Fake News Ain’t the Half of It

“Fake News” is getting a lot of heat these days from some of us who actually believe that truth is better than untruth—those of us who are being forcibly dragged into the “post-truth” era.

As if “post-truth” were something new. Actually, we’ve been drifting into the post-truth fog for quite some time now.  In Virtual Unreality, Charles Seife (2014) chronicles the many ways in which the digital revolution and its star attraction, the Internet, have been masking, warping, and turning upside-down our perceptions of the world and even each other.  A pedestrian example is how easily one can manipulate one’s Facebook persona into one loosely based on, and more attractive than, the original—more good-looking, more cool, more talented, more sociable, more with it.  As the joke goes, “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog,” and no one knows whether what you’re feeding them is bullshit.

Where the line between the mostly-truth era and the post-truth era falls is rather fuzzy, but we can intuit it’s somewhere early in this century. Seife leads his book with an anecdote about the Muppet Bert appearing in photographs of Osama bin Laden (this was prior 9/11), so realistically that even major news organizations (Associated Press for one) fell for the hoax. The prankster, who digitally inserted Bert into the photos, came to rue his actions when 9/11 came along, and what had begun as a light-hearted joke on the man’s website, “Bert is Evil,” turned into very dark humor. It was too late to unpublish what had been published of the sinister Bert, and the creator, in Seife’s words, experienced “a queasy feeling that he had subtly altered the fabric of reality. ”

Yes, commentators have for years been deploring the seductive deceptions of the Internet, but it has taken messing with the U.S. presidential election with fake news to really get our attention. It’s as if the tip of the iceberg of altered reality had just crunched into the ship of our social discourse and triggered an SOS.

Problem is, the fakery, in the shape of the Internet, exists all about us, and the rash of “fake news” is but a glaring symptom.  We’ve always had lies and deception, but digital media supply the means by which lies and deceptions can be constructed easily and spread throughout the world at the literal speed of light.

Virtual Unreality is an entertaining read—Seife has a deft sense of irony that evokes at least one smile per page. But it is also a disturbing read. As Siefe puts it, “The special properties of the Internet have made it into the most virulent, most contagious pathogen that humanity has ever encountered.”

And he’s only partly kidding. Let’s apply Seife’s “contagion”to the Internet as a kind of “Global Brain.”  We might say that the “Global Brain” has something akin to a mental illness.  Neurons (that’s us) are getting rewired in strange new ways, with some synapses permanently broken (take the U.S. Congress), and others forming in places contrary to a reasonable approximation of truth (take the Associated Press being hoodwinked to think that a cartoon character is part of a terrorist organization).

But there’s more.  One feature of some mental illnesses is anosognosia—that’s the inability of the victim to recognize that s/he has the mental illness.  A tough, inside-out challenge: in order to cure the mental illness you first have to have cured the mental illness.  The Global Brain, if it ever was self-aware (as some believe), has had its circuitry meddled with and twisted to the point where it can no longer be aware of the extent of meddling and twisting.

Some corrective rewiring is in order, and I have no idea how that can be accomplished. Facebook and Google have recently taken measures to suppress the spread of fake news, but even minimizing that symptom does not solve the structural problem inherent in how the Internet works. It enables falsity to spread instantaneously around the globe at a volume the Global Brain (or any known brain) did not evolve to handle. It enables know-nothing mischief-makers to speak on an equal level with serious authorities. We may have thought of it as a self-correcting system, but the proliferation of hacking, hoaxes, shadings of facts, and flat-out lies, is overwhelming the Internet’s immune system. It’s a contagion that cannot easily be stopped, if at all. At the moment what we’re doing is keeping multiple tumors roughly in check, but they’re not going away any time soon.

The treatment needs to come from the outside, and we, mere neurons embedded in the system, cannot do it. If there were ever a time we needed benevolent space aliens to come and cure our collective mental illness, that time is now.

Was that a space alien that just peered in my window? I could have sworn I saw something. . . .