Jay Gatsby and the Chatbot
On Literacy and National Security
Everyone loves to brag about their bookshelf, especially in the national security community. Showing off their bookshelves on social media and bragging about their purchasing habits at chic bookstores as if it were the vast library of con-man Jay Gatsby. Of course, like the great Mr. Gatsby, it would be fair to ask how many of the books on your shelf have actually been opened and devoured? Knowledge is power and the display of knowledge is yet another status symbol in the absence of hard success. There are even niche companies now that help influencers “design” their bookshelves, often with books they’ve never read and never will. How many leadership books are in the top 100 of sales and yet we are devoid of actual leadership, how many books on the human condition and we are no more empathetic? How many dystopian novels and yet here we are? There is, however, a far worse threat to national security than lying about reading Clausewitz or wasting your (and my) time with yet another iteration of “how to win friends.” In the age of social media clout-chasing and algorithmic manipulation, declining literacy and lust for social conformity is a dangerous combination. Our ability to comprehend and challenge the world around us begins with literacy. In other words, our declining literacy rates, our depreciation of the value of written word, and the associated critical thinking skills are undermining our national security.
The first time literacy manifested as a real national security concern for me was years ago in infantry basic training. One of the first events you go through in the US Army is a leadership confidence course. You do a series of teambuilding activities and get the absolute dogshit smoked out of you. You also read Medal of Honor citations at each station, and that’s where I watched a number of my fellow recruits struggle to read aloud the stories of those who came before us. What a welcome to the Army. If you can’t read well how can you decipher orders, how can you understand battlefield intelligence, how can you effectively communicate? The Army will tell you brevity, clarity, and precision matter; the Army has also slaughtered the English language in its professional development courses, lending no favor to those who already struggle. This should’ve been the canary in the coalmine for me when thinking about society writ large, but admittedly I didn’t think it was that bad. I thought it was an anomaly: an issue for soldiering on a complex battlefield but not necessarily for the whole country.
The truth is that the United States faces a literacy crisis, and visual social media only makes it worse. Contrary to popular belief, the data suggests it started long before COVID hit, even if the pandemic made things worse. No, I’m not talking about the evolution of the English-language in the form of textspeak and Gen Z-isms as we gather online but rather the ability to comprehend the meaning of whatever textspeak or formal words we use in life and work. Language evolves and always will, the Bard himself added many a new word to the English language. Lack of comprehension, not the presence of invention, is the threat. Literacy is the underpinning of critical thinking and contextualization. Without comprehension of the written word you cannot contextualize the modern world and leaving ourselves vulnerable to abuse. If the only source of media we consume is decontextualized TikToks, Instagram Reels, viral tweets and AI-manufactured Facebook slop, then we are collectively regressing as a society. If you are not sufficiently literate then you cannot fact check, you cannot challenge presented truths in fractured realities, you cannot even understand when you are being deceived because you have no comparative means. Social media and the way we consume media is just the symptom, our no-shit reading comprehension skills are problem.
It’s not that we are raising a society without an alphabet, but rather that we collectively cannot read in a manner and at a level that enables us to survive and thrive in society without leaning on the malevolent and/or idiotic influencer as a crutch. If you can’t understand the statistics, the geography, the verbiage in an article, thread, or video, how can you hope to know what isn’t true? Conspiracy theorizing and fake news propagation is on the rise partially because the decline in literacy and critical thinking means people are more prone to make illogical linkages. In policymaking, particularly in national security, we talk about how to improve the American education system to prepare us for tomorrow so we can compete with the Chinese Communist Party. We talk a lot about graduating more coders and STEM majors, but that does us no good if they too cannot contextualize the world around them. Consider the following:
Combatting Disinformation
We’ve faced a disinformation crisis for sometime, it’s hardly new. But because we’ve been unable to fight the root causes: data compromise, algorithm abuse, absent critical thinking, societal and financial incentives that promote falsehoods and ignorance, we have been unable to gain an edge. We cannot elect leaders and train tomorrow’s who are capable of ensuring our prosperity if we do not know how to assess them and how to navigate the flood of bullshit in our feeds. Even worse, what happens when the enemy steals the keys to our systems or abuses our algorithms and ignorance to their advantage in an age where narrow AI can be deployed to feed you bullshit without the need for the vast troll farms the Russians relied on in 2016. Critical thinking and literacy is our best defense against foreign disinformation campaigns, but instead we have unilaterally disarmed.
The Chatbot Singularity
As we’re making Americans dumber, the bots are getting smarter. The real singularity isn’t the creation of an artificial superintelligence (aka new god) as many in the tech futurist community theorize, rather the inescapable gravity well of doom will emerge at the intersection of declining human literacy and growing chatbot intelligence. In other words, what happens when the chatbot becomes smarter and more reliable than the real human online? What happens to social trust, critical thinking, human development and any sense of community when the default assumption online (or in person) is that the human will hallucinate (generate false results) more often than the AI? At its most existential, there is a direct linkage between this upending of human trust and the proverbial Skynet scenario: handing our nukes to the machines. But for most scenarios the threat is far more simple: we become a society where truth is held with more disdain than narrative and that drives bad policy, bad governance, bad outcomes for all Americans because we stop thinking twice about pulling the wrong lever.
What happens online is more often than not connected to real life these days. We are consumed in our digital worlds and to argue that the digital doesn’t transfer to our day-to-day would be to ignore all manner of election results, rhetoric, and even military operations. The machines are coming whether we like it or not, and the inevitable human abuse of those machines is coming too. I wrote about that back in 2022. The only path to survival in a democratic society under these conditions is to never get caught in the pull of the singularity in the first place. That only happens if we improve our collective ability to critically decipher our fractured realities, and that starts with reading.
Our education system, and therefore we as the proverbial policy elite, have failed to ensure the basics remain strong. Like with other aspects of policy, we bet on the eternal positive growth of the American economy and society in a unipolar world. We bet on a consensus that a lot of people didn’t agree to and we failed. The gap between the have-reads and the have-not-reads is growing. For all that emphasis on not leaving a child behind, we left a lot of kids behind who are now voting adults who consume a lot of dumb media and live in their algorithmic echo chambers, and that includes some of us to our left and right in our policy circles! You, yes you, may also be a child left behind. When it comes to basic education and the staying power of critical thinking, it matters less if your 8 year old can read Dostoevsky and more that at 18 he can tell you what it means. Education is a lifelong journey, and it’s clear from the data that we stopped ensuring that journey continues uninterrupted. So what do we do?
No, seriously, the solution is to return to what some have deemed “the science of reading” which includes an re-emphasis on phonics. But it doesn’t stop there.
Once we rebuild the foundation, we have to invest in programs that promote reading not just for testing but for life. We cannot stop once someone becomes literate, we must promote skillful reading that takes the training wheels off and doesn’t simply push students to graduation.
Finally, some of you may be asking what we do about the people around us: our family members, our friends and colleagues caught in their fractured realities. Well, short of regulating the algorithms in a way that doesn’t incentivize bias and conspiracy (good luck with that), the adults are kinda SOL from a policy perspective. This is more of a long-term play for the future of America, not so much for its present. However, what YOU can do as an individual is work in your community to promote critical thought, to check your own biases, to fund literacy programs, and to bend the algorithm back by boosting think pieces and positive debate over conspiracy theories and hate. Culture is shaped by people, not policy. And at the end of the day, we can choose to be a culture of thinkers or not. No one made you rot your brain, they’re just taking advantage of the fact that you did.
If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict or what happens when AI-enabled disinformation is operationalized for war, check out my novel, EX SUPRA, about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on Twitter @Iron_Man_Actual and on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!