What happens if you offer storytelling gifts in a box labelled ‘Thing A’, but containing ‘Thing B’? See Through reflects on the challenge of balancing delightful surprise with annoying disappointment.

In an era obsessed with Fake News, with AI generating plausible-looking ‘hallucinations’ that fool both humans and other robots, with climate disinformation rife, the issue of telling Truth from Lies may never have been more important. 

Where does that leave a content provider that consciously encourages audiences to assume a story is one thing in order to attract their attention, only to reveal their true purpose once they’ve been hooked? 

This article, by one such content provider is, by the way, exactly what it claims to be… 

Trading Standards

When it comes to physical objects – car parts, luxury watches, or fizzy drink brands – the rules about what Real and what’s Fake are not only fairly clear, but defined by law. 

In a court of law, fake products, whether pharmaceuticals or artwork, are Lies, and the court allows no wiggle room for ‘white lies’. Truth is legal; Lies are criminal.

The implicit morality of Lies=Bad, Truth=Good is evident in the language. The Prosecution calls ‘fake’, ‘deceptive’, ‘forgery’, ‘counterfeit’, ‘fraudulent’ –  unambiguously negative words outside the courtroom. The Defence, by contrast, deploys positive terms like ‘inspired by’, ‘homage to’, ‘creatively stimulated by’.

Whatever our personal views on the morality of knock-off brands, counterfeit banknote dealers or art-fakers, the law is uncompromisingly unamused.

• Sell fake Rolexes, and you’ll do time.
• Copy famous brand packaging too closely, and you’re ‘passing off’, ‘violating ’, ‘infringing’, or committing some other form of intellectual property theft.
• Get rumbled convincing art experts your work is a Picasso, and you’ve been framed.

The same moral opprobrium applies to certain services – ‘wire fraud’, ‘securities fraud’, ‘impersonation’. 

The law says pretending is Bad. Lawyers don’t need to concern themselves with morality, only with presenting evidence to prove the defendant has or hasn’t overstepped a clear legal boundary that separates real from fake.

Entire businesses, sectors, even economies are based around dancing on the margins of this legal line, like discount supermarkets selling tins of cider  resembling a famous brand’s design and colours. You can simply ignore jurisdictions altogether, like North Korea’s counterfeit US$100 bill operations.

But what happens to Truth, Lies and misrepresentation when it comes to what’s now called ‘content’? 

A Riff on Homage vs Rip-off

Before looking at ‘stories’, it’s worth lingering a little longer in the courtroom to consider the double-edged sword of musical copyright law, as a stepping stone to separating Truth/Lies from Good/Bad.

Music has a peculiar moral/legal dilemma when it comes to determining when a creative ‘homage’ becomes a commercial ‘rip-off’.

Periodically someone makes a lot of money from a track that in some way closely resembles something that’s still in copyright. If the copyright holder of the track that was issued first can afford expensive lawyers, they often sue the owners of the later track for compensation.

In these rare cases, ordinary people are expected to arbitrate on which side of the homage/rip-off boundary the track in question lies. Juries of nurses, plumbers and shopkeepers are required to deliver a verdict on whether certain chord sequences or melodies overstep the legal line.

Millions of dollars can be at stake. Musical careers can be made, like when Ed Sheerhan got out his guitar to convince a New York jury he hadn’t ‘ripped off’ Marvin Gaye. Or careers can be destroyed, like when Men At Work’s flute motif from Down Under was adjudged to have crossed the boundary from ‘allusive’ to ‘derivative’.  

George Hinchliffe, musicologist, founder of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, and See Through Together volunteer, addresses the sticky issue of musical copyright. His These Chords Are Illegal! video from See Through Together’s Concert in the Key of C Playlist, demonstrates that the same chord sequence recurs over generations and genres, from Wilber C. Sweatman’s Original Jazz Band to Duke Ellington, Rod Stewart, The Beatles, Nena and Lou Reed.

Copyright laws are not, however, intrinsically Bad. They were created to protect musicians from being ripped off by radio stations, streaming services, and anyone seeking to gain advantage from their original work without compensating them. 

Music provides an instructive example of how Truth, Lies and Mislabelling are not always neatly congruent with Good, Bad, and Honesty.

What about text, video and audio?

A story about stories

Interestingly, and confusingly, we use the same word – ‘story’ – to describe both a fairy tale and a news report. 

This is odd, when you consider how our everyday, common-sense delineation between Fact and Fiction appears to made them quite distinct. In daily life:

• Bookshops have separate sections for ‘Reference’ and ‘Fiction’. 
• Newspapers contain facts; comics contain fiction. 
• TV listings separate documentaries from movies.

