come to just accept Wikipedia as-is, and why it really doesn't bother me anymore. Wikipedia doesn't need to be fixed. It needs to be replaced in the public consciousness as a default source of information. And that is happening right now.
But I'm getting ahead of myself in the story. So Aaron connected me with his Jewish Journal colleague Boaz Hepner, a cool guy who created and hosts the Chosen Links video podcast. Here's how it works: There's one episode each month, Boaz features a dozen people, and he runs the show for two hours or more. Thus, everyone can expect 12 or 15 minutes total to talk, and it's a casual, friendly discussion amongst reasonable people who might otherwise never get to connect.
So Boaz was able to gather together a dozen of us who knew a bit about Wikipedia bias, and we had a really fun discussion. Everyone he picked was thoughtful and friendly. And to my great relief, my "black-pilled on Wikipedia" position was not as alienating to the others as I feared it would be.
Now, a key reason to do podcasts—any podcast, even if it's very small—is because it's an opportunity to connect with new people—and sometimes old colleagues—hey, Jordan!—who may appreciate your work. That's what I understood in being on the podcast: that it was a quasi-job interview. Perhaps someone would see it and then want to collaborate or commission me for a freelance article or two.
And that's what happened—before Boaz even released the thing. One of my favorite people on the podcast—Christian Gribneau, who had some of the smartest insights and just seemed like a cool guy—connected Boaz with the heads at RealClearPolitics. They liked what I had to say, asked me to write for them on antisemitism, and the piece published at the end of last month is the result. Yesterday I submitted my next article to my editor, which I'd worked on the last three weeks, including interviewing people at organizations around the world. It's some great work that turned out much better than I initially expected.
Click here for a great write-up that RealClear did of the video, which noted this from my contributions to the discussion:
The Algemeiner contributing editor David Swindle adds: "Wikipedia has an international perspective. Well, what’s the international community’s perspective on Israel? That’s what you’re getting."
But all this remains bittersweet. On the one hand, the new collaborations with RealClear, Aaron, and Boaz are very sweet. These are great guys, and I look forward to working with them more down the road.
On the other, all of this is possible because of a man I was eager to potentially work with, too, but who I now cannot. Christian died unexpectedly on April 20. I will be eternally grateful to him—as well as Boaz, Aaron, and my editors at RealClear—for giving me the opportunity to write these meaningful investigative stories about the dangerous antisemitic threat not only to Jews, but to everyone.
Perhaps death has just haunted my mind a bit too much lately—heck, seemingly all the time, every day now. And not just because, as I've written about, encounters with literal ghosts are a regular happening in our household. In those strange experiences, there's a great deal of regularity and even predictability in what these usually sad entities have to say.
These are almost always unsettling experiences—a sense of dread comes over me when they're around and my teeth start chattering, generally more intensely depending on proximity. I take a few steps backward into the hallway and everything seems fine again.
And every time, the person is a ghost for pretty much the same reason—almost none of them know they're dead. They've usually died violently or suddenly. So they end up just walking around looking for something or someone, unsure or upset to one degree or another. It’s especially sad when they’re children.
Seen the move “The Sixth Sense?” That's how it actually works.
My apologies: I know it can be upsetting or annoying for those with a secular materialist orientation to hear me discuss these mystical matters so casually without pretension of needing to “prove” this stuff to your satisfaction. So go ahead and just pretend these are literary flourishes—creative metaphors—that I am only employing to make the big picture point here:
Just as people often don't know when they're dead, we who are still alive often don't know when our cultures and ideas are walking corpses, too.
And in this discussion above, I made an argument which I'll elucidate further here:
Why don't we have to keep worrying about Wikipedia bias? Because Wikipedia—as well as websites as a whole and soon, social media, too—is being replaced by artificial intelligence.
First question: If you want to learn about any subject, are you going to have a more satisfying experience by reading an encyclopedia entry written by anonymous people who may have infinite axes shooting sparks all over the digital grindstone, or will it be better to have an extended chat with an AI, which you have aligned to your own preferences and needs and which will allow you to ask the specific questions that you’re considering?
Do you want your answer biased in favor of Israel or in support of the Islamic regime in Iran? Do you want a so-called “liberal” AI, like what OpenAI allegedly offers with ChatGPT, or how about a so-called “based” AI like Grok, which will promote racist conspiracy theories about “white genocide” and outright Holocaust denial?
The ascent of AI both solves the Wikipedia Israel-bias problem and creates a whole host of other new challenges. Just as there will be websites which offer narratives slanted one way or another, now there will be AI programs which can do that, making it even easier for the user to calibrate—for better or worse—how they want their information filtered.
But the dethroning of Wikipedia is only one of the forces of creative destruction that AI will unleash. Perhaps putting it in these terms will clarify what is at stake here:
There is a very real chance that OpenAI will overtake Google and Meta as the top, most dominant tech company on the planet. And now they're apparently gunning for Apple, too, with talk of an upcoming AI hardware product.
Second question: Why did Google, Meta, and Apple become as wealthy and powerful as they did?
Because each created unique technological innovations that changed our lives. Google created the most powerful search engine, the gateway to the internet for decades. Facebook created social media as we know it, or as we knew it before it gradually transformed into just another channel of conventional entertainment, rather than its original purpose of networking friends and family together. The New Yorker reported a month ago, my emphasis added:
The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
And Apple created the iPhone, the first smartphone, a hardware innovation that gave us these tools in our pocket at all times, something that transformed all our minds, reshaped our culture—and as I demonstrated in my last RealClear antisemitism article, really fucked up Gen-Z, with many young adults fucking addicted to all three of these and coping through addiction to antisemitic ideologies or other bullshit.
And now OpenAI did the same thing with ChatGPT. They created a new, “general-use technology,” which others would then take and implement in all sorts of bizarre, innovative, unpredictable ways. This technology, it goes without saying, is far superior as a way to analyze and synthesize information compared to the Wiki technology created 20 years ago, which continues to power Wikipedia.
Third and final question: Just as the Wiki technology overtook the print technology of previous encyclopedias, will AI now do the same thing, eating Wikipedia for breakfast alongside some steaming hot hash browns?
Death scares people so much, really just because they don't know what's coming next. If they did, then they wouldn't worry. It's just a transformation from one form of consciousness to another, and afterward, you can choose what you'd like to do next, if you want to simply reunify with God or if you'd like to try another life, maybe as a stockbroker or drug dealer next, or I hear the dolphin or butterfly life is worth trying once or twice.
And that's what's going to happen now with our cultures and politics.
The technology that we create in turn creates the culture and politics that we have.
The technologies of the Wiki, the HTML website, the search engine, the social media website, the smartphone—the culture we have now is the result of the culture that these technologies enabled.
But that's all dying now, and AI is coming to replace it.
Are you going to see this, accept it, and get on board with the next technological and cultural revolutions?
Or would you rather swim among the skeletons and lost souls who don't realize they're dead?
Fabulous my friend. And what an honor it was to have all of you on the show. And what a lovely tribute to Christian who was taken from us far too soon
The problem with ‘Wikipedia’ is the ending ‘pedia’ … or rather with its allusion to the supplanted ‘encyclo’ while it is no longer truthfully factual.