> “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation … Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.
Why is this guy talking like this? YOU are literally co-making internet full of fake!
It's worse if you read the context[0]:
Interviewer: What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about — who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online?
Coren: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew(Chaotic Good co-founder) would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments — which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want.
Dang, that hurt to read. I'm starting up a new news-ish site like the old TheServerSide.com, at https://bytecode.news, and I'm faced with the question of "how do I generate traffic in the face of AI and all the people willing to market, market, astroturf, market, market?" I'm not that kind of personality, I don't want to do tiktok or whatever the kids do, I'd far rather accept organic and slow growth over meteoric and unsustainable and undeserved success, even if "organic and slow growth" means failure in the end.
This is not true though. My two favorite bands from the past year were poorly-attended shows that I stumbled into. You can still seek out good underground, obscure artists - you just have to look for them.
Not trying to be elitist - like what you like. I just really feel like little artists need the support. Plus, it feels like there is a bit more satisfying agency and fate in looking for new things rather than being fed them.
This isn't new, Theodor Adorno was making the point in the 1940s that taste isn't something formed in a vacuum and then expressed in the market, it's something the market produces in you and sells back. Chaotic Good is just an extension of the same tricks from back when Eddie Bernays was staging fake suffragette marches to sell cigarettes to women in 1929.
The more disturbing implication is that it's not just "everything on the internet" is fake so much as the whole surrounding culture of consumerist societies - and that possibly every thought you have ever had and will have is a product of these influences.
Mark Fisher is a good read on whether we're even capable of comprehending what it would mean to live outside such a system at this point.
I had a very odd experience the other day; while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, I had a book I’d read pop into my head (Mercy of Gods, very good) and looked up when the sequel was going to release. It had come out that morning.
I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a coincidence for me to discount the idea that I had been primed to look it up.
Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day recently wrote about the Geese ‘Psyop’ and is very skeptical that the PR firm actually accomplished anything to boost their profile: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-geese-chase (ironically, until now with these articles, I guess!)
It's such an insane amount of waste that there are rooms filled with cell phones just to churn out spam. The same job should be doable by a single server. I imagine that it's only required because platforms are fingerprinting the phones to check for spammers but obviously those systems have gone from being simply useless to becoming harmful since it's now generating massive amounts of e-waste.
This seems like something that should be regulated. The cell phone companies can identify these customers/devices easily enough.
Well, one thing I've discovered with the advent of AI music is that there are lots of things I like that are not particularly notable. I can listen to the 100th "1996 ESCAPE FROM DATA CITY + Unreal Tournament Mix" and enjoy it. I can't say that I've "discovered" an artist who then went on to become big. Back in the day, on amie.st there were quite a lot of cheap singles that I really enjoyed too but I can't find those artists again.
So, for people like me, the things we will listen to are the things you can get in front of us. I suspect there are a lot of others like me. The threshold for good is not very high for us so it's a matter of distribution. Of the numerous things we will deem good, what can you put in front of us? In a sense, I use platforms for their communities selection effects.
Reddit's /r/books has a top scroller with book titles on it. Right now are Mieville's Kraken, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, The Names by Knapp, and Lolita by Nabokov, and so on. Of the times I've picked from the top scroller I've been pleased. The guys running that site are good taste makers for me even if they're paid for it.
If Chaotic Good breaks that pattern and pays them to put things I don't like, I will stop using the platform for selection. Such is life and I'm fine with it. But if they cross my threshold of good, I don't mind so much that in the frothing foam of artists some are elevated by their agents to slightly greater heights than others. The psyop is perfectly okay.
I think most users of websites like reddit, x, and yes even HN don't realize how much traffic is inorganic. Marketing firms, government agencies, and many other interested parties with money to burn are absolutely aware that you search "best {product} reddit"
I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that?
Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
But Geese is a good band. I just listened to 3D country to verify this. Yep, they’re still good. If it is a psyop, the psyop was only successful because they were a good band in the first place.
As a musician in a small band: find a venue that sells tickets at the door and just go look at some bands whose name you have never heard of.
If they sell tickets at the door, that means they may not be in one of the big ticketing monopolies. Going for bands/artists you have never heard of will give you a mixed bag, sure, but (1) it will be your mixed bag, (2) you support the ecosystem that creates new bands and (3) it is much more authentic and personal, because it is usally also smaller.
