The post-truth world and its discontents
Before the advent of the internet, generally we had a shared sense of what "truth" was. We knew the sky was blue and that water would get you wet. There was no debate about basic, observable facts.
But this computer network on which we all vent our spleen has blown all of that out of the water. Some call it "democratization of information." It's nothing of the kind. It's a mob of malicious actors blowing apart truth and factuality. Factuality no longer matters; all that matters are vibes and "truthiness."
The genesis of this piece was something I saw on Bluesky yesterday. An account claimed that he asked ChatGPT "What political system does the US have?", and got these answers:
Sounds rather awful, no?
Of course, my bullshit detectors are part of the package they gave me when I became a librarian. So, I asked the same question. This is the answer I received:
A lie is a lie even if it conforms to your predetermined beliefs. And that's the problem we face now, not just as a country, but as a species. This computer network on which we now interact has been turned into a virus aimed at the heart of human civilization. Democracy depends on an informed electorate which inhabits the same plane of reality. It depends on citizens being able to agree on basic facts. It depends on voters having a set of shared beliefs.
We are way past that. The "loneliness epidemic" has been engineered to make us atomized and disparate. Our own Victor wrote this wonderful piece about a seminal episode in M*A*S*H. As a nation we used to have shared cultural experiences. The Day After was a moment when the entire country came together to watch what could happen if the United States and the Soviet Union did the unthinkable and launched the ICBMs. Now we don't. Now programs like Game of Thrones, which pulls in a fraction of the audience that programs did in the days of the Big Three, are considered cultural behemoths, when they're nothing of the kind. They're niche artifacts, speaking to a niche audience. They're available only to people who pay for a subscription, who go to the bother of pirating them, or who buy the DVD releases. Even with all that, they don't have the reach of any television before the advent of streaming. The most popular entertainments are reality competitions, where deceit and manipulation are rewarded. We have no shared truths, but individual beliefs, and we search for people who share those exact same beliefs, if we can find them.
We are not in a "loneliness epidemic," but an epidemic of selfishness. We are in an epidemic of unknowing, where through the democratization of communication one's ignorance is as valid as another's expertise. The wretch Scott Adams is dying of prostate cancer; he revealed this after Joe Biden disclosed he had stage 4 cancer. And rather than commit himself to an oncologist and subscribe to proven therapies, he took Ivermectin. That is the perfect encapsulation of this post-truth world in which we live.
We may be in a situation of closing the barn door after the horses have bolted. Malicious state actors have used a technology which was supposed to liberate humanity to instead shackle it. And they find willing accomplices in the countries they target. No one spreading these lies is innocent. They're not dupes. They're fellow travelers, taking aid because it suits their purposes.
But remember: If the situation were hopeless, their propaganda would be unnecessary. We must push back against lies. We must uphold the truth. For there is truth. This deconstructionist world in which we now live is a lie. There is truth and there is falsehood. And our survival depends on re-establishing that boundary.