I saw a video recently that showed a faucet with running water and a pair of scissors. As the video went on, the scissors moved toward the running water and cut it. The water stopped because it wasn’t actually water. It was a blowing strip of paper taped to the faucet. The overlying text in the video simply said,

“Proof your brain makes assumptions based on past experiences, not reality.”

I sat and replayed this video five times but all I could then see was the strip of paper. I don’t know of any other social experiment that has moved me so quickly to understand something so profound. A genuine mindset shift occurred from a one-minute video. Like how an avalanche creates a new landscape. One of the comments on the video brought it home, “And this is how we listen to people. With filters created from our past.”

Our brains are such incredible pieces of mushy equipment. A well-functioning, healthy brain works to protect us (or itself, really) by re-wiring, firing, and shutting down. It can also help us fill in the gaps where words or images fail us. After watching that video, I began wondering how this is playing out in real-time with the expansive world that is social media. Pairing that with the political turmoil, I am asking this: How are we filling in the gaps by running everything through the dusty filter of past experiences and bias? And, more importantly, how are AI, anyone with a platform, and tech companies taking advantage of this?

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I love the podcast A Bit Fruity by Matt Bernstein. This delightful, self-described “queer Jew with long nails” is so helpful for those of us trying to navigate the world set aflame. Matt is young, ambitious, and wants to continue to live in a world full of hope and purpose. So, the guests he invites on are smart in their own right and thoughtful with their words. Most recently, he had the author/activist Naomi Klein on to discuss Tucker Carlson, and whether or not we should be side-eyeing or trusting his new, uh, direction.

Naomi Klein, as I learned, does not only exist on a different level of intelligence, but also dives deep in the product she is researching. In this case, watching a lot of Tucker. For a quick get-you-up-to-speed part of why Tuck is even discussed: he is dropping a lot of views that are veiled as liberal or liberal-adjacent. What Matt and Naomi discuss are the ways in which this veil can play a trick on our already content-saturated minds.

Naomi says Tucker’s “deliberately ambiguous politics” means he can “appeal to different audiences simultaneously.” She notes that we now live in a “clip culture” where videos are purposely edited to appeal to one group and then another clip – from the same video – can be edited to appeal to an entirely other group. She says this creates an easy avenue for us to “project our values into what we don’t hear. So, if you hear somebody who seems to care a lot about the genocide in Palestine, then you kind of assume that that person also cares about Palestinian rights and human rights more broadly.”

With this newly devised clip culture content, our brains are learning to fill in the blanks by pulling on our own assumptions and bias of what we are wanting to hear. Similar to the water I wanted to see falling from that faucet.

I could go on about their conversation that eventually ends up in What Happens After MAGA (Reader: it’s not good.). But I’ll keep it succinct in saying this: the collective We need to remain aware, awake, and in tune with the undercurrent of the rising Othering. What Tucker and Co. are doing is just that. They are smartly (?) using their platforms to say the straight, Christian, white male is a victim and also the hero of whatever story they are concocting. Matt quotes Klein’s book “Doppelganger” when he says that “fascists are really good at taking large groups of people, correctly helping them identify the problem, and then giving them the wrong solution.”

What this looks like now? Unaffordability in all sectors of life or a broken healthcare system. A solution offered by Tuck and Co. isn’t to dismantle the billionaires or fund government programs. It’s trans people, pronouns, and an astonishing amount of antisemitism.

When solidarity fails, when multiracial democracy fails, when internationalism fails as a promise of security, I think people start looking for strong men. They start looking for their own bully, right? And I think that that’s what Tucker maybe represents to some people. I think it’s a really sad story about the failure of solidarity and the vacuum that gets created. […] The issue is this global elite class protecting each other at the expense of all the rest of us.

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I know there are many of us that feel like the systems keep failing us, or wondering where the hell our government officials are to protect us. They sit at their microphones and we are recipients of the clip culture quotes. But so many of us want something more tangible – accountability to the Constitution, We over Me, basic human decency. And every day it feels like we get a little further away from that. Hopefully after reading this, you, like me, will begin to ask ourselves where our brains are filling in the gaps for us, and where we can still lean into not trusting everything at first glance.

*Note: No AI was used in writing this post. I am a fervent believer in writing as soul care. If I am putting something out into the world that is meant to feed someone’s thoughts, I will do so with my own brain and fingers.