Context: Facebook to take action against users repeatedly sharing misinformation
To be quite frank, this (and all interdictions like it) merely treat symptoms, regardless of sincerity, conscientiousness or any plausible resemblance to aspirational efficacy. One of the key problems we face in the problem of disinformation is that of foundationally misconstruing the nature of the information systems that generate it.
Communications systems perform complex autocatalytic gymnastics both through and as the adaptive transmission medium(s) that their inhabitants compose. These systems are autonomously-oriented towards their own self-propagation and as a generalised property of complexity are biased towards an open, incomplete and indefinitely-extensible modularity – not towards closure or any other cognitive and linguistic teleology.
For this reason, if dissonant disinformation provides an optimal transmission medium for system self-replication – no less than conflict functions as the hyper-extended phenotype of a moving frame of reference as technological metamorphosis – then turbulence and partisan adversarialism is not an aberration so much as a ground-state and ontological essence of information and communications systems. Without acknowledging the kernel of this entity, it can not be possible to remediate it.
Daedelus Kite 