I actually don't think Getting Killed the album is well mixed, what turned me on to Geese was their From The Basement performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIol9hig2G4 the music and the mixing are incredible. I've followed From The Basement for a while, ever since their collaboration with Radiohead. So maybe this was a psyop, but the music is genuinely really good.
> But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Geese worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good, which creates thousands of social media accounts designed to manufacture trends on behalf of their clients
The complexity of being popular increases as the complexity of the environment increase. I'm started to think, maybe this is an unavoidable stage in the development.
Today's Internet is filled with high quality (at least engagement wise) content which the platforms are trying to promote to retain users. These content could occupy the free time of the user, after a certain time threshold has reached, they stops watching the platform all together.
This creates some competitiveness, unless you are also doing something highly optimized (for example, "hack the algorithm"), your effort may gone unnoticed, short-noticed or delayed-noticed, and that could lead to commercial failure.
The "psyop" is new the game rule simply because it should give you a chance to compete against other established content.
as someone who works does marketing,
"first time?"
People paying UGC creators to have ads is nothing new. Posting en masse to fool the algo is, but there's alwasy been bot farms.
And before that there's still the trick of getting published by a low rated news org, then letting journalist at a more reputable organization let them know of this trending news. And so on til you end up in the NYT. FYI this works even when you actually bought placement for those low quality placements
On the upside, the product/service needs to be good if you want to gain traction AND staying power. Psyops are cheap tricks, if your product sucks, then there's no word of mouth and you can't scale regardless of how many reviews you botted.
Drake,Katseye, etc. aren't doing doing well becuase they're doing cheap marketing techniques, they're doing well b/c they have a loyal audience and make good music.
Never thought I'd be reading this on TechCrunch but fully resonates and it's an interesting article.
Also, I understand why some people think we live in a simulation. It can be explained to some extent; we're glued to our phones/devices and those devices choose what information we see.
We are only aware of the stuff that our devices show to us; yet the vastness of the internet creates a false sense that we know everything. This dual reality (deep reality vs the surface reality we see) creates the feeling of being in a simulation; we have a feeling that there's another reality beyond our simulation. We implicitly trust the algorithms to do the curation for us, personalized to our tastes, but the algorithms are heavily biased towards popular content, ideas and people. It's a tiny subset of reality that's highly manipulated and fake. The less critically-minded you are, the smaller but more pleasant your world is (until you reach a certain point?).
We have hype leading adoption, which funds development capacity which leads to slight improvements, which lead to consolidation of hype... But there exist alternatives that are 10x better from the beginning but lacking the hype component altogether and those things appear to not exist. Value creators are often terrible at marketing. It's hard to sell to people who are inside the simulation when you are outside of it because you don't speak the same language.
The contrast between form vs substance has reached comically absurd levels and sadly, the clear winner is form.
To really get the full picture, you almost have to already know all the key information. At best, AI/LLMs can give you confirmation of your existing knowledge with additional supporting data... But even that's under attack; there are narratives trying to discredit the objectivity of LLMs by saying that they are programmed to agree with you for engagement... That's a persuasive narrative, especially in the age of fake news, but I really hope we ignore these narratives; we just have to observe that LLMs do in fact push back effectively when you're wrong! You can't make an LLM agree with you on facts that are wrong no matter how many times or how many ways you repeat them. The only wiggle-room is in terms of 'importance' or 'relevance', not facts.
Critical thinking (e.g. poking holes in otherwise perfectly satisfying explanations) is now more important than ever if you want to stay connected to reality because there are incredibly powerful forces in place to make sure we stay on the first layer.
For folks that don't appreciate the power of marketing and advertising, I would strongly recommend the book Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. The point isn't to say "well ackchyually marketing is good," but is instead to say that the human mind has some built-in irrationality, and understanding the our behavioral predispositions interact with the world means that we can make better decisions in life and in business.
Psyop feels a bit dramatic. Either marketing turned you on to a band you otherwise wouldn’t have found, or your tastes are driven by trends and social/status signals from others. Either way that’s just (admittedly intense) marketing isn’t it? Maybe I’m missing something?
