The Validation Problem
Why we can't tell dogs from gods
Here's the problem with the internet's promise: verification doesn't scale.
When someone in your village claims to be a healer, you can check. You know who they've treated. You've seen the results. The community holds shared memory of their successes and failures. Reputation is earned through observable outcomes over time.
When someone online claims to be an expert, what do you have? A follower count. A blue check. Some engagement metrics. Maybe a credential from an institution you can't verify either.
This is the validation problem: the cost of verifying whether someone is actually what they claim increases exponentially with distance.
Up close, validation is cheap. You can see the work. You can test the claims. You can watch someone operate over time and form your own judgment.
At scale, validation becomes impossible. So we substitute proxies. Followers. Likes. Shares. Credentials. Endorsements from people we also can't verify.
The proxies aren't worthless—they carry some signal. But they're gameable. And the game has been figured out.
A dog who understands the metrics can perform godhood convincingly. Post with confidence. Build engagement through controversy. Accumulate the appearance of authority without the substance behind it. The signals look identical.
Meanwhile, a genuine god—someone with real insight, real capability, real value to offer—might have none of the right signals. They might be bad at self-promotion. They might be unwilling to play engagement games. They might be invisible precisely because they're focused on the work instead of the performance.
The internet promised to disintermediate. Cut out the gatekeepers. Let quality rise on its own merits.
Instead, we replaced human gatekeepers with algorithmic ones. And the algorithms optimize for engagement, not truth. For performance, not substance. For what captures attention, not what deserves it.
The old gatekeepers were flawed. They had biases, blind spots, insider networks that excluded outsiders. But they were at least trying to validate quality, however imperfectly.
The new gatekeepers aren't trying to validate anything. They're trying to maximize time-on-platform. Quality and engagement are correlated just enough to maintain the illusion, and divergent enough to create chaos.
So here we are. Dogs performing godhood, indistinguishable from actual gods. Actual gods invisible or frozen. And everyone relying on systems that were never designed to tell the difference.
The question isn't whether you can become a god. The internet proved that's possible.
The question is: in a world that can't tell dogs from gods, what does it even mean to become one?