Yet…both feature the very same storytelling principles. The ‘Rule of Three’, ‘narrative arcs’, ‘show, don’t tell’, and ‘tension and resolution’ all work equally well whether you’re telling porkie pies or the Gospel Truth. Apply them to factual stories, and they’re called ‘narrative techniques; when applied to fiction, ‘storytelling tricks’.

Many ‘content providers’ operate on both sides of the Fact/Fiction divide, deploying the same techniques/tricks:

• Writers, like George Orwell, can be as adept at structuring reportage like Down and Out in Paris and London as they are with novels like Animal Farm. 
• Filmmakers, like Werner Herzog, do the same in film, flipping between movies like Fitzcarraldo (1982) and documentaries like Grizzly Man (2005). 
• Auteurs like Orson Welles, can spend their careers dancing on the line separating our expectations of what’s ‘true’ and ‘untrue’. Welles’ notorious radio drama War of the Worlds (1938) created mass panic when listeners thought aliens really had invaded Earth: F for Fake (1973), explicitly challenged viewers to exercise their capacity to sort truth from lies, and sort documentary from fiction.

As a species, humans are suckers for any form of storytelling. Many of us, for much of the time, are more concerned about whether we find the story satisfying, than whether it’s true or false.

This is the territory that environmental activists the See Through Network is exploring. 

In advancing their Goal of ‘Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active’ its content providers – filmmakers, writers, musicians, broadcasters – follow its ‘Transparent Trojan Horse’ Methodology of attracting attention by appearing to be one thing (telling fun/interesting/compelling stories), while actually being driven by something else (measurably reducing carbon).

How does this work in practice?

Here are some case studies for you to consider. 

You can be the jury – do these examples of See Through content transgress your ideas of what’s legitimate, or not?

The Truth Lies In Bedtime Stories Podcast

You might think the clue was in the title, but hiding in plain sight can sometimes make you invisible.

Each series of this podcast series (‘Extraordinary stories that are entirely true, largely’) tells very different stories, but all follow the same narrative format, a climate-activist adaption of the broadly-understood ‘fictionalised true story’ genre.

Movie producers often use the ‘based on a true story’ caveat in order to harness the authenticity of a true event, without the legal hassle, or visual archive demanded by a documentary. The Coen Brothers’ Fargo, a fictional story prefaced by the caption ‘This is a true story’, exploited the residual trust in this device to frame what the viewer was about to see with the narrative tone of a fictionalised true story. 

The Coen Brothers saw no need to ‘fess up to their deceit by the end of the movie. By contrast, The Truth Lies in Bedtime Stories makes a point of it, making the ‘fictionalised true story’ not an amuse-bouche appetiser, but the whole meal. Each series’ narrator spends the first 95% of the story spinning a fascinating, but unfamiliar, yarn. Examples include:

• The Story of Ganbaatar: the only qualified deep-sea navigator in Mongolia
• Life On The Edge: the moment I realised Mrs. Wang was mostly guessing what her husband was saying
• Marcus and Jemima: how I deal with people at parties who assume I have children

All Truth Lies episodes pepper their barely credible tales with verifiable facts, names, dates and references. This is done by both journalism and hucksters, and the only way to tell the difference is to check, verify and independently confirm – if you can be bothered. Climate disinformation works because most people can’t be bothered most of the time, especially when listening to a narratively satisfying, beguiling, story, that only requires passive consumption.

In the final episode of The Truth Lies podcasts, however, just at the point where listeners are conditioned to expect a narratively satisfying double-axel, half-loop triple-salchow, the passive listener is suddenly required to take centre stage. 

After spending the previous episodes slumped in the back row, munching popcorn in the dark, the Truth Lies narrator suddenly turns the spotlight on the listener, challenging them to work out which bits were true, and which bits not. 

The narrator provides listeners with the means to discover the truth, but declines to do the truth-seeking for them. 

Instead, listeners are challenged to find out for themselves, explicitly asked to reflect on how much they can really care about whether something is true or false, if they can’t be bothered to spend a minute or so doing their own research (no need for ironic quotation marks).

Even then, The Truth Lies declines to make an explicit link to environmental activism and climate change. As a first step to move listeners from climate inaction to action, it simply seeks to highlight how easy it is for vested interests to manipulate public narratives, when they’re confident few people can actually be bothered to check-facts themselves. 

So long as we’re all , happy to swallow disinformation that reassures us business as usual is just fine, they’re quids in to keep careering down their unsustainable paths.

Should The Truth Lies be more explicit, and mention ‘carbon’, ‘climate’, or ‘environment’?  

It’s a fine balance. For every listener who might be moved into taking climate action, another might feel ‘lectured’, ‘patronised’ or ‘manipulated’, and deterred from any further engagement. 

Some may even have missed the point altogether, the hazard of being too subtle.

Listen to a Truth Lies podcast, and decide for yourself. Even better, share it with some friends, and see whether they agree with you.

