To our current and arriving alien readers: Welcome to Earth — a beautiful cyber landscape covered with lush green AstroTurf. We have a great thing happening here. We are globally connected with unlimited opportunities to share ideas and products with each other. Cyber species include humans (and their avatars), bots (which are kind of like robots, but not really), domesticated artificial intelligence, exploding kittens, apes (that are members of yacht clubs), and trolls. Inter-species relations are mostly harmonious, although you wouldn’t believe that if you happen to visit our town square on X or scroll through the streets of TikTok, YouTube or Instagram. One big problem though, we tell a lot of lies and come up with great words to explain the not-so-great things we do and say, which makes people a little unsure about whether any of this is real.
So, about the lying and the words we come up with to explain it away — I present to you: astroturfing.
Although originally coined in 1985, it took the culture wars of the 2020s for astroturfing to show up as part of the news I feed on each morning.
No, it doesn’t mean artificial grass laid down across sports; however, the result is the same. Fakery. A fake, upgraded version of reality.
Technically, astroturfing is the practice of hiding the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious, or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from, and is supported by, grassroots participants.
More simply put, it’s a way of fooling people into believing something is a certain way, when really, it’s not.
Fakery is longstanding, ubiquitous, and has permeated our global culture, but somehow with the megaphone of today’s technology, it all feels worse now.
Before the internet was home to all humans, astroturfing seemed more benign, and occurred through letters to the editor in the newspaper, written under pseudonyms, to manipulate public opinion. Today, it’s not only bot-generated likes and comments launched at a massive scale, or hidden sponsor motivations that make up the astroturf. Now, there are entire news and media publications that are constructed and deployed, designed to look like trustworthy sources of information, but are ultimately just mouthpieces for a specific agenda.
Astroturfing is a deeply deceitful practice, and we should be aware of it as its genus has grown into much of what we do and see online.
To emphasize this, I’ll share some more nouns words we’ve use here to describe our habitual lying.
First, there’s puffery in advertising, which, in a current definition, refers to the use of exaggeration, sometimes to absurd levels, to promote a product or service. Think of puffery when a company tells you in no uncertain terms they have “the best” product for your needs.
Or paltering, which is the deliberate use of selective truthful statements that mislead you into crafting a certain belief.
There’s the beauty-filter trap and deep fakes, which flourish in Earth’s pixelated climate, where filters and AI-generated images are so supercharged that they are no longer just about hiding a pimple but creating and posting multimedia that is not even real.
What of wokefishing, a popular new way of catching “fish,” where people pretend to have progressive political ideologies in online dating profiles to attract potential mates.
I’ve heard obfuscation more and more these days, which is the act or process of obscuring the perception of something — the concept of concealing the meaning of a communication by making it more confusing and harder to interpret.
Or we could get the government’s new favourite word trifecta of dis, mis and mal information.
Really, the list goes on and on and on.
The point is, given that we have all these words for what we see online, we surely must know that much of the content we consume is utter bullshit. Or do we? More importantly, do we really care?
It could all just be de rigueur of the moment. I mean, if we all use filters, select just the best things to show others online, post about our idyllic and virtuous views (that may not be our actual views) in order to feel part of the tribe, or lie about certain attributes to improve our desirability, then doesn’t it all just balance out in the end? Or maybe our cause is so just and so right and so good for humanity that we can slither into a belief system of deception where the end justifies the means.
Is all this astroturfing and wokewashing really just a wash?
Or is perception reality?
Conversely, if attention is the new currency, do we really have any choice but to enhance our image or status to stand out or fit in? In other words, is bending the truth, even in a way we deem trivial, a necessary evolutionary survival adaptation?
I say not.
I say we have built a house of cards that is trembling in the headwinds of the age of information. A cultural foundation that the rapid rate of change has fractured on the fault lines of the lies and half-truths we continue to tell. And that we are denigrating the authenticity of human life, and continuing to erode and destabilize our lives physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
I believe many of us already know and feel this, yet some prefer to shoulder shrug in resignation and cover themselves in the fairy dust of complacency. What can I really do about it if everyone does it?
So, what of it then? What shore do we wash up on when we continue to knowingly shape our world and lives by continuing the antics of puffery, paltering and astroturfing? What are the downstream consequences of these actions?
Deception is like a muscle — the more we use it, the better we become at it.
At this point, we’re practically enabling it. There is so much fakery out there that we’ve almost left the green grass entirely and only play on turf. We’re so used to interacting with the façade that it’s easy to think we don’t mind it.
I posit that we do.
