The Noise Is the Signal: A Behavioral Reading of Media Collapse

By Johan

Professor of Behavioral Economics & Applied Cognitive Theory

Former Foreign Service Officer

What looks like information chaos is actually a global experiment in collective sensemaking, and the old gatekeepers are failing the test.

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The Behavioral Shift We’re Ignoring

In my years in the Foreign Service, I learned that the most dangerous moment in any negotiation isn’t when parties disagree, it’s when one side stops believing the mediator is neutral.

We’re living through that moment on a civilizational scale.

The traditional media apparatus (newspapers of record, broadcast networks, official channels) has lost something more fundamental than market share. It has lost epistemic authority: the collectively held belief that these institutions can reliably arbitrate between truth and falsehood, signal and noise.

And here’s what behavioral science tells us happens next: When trusted systems fail, humans don’t return to chaos. They create new ones.

Coldplay, Munich—Everyone is a broadcaster

Pattern Recognition in the Rubble

What most analysts call “media fragmentation” is actually an emergent distributed sensemaking network. Let me translate that from academic speak: millions of people are building new systems to figure out what’s real, what matters, and who to trust…and they’re doing it in real time, across platforms, without waiting for permission.

This isn’t disorder. It’s reorganization.

Consider these behavioral signatures:

Cross-platform verification rituals: People now routinely check the same story across LinkedIn, Instagram, Substack, and traditional sources…not because they trust any single platform, but because they’ve learned to triangulate truth through contradiction.

Credibility heuristics have shifted: A video filmed on a phone now carries more weight than a polished network segment. Why? Because our primate brains are better at detecting authenticity in raw footage than in professionally edited content. We evolved to read faces and voices, not teleprompters.

The conspiracy surge is a symptom, not a disease: When institutional narratives fail to explain lived experience: when you can’t afford rent despite “economic growth,” when police brutality happens despite “reform,” when climate disasters accelerate despite “climate action”; the human brain doesn’t shut down. It generates alternative explanatory frameworks. Some are insightful. Some are delusional. All are attempts to close the gap between official story and personal reality.

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What My Diplomatic Training Taught Me About Truth

In diplomacy, you learn quickly that every government lies. The question is: what are they lying about, and why?

The skilled diplomat doesn’t dismiss all official statements as false. Instead, they learn to read between the lines, to understand what the lie reveals about interests, fears, and constraints.

This is exactly the skill that millions of people are now developing outside formal institutions.

They’re asking:

• Why is this story being told this way?

• Who benefits from this framing?

• What’s not being said?

This isn’t media literacy in the old sense—-the ability to parse a news article correctly. This is structural literacy: the ability to see how power shapes narrative, how institutions protect themselves, how language obscures violence.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

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The Behavioral Reality Behind the Headlines

Here’s what I observed in government that most people are only now discovering outside it:

There has never been a neutral arbiter. Every institution reflects the interests of those who control it. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s organizational behavior 101.

Bureaucracies optimize for survival, not truth. When truth threatens institutional legitimacy, institutions will almost always choose institutional legitimacy. Again, not conspiracy, just incentive structures. The core piece of economics is incentives.

Official narratives lag behind reality by design. By the time State Department cables acknowledge a crisis, people in that crisis have been living it for months or years. The gap isn’t incompetence, it’s the time it takes for uncomfortable truths to pass through multiple filters. Bureaucracy.

What’s changed isn’t that these dynamics exist. What’s changed is that millions of people can now document and share the gap in real time.

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Why This Moment Is Different (Behavioral Science Edition)

I keep hearing that we’ve had “moral panics” and “media distrust” before. True. But three behavioral factors make this moment genuinely unprecedented:

1. Bidirectional information flow at scale

For the first time in human history, the audience can talk back…immediately, publicly, and with receipts. A network news anchor makes a claim; within minutes, dozens of people post primary sources that contradict it. This isn’t heckling. It’s collaborative fact-checking at a scale that was technologically impossible even twenty years ago.