How does this balancing act – concealing the content’s true environmental activist mission for long enough to gain the audience’s attention and trust – work for the eye, as well as the ear?

Transparent Trojan Horse Videos

Browse through the playlists on the See Through Together YouTube channel, and you’ll see they consist of popular genres of shared video content (porn excepted), disguised with clickbaity Playlist titles:

• Humour: Thinking Outside The Bogs
• Music: Concert in the Key of C
• Craft: Ben Law’s Woodland Year
• Building: Gimme Shelter
• Education: The 3 R’s: wreading and riting
• Poetry: 25 Words That Rhyme with Orange

As  per the See Through Methodology, every frame of every video is edited with one purpose in mind – nudging unsuspecting ordinary viewers from climate inaction into measurable carbon reduction.

Each follows the See Through model, described, explained and analysed in dozens of articles on the See Through News website (search www.seethroughnews.org  for ‘Storytelling’ or ‘Transparent Trojan Horse’).

One video – apparently an inspirational school Languages Day speech – even makes this mis-labelling paradox explicit, asking an audience ‘If I tell you I’m manipulating you, can I really be manipulating you?’. 

If being transparent about how to deploy transparent Trojan Horses isn’t transparent, what is? More importantly, does being so clever-clever succeed in nudging ordinary people towards effective climate action, the only metric See Through is interested in?

The good news is that neither your opinion, nor that of See Through News, matters.

One of the advantages of leveraging the free infrastructure of social media platforms is that See Through can track and measure the efficacy with a high degree of granularity, so the degree to which it works is a matter of empirical fact, rather than speculation.

Room From A View ‘Property Show’

This documentary series is packaged to resemble a popular YouTube format, the ‘property show’. 

There are various sub-genres – linear TV versions usually feature the same presenter observing a series of protagonists’ efforts to buy, sell or improve their properties. YouTube versions often feature the protagonists themselves, often building unusual constructions, often off-grid.

See Through Together’s Room From A View: can he build it? Playlist looks and feels like a regular property show, but differs in some critical aspects. 

Here’s what appears to be the premise:

• A homeowner wants to add a single-story extension that would add around £100K to the value of the property.
• Local builders, using standard building materials and methods, are quoting at least £200K to build it.
• The homeowner, who has no construction experience, but has done his own research, reckons by copying what a woodsman featured in an old episode of a popular TV did, he can build it for £100K or less.

The question asked at the start is – is he deluded, or inspired?

In conventional TV property shows, this is the opening chapter of a very familiar narrative, with a proven track record of engaging large numbers of viewers. Storytelling basics:

• Motivation: the main character (homeowner)’s motivation appears obvious – getting an extension on the cheap.  
• Means: the unconventional building methods in this case involve using obsolete round wood timber carpentry he saw on the old TV show. He thinks he can convince his friends to do most of the labour for free. As far as possible, he aspires to use the same local materials (timber, straw, stone, chalk, clay) he can see from his front door, which was how the original house was built by peasants, a few centuries before.
• Jeopardy: conventional TV property formats usually create narrative tension by signposting specific budget, schedule, logistical and bureaucratic goals, and the protagonist, for one reason or another, not meeting them. The story’s resolution is provided by the homeowner ending up with something approximating to their original architectural vision, still solvent, and with family and friend relationships still intact. Or not.

But from the off, Room From A View: can he build it?, while apparently cleaving to these  conventions, is missing some key usual ingredients…

Who’s In The Know?

Room From A View: can he build it? nas no narrator. 

Viewers therefore have have no storyteller, beyond the edited footage of the protagonists. In the absence of an omniscient narrator, the audience has no authoritative voice to help them answer the central deluded/inspired question. 

Instead, viewers only recourse is to make their own deductions from the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ observational documentary.

Presenters are important to conventional property shows, because explicitly, or via nudges and winks, they define and amplify the jeopardy for the audience. 

This ‘Greek Chorus’ role further raises the jeopardy stakes by creating informational asymmetry between the protagonist and audience (‘Jim and Belinda seem confident they’ll have that lovely triple–glazed bifold door installed next week, but we just checked, and the only distributor has just sold out and doesn’t expect another shipment this year. The only alternative available is twice their budget. Come back after the break to see What Happens Next’). 

By contrast, Room From A View: can he build it?, has no narrator. It has some captions – another way of creating informational asymmetry – but they’re minimal and blandly informative. 

Critically, this transfers the burden of answering the central deluded/inspired dilemma from the narrator to the audience. The videos themselves provide no clues, no nudges, no winks. 

Everyone involved has the same information at the same time. Additional evidence can only be provided by the viewer’s own experience/expertise – and what other viewers express in the YouTube Community comments.

Real-time, real-life storytelling

Episodes of Room From A View: can he build it? are uploaded in virtual ‘real’ time, give or take a few days for editing and polishing.