Taqueria style chile de arbol salsa roja is not a psyop. So I don't like the title. But I enjoy the examples in the article -- I am only Geese adjacent, and much closer to actual Canadian Geese on a daily basis, but my daughter has been critical of Geese hype.
I enjoyed watching Adam Ruins Everything. But it was a bit weird. It didn’t ruin everything. It’s just about how seemingly every American thing is a marketing “psyop”. I’m not an American so learning about how spending X amounts of salary on a specifically diamond engagement ring or something is a Diamond Industry (or something) marketing campaign didn’t really “ruin” it for me since I don’t have warm and fuzzy feelings around it. But I imagine that’s the same for many Americans.
There are many this-is-just-what-is-done “values” that were discussed like this. Not quite as on-the-nose as spend this ridiculous amount of your salary on specifically X ring.
I’m not singling out America here. I don’t think this shows that it is a uniquely American thing. It is just very convenient for me: I’m not part of the culture so I can watch a little from the outside. And America is a big country (we are told) so naturally there are pop-exposes like this. I do not expect the same amount of resources to be poured into my own corner of the world and all the “organic” things that we value. But that show helped me think about all the things closer to home that might be influencing me.
And since then, or before it, I’ve believed that all of society is a marketing gimmick. The asymmetry of mass media is too great in favor of Big Bad Things (governments, corporations).
What a weird feeling. To know (or believe) that you are a spoiled brat in terms of access to information, many conveniences and such (except my mortgage), and that it just comes at the small price of a Panopticon of constant brainwashing.
And so you go about your day. A Special Occassion on this and that day, which is just a marketing campaign to sell you gifts that you are obligated to buy on this Special Occassion. You know it. But you go along with it. Because what are you going to do? Complain at the nearest plaza to drones like you that also knows the truth but go along with it because it’s just the way things are done and anyway no one cares about your particular eight-page manifesto on how society is slightly broken?
As to the article, naive to the point of being suspect, even. This has been going on for let’s say a long time. But as usual the classic outlet is the Evil Corporation with stupid-arse names like Chaotic Good who has some hateable yuppie press release person who just says, Yes, the Internet is bot-filled and there is a demand and we fill it, in fact we are so proud of it. It’s just, hey these people are doing it, look, it’s these people right here.
But the reality is so insidious and rotten that TikTok Comments on Demand Inc. and Korean Executive-created K-pop is just a farcically shallow treatment of it.
How much of the Internet is like Moltbook where you don't know the other users are bots? Does the private sector or Government control them? ... How long has it been this way??
Everyone needs to revisit William Gibson's the Blue Ant books. Still holds up as the best distillation of our current times culturally.
On Cameron Winter & Geese, i think he and the band are great. But I find it amusing that this weird discourse thinks this wasn't always the way the music industry works. The tools are different but its fundamentally the same playbook
Something occurred to me, I wonder if the "hipster" is a creation of these marketing firms also. What do you do when tastemakers are getting their friends to listen to underground artists you don't make money off of? Flip the script, call THEM uncool and disingenuous posers. They didn't find good underground bands by having TASTE, they only like underground bands because they're narcissistically drawn to being different than everyone else!
The problem is that social platforms benefit from this behavior as long as it doesn't get too egregious. Bots contribute to metrics just as easily as real humans as long as investors and ad purchasers feel like it's kept to managable levels.
Nothing on social is organic anymore, and hasn't been long before AI came around, which is why I welcome the AI slop era. It will accelerate us to the endgame, which is acknowledging how bad the problem really is and to start cleaning it up.
247 comments
> “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation … Everything on the internet is fake. One thing that we always say is all opinions are formed in the TikTok comments,” Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren noted.
Why is this guy talking like this? YOU are literally co-making internet full of fake!
It's worse if you read the context[0]:
Interviewer: What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about — who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online?
Coren: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew(Chaotic Good co-founder) would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments — which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want.
[0] https://www.billboard.com/pro/digital-marketers-secret-tacti...
Not trying to be elitist - like what you like. I just really feel like little artists need the support. Plus, it feels like there is a bit more satisfying agency and fate in looking for new things rather than being fed them.
The more disturbing implication is that it's not just "everything on the internet" is fake so much as the whole surrounding culture of consumerist societies - and that possibly every thought you have ever had and will have is a product of these influences.