2. Reputation as distributed ledger

Your credibility is no longer determined by your institutional affiliation. It’s the sum of every claim you’ve made, every time you were right or wrong, archived and searchable. Trust is becoming earned and revocable rather than granted and assumed.

3. Narrative competition with low barriers to entry

A teenager with a phone can potentially reach more people than a newspaper that’s been publishing for 150 years. This drives legacy institutions insane, but it’s also how marginalized perspectives finally get heard at scale.

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The Protest Hypothesis

Here’s my core behavioral claim: What we’re calling “media chaos” is actually a global protest against epistemic gatekeeping.

People aren’t just upset about specific policies or politicians. They’re rejecting the authority of institutions to tell them what counts as real, important, or true.

This is part of the why:

• Viral videos of police brutality carry more emotional weight than official police statements

• Lived testimony from survivors matters more than sanitized news reports

• Informal networks consistently break stories weeks before mainstream outlets

• Memes communicate political critique more effectively than editorial columns

Each of these is a behavioral refusal: a rejection of the claim that legitimacy flows from institutional position rather than demonstrated reliability.

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What Comes Next (And What Worries Me)

As a behavioral scientist, I’m fascinated by this transition. As a former diplomat who’s seen how quickly social fabric can tear, I’m concerned about three things:

Concern 1: Pattern completion in the absence of data

Humans are pattern-matching machines. Neuroscientists often call the brain a prediction machine. When we don’t have enough information, our brains will literally invent patterns to fill the gap. This is how conspiracy theories gain traction…not because people are stupid, but because our cognitive architecture abhors uncertainty. The brain doesn’t just process reality. It guesses it first.

Concern 2: Tribalism as the default coordination mechanism

When institutional trust collapses, humans reliably fall back on smaller-scale identity groups. This is adaptive for survival, but catastrophic for large-scale cooperation. I’ve watched this play out in fragile states. It’s not a path you want to go down.

Concern 3: Violence as the ultimate arbiter

In the absence of trusted systems for resolving disputes about reality, the risk of physical conflict increases. This isn’t speculation, it’s what happens when shared epistemology breaks down. I’ve seen it. You don’t want to.

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Ritualizing the Rupture

But here’s the thing: we can’t go back. The old system is gone. The question isn’t whether to restore institutional authority, that ship has sailed. The question is: What new systems of collective sensemaking can we build from here?

Some possibilities:

Decentralized verification networks: Not fact-checking as top-down pronouncement, but as collaborative investigation with transparent methodology.

Reputation systems that actually track accuracy: Not credentials and titles, but demonstrated reliability over time, with receipts.

Public infrastructure for primary sources: Instead of paywalled archives and restricted documents, radical transparency as the default for publicly relevant information.

New rituals for collective memory: Ways to inscribe what matters, what happened, and what it means, without requiring institutional blessing.

This won’t be tidy. It will be messy, iterative, and full of failures. But it’s already happening. The question is whether we participate intentionally or stumble through reactively.

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A Final Word From the Diplomatic Corps

In diplomacy, there’s a concept called “agreeing on the facts.” It sounds simple, but it’s the foundation of every negotiation, every treaty, every attempt at peace.

We’re losing the ability to agree on the facts…not because people are irrational, but because the institutions we relied on to establish shared reality have been exposed as partial, self-interested, and sometimes quite biased.

This is terrifying.

But it’s also an opening.

Because maybe, just maybe, we can build something better than a system where truth was whatever powerful institutions said it was.

The noise isn’t the problem.

The noise is us, finally speaking.

And the world has no choice but to listen.

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Why the Snail

It carries its home.

It moves with intention.

It leaves a trail.

So do I.

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Johan is a behavioral scientist and former Foreign Service Officer. He writes about power, belief systems, and how humans make sense of collapse. Subscribe for essays on what happens when the maps no longer match the territory.

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