My guest in episode 4 of Wrestling Darkness is Professor Lawrence Lessig who explains in his essay, The Age of the Fantasist, how and why algorithmic media came to reward narratives that lie to us.
“The fantasist doesn’t worry that he will not please everyone. He’s not aiming for everyone. Indeed, he is aiming precisely to avoid appealing to everyone. Division drives attention in a world of fragmented media.” —Lawrence Lessig
Perhaps you’re not prepared for a conversation that bridges artificial intelligence (AI) and professional wrestling. Don’t worry, neither was Professor Lessig! But we did arrive at a helpful framework for decoding today’s media landscape, an important first step if we decide we want to change it.
AI selects for people (fantasists) and other content that resembles professional wrestling because it knows such fact-free hyperbole causes people to click, to watch, and to share. The aggregate impact is a threat to humanity, Lessig warns, because it divides us, and thus, makes us ripe for conquering.
AI is “the most extraordinary technology humanity has ever even conceived of,” he said during harrowing presentation at TedxBerlin in February. But, it is also one we need to watch “with the paranoia of the hunted.”
Lessig recommends the book Invisible Rulers for having informed his writing and his analysis. The book’s author, Renée DiResta joins us in episode 2 of season 2:
Sins of the Algorithmic Curator
“A deluge of content sorted by incentivized algorithms and shared instantaneously among aligned believers has enabled us to immerse ourselves in environments tailored to our own beliefs and populated with our own preferred facts.”
And, or circle back to episode 2 of season 1 which is more focused on wrestling but still closely related:
Episode 2: Wrestling Has Infected Everything
Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of the best-selling biography Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America., explains how the production of cheap, addictive entertainment such as pro wrestling, cable news, and reality TV, changed the culture of American.
Wrestling Darkness 5: The Netflix Era
A $5 billion dollar deal to stream WWE Raw on Netflix kicked off on January 6, 2025 with 4 matches sprinkled across three hours of pageantry and eye-popping imagery.
TWO UPDATES:
The piece Professor Lessig was writing when we recorded this episode was subsequently a few hours after this episode. You can read it here.
All Wrestling Darkness episodes are on Substack and YouTube. You can hear them on all the usual podcast apps such as Apple Podcast and Spotify.
—Eric
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