Mark Fisher is a good read on whether we're even capable of comprehending what it would mean to live outside such a system at this point.
I can’t remember seeing any marketing about the sequel, I don’t use any app or service that would have told me it was upcoming or released, and I block ads; but it feels too enormous a coincidence for me to discount the idea that I had been primed to look it up.
This seems like something that should be regulated. The cell phone companies can identify these customers/devices easily enough.
They turn everyone elses experiences to shit just so they can have more money.
So, for people like me, the things we will listen to are the things you can get in front of us. I suspect there are a lot of others like me. The threshold for good is not very high for us so it's a matter of distribution. Of the numerous things we will deem good, what can you put in front of us? In a sense, I use platforms for their communities selection effects.
Reddit's /r/books has a top scroller with book titles on it. Right now are Mieville's Kraken, Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, The Names by Knapp, and Lolita by Nabokov, and so on. Of the times I've picked from the top scroller I've been pleased. The guys running that site are good taste makers for me even if they're paid for it.
If Chaotic Good breaks that pattern and pays them to put things I don't like, I will stop using the platform for selection. Such is life and I'm fine with it. But if they cross my threshold of good, I don't mind so much that in the frothing foam of artists some are elevated by their agents to slightly greater heights than others. The psyop is perfectly okay.
I've commented on this before, but I strongly suspect much of the narrative around AI is being formed with strong inputs from these patterns. What's your basis for thinking that codex is best for planning, but opus is best for implementing? Is it based on extensive experimentation and first hand experience in a non-deterministic environment, or is it that you saw a large number of people on HN and X say that?
Why was the dominant narrative on cursor coming within spitting distance of opus with a MUCH smaller team and less capital "LOL THEY USED KIMI!!" instead of "wow, open source models + a bit of RLHF training and some clever context management got within spitting distance of the industry giant and way cheaper"? The latter sentiment is a whole lot more damaging for a company eyeing an IPO with existing investors with very deep pockets.
If they sell tickets at the door, that means they may not be in one of the big ticketing monopolies. Going for bands/artists you have never heard of will give you a mixed bag, sure, but (1) it will be your mixed bag, (2) you support the ecosystem that creates new bands and (3) it is much more authentic and personal, because it is usally also smaller.
> But it’s never that simple. The real story is that Geese worked with a marketing firm called Chaotic Good, which creates thousands of social media accounts designed to manufacture trends on behalf of their clients
The complexity of being popular increases as the complexity of the environment increase. I'm started to think, maybe this is an unavoidable stage in the development.
Today's Internet is filled with high quality (at least engagement wise) content which the platforms are trying to promote to retain users. These content could occupy the free time of the user, after a certain time threshold has reached, they stops watching the platform all together.
This creates some competitiveness, unless you are also doing something highly optimized (for example, "hack the algorithm"), your effort may gone unnoticed, short-noticed or delayed-noticed, and that could lead to commercial failure.
The "psyop" is new the game rule simply because it should give you a chance to compete against other established content.
People paying UGC creators to have ads is nothing new. Posting en masse to fool the algo is, but there's alwasy been bot farms.
And before that there's still the trick of getting published by a low rated news org, then letting journalist at a more reputable organization let them know of this trending news. And so on til you end up in the NYT. FYI this works even when you actually bought placement for those low quality placements
On the upside, the product/service needs to be good if you want to gain traction AND staying power. Psyops are cheap tricks, if your product sucks, then there's no word of mouth and you can't scale regardless of how many reviews you botted.
Drake,Katseye, etc. aren't doing doing well becuase they're doing cheap marketing techniques, they're doing well b/c they have a loyal audience and make good music.
We are only aware of the stuff that our devices show to us; yet the vastness of the internet creates a false sense that we know everything. This dual reality (deep reality vs the surface reality we see) creates the feeling of being in a simulation; we have a feeling that there's another reality beyond our simulation. We implicitly trust the algorithms to do the curation for us, personalized to our tastes, but the algorithms are heavily biased towards popular content, ideas and people. It's a tiny subset of reality that's highly manipulated and fake. The less critically-minded you are, the smaller but more pleasant your world is (until you reach a certain point?).