This means no one – not the homeowner, nor the building team he’s assembled, nor the production team, nor the audience at home – knows what will happen next.

This is genuine jeopardy. No need for a presenter to confect tension and drama post-hoc, with knowing pieces to camera, with the huge storytelling advantage of knowing how the story ends. 

Nor can skilled editors carefully schedule plot twists, or cunningly plant hints and pointers, in the knowledge of what is to come. If no one knows what’s coming, there can be no spoilers.

This authentic jeopardy, it is hoped, should more than compensate for the absence of structure gained by knowing how the story ends before you start telling it.

Budget

See Through Together, like all of the See Through Network, has a budget of zero. 

Everything is done by professionals contributing their expertise pro bono. 

Everyone you see on camera, the entire production team behind it, and all the social media gurus pulling the YouTube algorithm levers, work ‘for free’.  

They contribute their time and skills because they share See Through’s Goal of measurable carbon reduction, buy into See Through’s ‘transparent Trojan horse’ methodology, and think it’s worth a shot, as not many others seem to be trying it.

This financial aspect is central not just to See Through Together’s approach, but to the entire ‘purpose’ of this and all See Through Content.

The true ‘purpose’ of this video content, like everything on See Through Together, is not to make money from YouTube (nor to further enrich our Silicon Valley Overlords), but to get as many viewers as possible to click on the hyperlink at the top of all the videos.

The act of clicking whisks viewers away from YouTube’s warm embrace, with its algorithm spoon-feeding content tailored to keep you in your comfort zone, whatever it may be. Clicking lands the clicker in the See Through online environment, designed to either:

• Nudge the viewer into taking action that measurably reduces carbon (for example, emulating the homeowner’s sustainable construction).
• Prompt the viewer to volunteer for See Through network themselves, to promote the mission of measurable carbon reduction.

Only a minority, who find See Through’s misdirection a delightful surprise, are likely to take either of these actions. 

Most will be annoyed or frustrated at having their narrative expectations disappointed. They will return to YouTube, and continue to passively consume content.

This makes See Through’s metric for success a numbers game. 

The more people watch the videos, the greater the number of potential converts from climate inaction to climate action. This happens to align with YouTube’s business model.

Money vs Carbon

Throughout Room From A View, the homeowner mentions words like:

• Money
• Budget
• Investment
• Asset
• Finances
• Rate of return

Not once, does he mention any words relating to the true See Through Goal, like:

• Environment
• Climate
• Carbon
• Greenhouse gas
• Emissions
• Zero-carbon
• Sustainable

This is deliberate, for the simple reason that most people care a lot about saving money, and not many people care about reducing carbon.

By hitching one to the other, Room From A View aims to beat an alternative path to emissions reduction that relies on measurable reduction or sequestration of greenhouse gases, not on good intentions or virtue signalling.

The producers’ ‘stretch goal’ is to ‘trick’ a climate denier into building a sustainable home because it saves them money and makes them look smart.

Is this misleading, patronising or deceptive? Or is it smart storytelling? This entirely depends on whether viewers align Truth with Good, and Lies with Bad, or see Truth and Lies as morally neutral tools, deployed to serve Good or Bad ends. 

Mislabelling

A young physicist visiting the Copenhagen home of  Nils Bohr, reputedly once asked the ‘father of quantum physics’ 

‘Why do you, an arch-reductionist for whom everything in time and space can be explained by the interaction of different nuclear particles, have a horseshoe above your front door?’ Surely you can’t believe in luck?’.  

Bohr supposedly replied, 

‘Oh, of course I don’t believe in luck. But I hear it can still work anyway’.

This is See Through Together’s pragmatic view of mis-labelling content in order to attract attention, as a means to an end.

It may be more morally ‘pure’ to clearly label climate activism as climate activism, but we already know how ineffective this is. 

• Green content labelled ‘green’ tends only to be watched by people who are already green.  
• Green content labelled ‘property show’, ‘Cringeworthy Dad Joke’, ‘Tudor Axe God Sells His Soul’, or ‘You Will Struggle And It Won’t Be Pleasant’ may stand a chance of being seen by people who would click away from anything labelled ‘green’. 

Besides, anyone who’s worked in TV property shows knows how compromised its credentials to be ‘true life’ are. 

Is Room From A View any more ‘fake’ or ‘mislabelling’ for a presenter to claim at the beginning of a series that they’re ‘about to embark on a journey, who knows where it will end?’, when they’ve already finished filming and not only know precisely where it ended, but have minutely budgeted for it for months before they started filming?

Take Action To Reduce Carbon Now

If this article, in combination with the video content, or any of the links in this article have intrigued you enough to enquire about joining the See Through Network in any capacity, email: volunteer@seethroughnews.org

and/or share this and all other See Through Network content widely.

It’s a numbers game.