We are social creatures, and in my experience, we feel deeply unsettled from being deceived — even if we cannot prove it. The constant swirling of deception around us creates an undercurrent of uncertainty that removes our sense of agency and autonomy. Constantly trying to decipher if we’re being manipulated is exhausting. We lose trust and become jaded, apathetic, and feeling of angst increases. Over time, we become filled with a witch’s brew of resentment and bitterness that bends our values away from empathy and moves us into echo chambers that do not present the all-important spectrum of human thoughts and experiences.
May I suggest a reframe?
Although the popular term “your truth” has always seemed a bit pithy and wishy-washy to me, I believe the context of “your truth” has great importance here.
Allow me to explain.
Naturally, what is true is usually paradoxical, and real life is variable. Or as my friend says, “Truth in a relative world is a relative truth.” Cue the head spin!
There are many, many things we do not know about the world in which we live. To put a nice wrapper on that which we do not know, we have faith, hypotheses and theories. That is to say, and again, according to my dear friend, “Beliefs are for things we do not know.” We engage with truth by filling in the gaps of uncertainty with a felt sense of truth that makes us feel more secure.
You see, my father always taught me that we as individuals are not arbiters of the truth because everyone is coming from their own narrative and we self-select toward what we know to be true in the moment and our own biases. Therefore, the truth constantly changes as we grow, evolve, adapt and learn more. Even if we mostly don’t like to admit it.
Therefore, it isn’t truth at all that we should be aiming for in order to combat astroturfing or any of those other fancy nouns I shared above. No, the aim is toward our own truth, but more precisely, our intent to be honest and sincere. While the act of astroturfing implies we don’t like a certain truth so we’re faking it, honesty is unafraid of that truth — even if it’s wrong. It is in the spirit of honesty that we must speak to ourselves and to each other. We must seek to see and present not what we wish to see, but what’s actually there.
We must move away from ego-driven vanity metrics to reclaim and foster the organic nature of what is to blossom, to rebalance our societal ecosystem and create a fertile ground where we feel secure in the honest intent of human beings and institutions alike.
A Don Miguel Ruiz states in his first of The Four Agreements, “Be impeccable with your word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean…Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.” I would add — be impeccable with your action as well.
And, as Paulo Coelho says, “If you want to be successful, the first rule is you must never lie to yourself.” I would add — or to others as well.
Being dishonest traps us in the metaphorical web of lies, whereas honesty and forthrightness are an elixir of freedom. They remove the layers of bullshit we need to crawl through to feel more certain and affords people the proper context to support, enjoy or believe in something. “The truth will set you free” rings true here.
Sincere connection requires sincerity. Another way of putting it — it requires the Naked Truth.
With that said, not all deception is heretical. Sometimes there is a social contract for deception. When we watch movies or go see a magician, we know what we are seeing is not reality as it’s being presented. We agree to that ahead of time. There are layers to disclosure as well; for instance, we’re not going to share everything about ourselves on a first date or job interview. Privacy is a right to which people and institutions most certainly are entitled. Deception can also be a social lubricant of sorts, where we don’t say what we’re thinking or feeling so as not to rock the boat unnecessarily, and to keep things moving along smoothly.
With truth and honesty comes the burden of knowing and accepting things we fear or do not like or are not yet ready or bear ourselves. In this way, we allow ourselves to deceive and be deceived because it feels easier. As Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estès states, “To know too much can make one old too soon.” In other words, there is a time and place to know certain things and there are possibly some things we cannot and should not know or share.
The question is, where do we draw the line?
The truth about how your face looks on a dating app will attract someone who likes your face. The truth about your values will attract people into your life who share your values. The truth about the harsher realities of life on planet Earth will empower us to handle them. And the truth about whether your ideas and endeavours should rise in the free market of ideas.
Therefore, honesty and truth are a choice you must make.
Morality is a complex landscape to navigate and understand. There is no question that the tendency and ability to lie is an easy one. So, as accustom as we are to castigating ourselves when we’ve missed the mark, we must have grace and reverence for the process of becoming more sincere in a world that incentivizes astroturfing.
It appears we are in an era-defining moment. We’re at an inflection point in our culture where we’re either going to aim the arrow of discourse toward the intent of honesty or a false, manipulated and idyllic perception of reality.
My thinking is that, for now, the best we can do is try, always try, to embrace the intent to be honest and forthright, as well as sceptical in all directions to spot the lies around us. To be critical in our thinking and see what’s there, not what we want to see. And to routinely update our thinking, and no longer be naive to the deceptions around us.
This is maturity. Not mastery, just maturity. A way of being on digital planet Earth so we can operate with more agency and sincerity. The same standards of honesty we hold ourselves to, we will in turn hold others. Trust must be earned back and it starts with each of us; from there, I bet we can see that progress along the continuum of honesty is possible. I have hope. But it will need time.
Sources:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01914537221108467
https://www.howtogeek.com/903618/what-is-astroturfing-on-the-internet/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/what-is-astroturfing
