AKO Storytelling Institute Fellowship intensive - Day one: what's the problem?

Day one: What's the problem?

It’s an ambitious premise: a group of pioneers come together to change the world for the better. Today they meet for the first time. Day One of a nine-month Fellowship programme devised and run by the AKO Storytelling Institute. The Fellowship is in its inaugural year. A brand new experiment that will continue to define and discover itself as it unfolds, with the aim of inspiring and enabling storytellers from many disciplines to achieve positive social impact.

The over-arching thematic focus is Truth and Lies, to which every Fellow brings their own research question. They’re here to explore and interrogate; to galvanise and expand their own practice. Their backgrounds are phenomenally diverse. All twelve practitioners are distinguished in their field. Highly conversant with the issues. They are visual and aural artists, filmmakers, curators, campaigners, statisticians. Designers, researchers, artists, writers and academics.

The immediate strength in the room is difference. Each member of this cohort has a specific approach, a way of seeing the world and undertaking storytelling. A unique sense of what story is. They’re not here under duress of improvement, but rather: to de-silo. To take in the nutrients of inter-disciplinary collaboration. They’re here to play and have fun. To carve out conscious activity for themselves in an embodied space at UAL. All of which might sound fanciful, but there’s a serious point to going (somewhat) analogue; to coming together in person and, as a journalist will phrase it later in the week, community sense making.

Over the past three years so much so-called meeting has taken place in isolation via tech and as a consequence: there has been a whole lot of unconscious storytelling. We’ve all filled in gaps, and not necessarily in generous ways. The Fellowship’s insistence on physical time and place invites the spontaneous moments, the full body language, the random fragments of personal information shared during tea break. Social creativity and productive chaos inside a framework of learning. In a very basic, very vital way, this programme creates more space for understanding. It feels pretty key, given the theme.

Day One is part housekeeping, part getting to know you. Then the investigation dives head-first into professionalised realm of countering misinformation, disinformation and mal-information with a panel of experts working at the coalface: Kayleen Devlin from BBC Verify, Tim Squirrel from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue and Ellen Judson of Demos (session chair Dr Zoetanya Sujon). What with the problems of late capitalism, the leveraging of culture wars for political gain, the generative AI explosion and increasing lack of transparency with large online platforms, there has of late been a surge in hate groups, conspiracy theories, online abuse and the general undermining of democratic process. But this is not a discussion about various atomised bad things.  The frontline now defines misinformation as a concerted, opportunistic mechanism.

Disinformation is has become its own product, legacy news media is losing eyeballs to social media and public trust in the capacity of an institution to tell the truth continues to erode. The panel agrees that fact checking is key, but has limited ability to win hearts and change minds. Information resilience is acknowledged as an important but also challenging, longer term project. For many, the Online Safety Bill isn’t cutting it. Human moderators can achieve nuance and understanding in polarised online spaces, but are underpaid and frequently end up with PTSD. There are years of damaging material in each day’s upload, and the sorting hat of vulnerability metrics are necessarily being called into question.

Meanwhile, misinformation is having a field day. And it is being delivered not by statistics, but by story. Scary, funny, stealthy, horrifying and entertaining stories carrying implicit and explicit messages. We all respond to story in the most human way: as rationalising, rather than rational beings. A persuasive story seeks out our conformation bias - our sadness, our anger and our desire for evidence of our own values. Thus we begin to believe, to double down, to attach one meaning to another. Our minds are evolutionarily hardwired for purpose and connection. We fall in love with stories. We find our people (or think we do). We take action. Storytelling has always driven social change. But we’re now witnessing a kind of storytelling and a rate of change that is at best dizzying. At worst, violently destructive.

If it all seems too world-endingly depressing for words, the fellows have plenty. They put pressure on the assumption that there is an ‘us’ and ‘them’ of harmful storytelling. They identify the way misinformation plays fast, loose and persuasive with lies - or more craftily, with plausible facts - while anyone trying to intervene on misinformation, or counter its impact, can find themselves up against the dry wall of cautious, boring or paternalistic messaging. Embarrassingly, I can’t help but think of Yoda telling Luke Skywalker that the dark side isn’t better. Just quicker, easier, more seductive. And of course the old maxim: A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots. Side note: fact-check this quote online, and the internet will give you five disputed sources and no definitive author.

We must take care, one expert says, that the solutions don’t end up coming back to bite us.

In a closing session one fellow lingers on this, ruminating: But how and why is there a ‘we’?

It’s a much-needed provocation with which to end the first day. Today was about meeting each other and (broadly) mapping the misinformation territory. Tomorrow is about what can be done.