We have hype leading adoption, which funds development capacity which leads to slight improvements, which lead to consolidation of hype... But there exist alternatives that are 10x better from the beginning but lacking the hype component altogether and those things appear to not exist. Value creators are often terrible at marketing. It's hard to sell to people who are inside the simulation when you are outside of it because you don't speak the same language.
The contrast between form vs substance has reached comically absurd levels and sadly, the clear winner is form.
To really get the full picture, you almost have to already know all the key information. At best, AI/LLMs can give you confirmation of your existing knowledge with additional supporting data... But even that's under attack; there are narratives trying to discredit the objectivity of LLMs by saying that they are programmed to agree with you for engagement... That's a persuasive narrative, especially in the age of fake news, but I really hope we ignore these narratives; we just have to observe that LLMs do in fact push back effectively when you're wrong! You can't make an LLM agree with you on facts that are wrong no matter how many times or how many ways you repeat them. The only wiggle-room is in terms of 'importance' or 'relevance', not facts.
Critical thinking (e.g. poking holes in otherwise perfectly satisfying explanations) is now more important than ever if you want to stay connected to reality because there are incredibly powerful forces in place to make sure we stay on the first layer.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy
Or are there a lot of adtroturfing hn accounts to influence the narrative?
It reminds me of pg's article on submarine and the pr industry
Discipline is required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
> Maybe Geese is a psyop, and maybe Katseye is an industry plant, but do we actually care?
...the article tries to normalize that.
But hell yeah, Amanda Silberling, I do actually care and won't ever accept that crap as norm.
There are many this-is-just-what-is-done “values” that were discussed like this. Not quite as on-the-nose as spend this ridiculous amount of your salary on specifically X ring.
I’m not singling out America here. I don’t think this shows that it is a uniquely American thing. It is just very convenient for me: I’m not part of the culture so I can watch a little from the outside. And America is a big country (we are told) so naturally there are pop-exposes like this. I do not expect the same amount of resources to be poured into my own corner of the world and all the “organic” things that we value. But that show helped me think about all the things closer to home that might be influencing me.
And since then, or before it, I’ve believed that all of society is a marketing gimmick. The asymmetry of mass media is too great in favor of Big Bad Things (governments, corporations).
What a weird feeling. To know (or believe) that you are a spoiled brat in terms of access to information, many conveniences and such (except my mortgage), and that it just comes at the small price of a Panopticon of constant brainwashing.
And so you go about your day. A Special Occassion on this and that day, which is just a marketing campaign to sell you gifts that you are obligated to buy on this Special Occassion. You know it. But you go along with it. Because what are you going to do? Complain at the nearest plaza to drones like you that also knows the truth but go along with it because it’s just the way things are done and anyway no one cares about your particular eight-page manifesto on how society is slightly broken?
As to the article, naive to the point of being suspect, even. This has been going on for let’s say a long time. But as usual the classic outlet is the Evil Corporation with stupid-arse names like Chaotic Good who has some hateable yuppie press release person who just says, Yes, the Internet is bot-filled and there is a demand and we fill it, in fact we are so proud of it. It’s just, hey these people are doing it, look, it’s these people right here.
But the reality is so insidious and rotten that TikTok Comments on Demand Inc. and Korean Executive-created K-pop is just a farcically shallow treatment of it.
Am I saying that TFA is a psyop?
Yes everything is a psyop
Really made me concerned w/ ad tech.
On Cameron Winter & Geese, i think he and the band are great. But I find it amusing that this weird discourse thinks this wasn't always the way the music industry works. The tools are different but its fundamentally the same playbook
(Late 90's Pop Group Framework)*(Dead Internet Theory) = Clicks and Streams
It's really the same mechanism every time :
- capitalism is about making money, more money, "better"
- someone finds a way to package an activity to a product to be sold
- that activity gets perverted beyond recognition by cutting all corners in order to "just" earn more money by "wasting" less.
Rinse & repeat to the next activity.
PS: context: one recent a16z investment is doublespeed.ai
The problem is that social platforms benefit from this behavior as long as it doesn't get too egregious. Bots contribute to metrics just as easily as real humans as long as investors and ad purchasers feel like it's kept to managable levels.
Nothing on social is organic anymore, and hasn't been long before AI came around, which is why I welcome the AI slop era. It will accelerate us to the endgame, which is acknowledging how bad the problem really is and to start cleaning it up.
OpenClaw is one of those