**Is the act of remembering harder with total information?**  Are we capable of remembering as well as those who only had an oral tradition? [[Mary Beard]]'s history of Rome '[SQPR](https://www.amazon.com/SPQR-History-Ancient-Mary-Beard/dp/1631492225)' is broad and deep and fascinating, at least to us history dilettantes.  Key point up front: the Latin historians to whom we owe a debt about the origins of Rome and its institutions, like Livy and Virgil, had only oral traditions at their disposal.  They wrote grand histories passed down through generations -  still cited, still translated, still used to teach Latin long after we've established their historical reliability doesn't live up to modern standards.  Seven Kings of Rome? Founded by Romulus and Remus in 732 BC? Probably (certainly) not exactly that. The reality is we'll never know for sure. Modern archaeological evidence, according to Beard, suggests the historians who wrote to invent written history were something like half correct.  Modern archaeologists find the Latin word "Rex" on monuments carbon dating to pre-republican Rome, and lists of names. So we "know" Rome had Kings, as Livy chronicled. But he likely had less *material* evidence for his assertions than we do today. The ruins architects have since found were under his feet as he wrote histories foundational to the ethos of the Roman empire, and instrumental to the American founding centuries late. The evidence for those histories relied on generational word of mouth. So how is it that the Latin masters could get things mostly right; and we can't get better than a 60/40 agreement on whether January 6th was an inside job? An event filmed synchronously from a thousand angles?  It begs a question nagging at us in view of the [[Attention Economy|the digital attention economy]]:  **If you were to ask a polity to reason well about a problem collectively (vote well, choose leaders well, ratify decisions, etc), would you equip them with zero context, or total context?** Would you want them to have an absolute written and video record? Or none at all? We bet the next ten years of practical politics are about finding the answer when the conditions more perfectly resemble the former. Life - riots - politics - multi trillion dollar economies - elections in continental nations -- complicated, multivariate stuff. Lots of discrete facts in play.  Yet, when the footage of an event is universal, conspiracy theories find a garden in which to bloom.  And when the online takes are also universal, every single possible epistemic bias can be found. Someone, somewhere, on a screen, will validate any political perspective.  #### What does that mean for advertisers?  If we're just now figuring out what post-modern politics looks like, how do we persuade? We can run an ad with all the citations we want. Anyone can find published articles that will assure you the moon landing was fake, the Sandy Hook tragedy didn't happen, think the Chinese were behind 9/11? There's a reddit group for that.  And it's all presented in exactly the same context as the perfectly sound advice on how to change your own oil, fry a perfect steak, or fix your golf swing.  Which is, ultimately, why people still trust what they read online; still google stuff even when they say they don't trust the media. Most of what they find is in fact materially verifiable: you will hit it farther, your engine will run more smoothly. And your buddies will chortle when you repeat the other stuff you saw about that politician you dislike, true or not. Now – we make falsifiable claims in ads all the time. [[Copywriting Tips from Harry Dry|We *want* to make falsifiable emotional claims.]] But there's a distinction to be drawn between the language falsifiable *emotional* claims through precise, evocative language and falsifiable *factual* claims, which simply may or may not be bullshit. Because if there's validation for any interpretation of events, then *everything* is falsifiable. What’s the fix? We don’t know yet. But it probably starts by leaning into personal authenticity. We can take a lesson from Livy and renew oral traditions.  People don't trust claims. They trust or distrust the people making the claims.  Humans are relational, not rational, creatures. Since the time of the Roman kings, human nature hasn't changed. If we can use the screen medium to create the images our eye believes, if we can make it a weaker barrier than the viewers’ empathy, we can inherently validate a testifier's claim. We can build trust and nudge persuasive arguments along.  Testifiers - ads in general - need to break through in that way, or not at all. Use faces to beat the internet.