"Did you find the directing sign on the
Straight and narrow highway
Would you mind a reflecting sign
Just let it shine within you mind
And show you the colors that are real."
David Clayton-Thomas, Blood Sweat & Tears, 1968
Fake stuff is just as plausible as true stuff.
Every color is equally real.
I saw a copy of the Twitter/X post below several times yesterday. I thought it was a tone-deaf, in-your-face post, but it was on-brand for Elon Musk, so I thought it was real.
It wasn't.
The Snopes.com fact-checking site said there was no indication that Musk had in fact created this post. It cited the fact that mainstream news organizations would undoubtedly have promptly captured screen shots of the original Musk tweet, had he written it, and they did not. There were 3.6 million views of the false tweet at the point I first noticed it. This creates an odd irony: Elon Musk calls establishment news dishonest and unreliable, but Snopes cites them to establish Musk's innocence. The second irony is that Musk is careless about disciplining falsehood on Twitter/X. This time, he is the victim.
Musk is in a celebratory mood of triumph. His candidate won the election, Tesla stock is up, Twitter/X looks like it will survive and thrive, and the new administration is open to supporting and deregulating crypto currencies. He is using Twitter/X to say that his platform is the big winner in the struggle to shape American politics and culture. He is right.
Musk retweeted the above message and many others along the same lines yesterday. He is spiking the football and gesturing "We're Number One!"
Democrats scoffed at Kellyanne Conway's comment asserting the validity of "alternative facts," a comment occasioned when she insisted that Trump had far more inauguration attendees than did Barack Obama. She was trying to legitimize lies. Maybe she was an early warning.
Conway and Musk are saying that what is real and true is described by crowds, people with their own opinions. They, not expert authority, define what is true. The 26 reporters at The New York Times that I cited in yesterday's post may be the last dying gasps of a former world.
Americans are increasingly getting their "news" from Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, talk radio, and opinion journalism. Two days ago I posted a short "Easy Sunday" comment about the philosophical and literary movement we know as Romanticism. It was a reaction to a new suite of inventions and the social upheaval occasioned by the Industrial Revolution. They understood steam engines and factories were changing everything. Dr. Frankenstein -- the allegory of the changes underway -- was creating a monster.
Democratic government rests on an ideological premise of the "wisdom of crowds." It is possible that there was an unacknowledged truth that guided that supposed wisdom. It was that it was hard and expensive to communicate with the public, so the public got signals that some information was more credible than others. Credible stuff looked better.
Now access to the public square is essentially free, and alternative facts are as plausible as ones that stand up to scrutiny. We assumed as a matter of faith and patriotism that "true speech" would eventually prevail over falsehoods. Lies were harder to sell than truth and in the long run truth would prevail. Maybe no longer.
We are feeling our way here. In the early 19th Century alert people sensed that a profound change was underway. They didn't know what, but they knew it was big.
6 comments:
It’s said that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. The sad thing is that in this Disinformation Age, Americans can’t tell fact from fiction or shit from Shinola. Many seem to think news sources that report the facts are showing their liberal bias. To be fair and balanced anymore, they’re expected to report “both sides,” i.e. give equal weight to “alternative facts.” Thus, newspapers that point out the obvious, such as calling Trump’s claim of winning the 2020 election a lie, have fallen into disrepute.
The story of the Tower of Babel might be a useful metaphor here:
We have built a giant tower of communications technology,, and as a result, we can no longer understand each other.
In the previous Walter Cronkite era of mainstream media, the limited information we got painted a more consistent picture of the world.. It may not, of course, have been uniformly true and reliable, but at least there was less to argue about.
Learning how to fact check and identify reliable sources should be required courses in primary and secondary schools, so that future generations of voters won’t be as easily misled by stupid lies as ours. Of course, Republicans would pitch a fit since disinformation is part of their stock in trade, along with fear, anger and hatred.
Alexis de Tocqueville famously stated that "the moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than in a single individual, and that the number of the legislators is more important than their quality," highlighting his view on the perceived "wisdom of the masses" in a democracy.
It’s no use relying on the “wisdom of the masses” anymore when 54% of adults in the U.S. read below a 6th grade level.
Hey anonymous- interesting statistic. Some questions:
1. Is it true?
2. How can you be sure? And If so;
3. Is that better or worse than times past?
4. What do you think explains the shift (either way)?
Musk would never write that a CEO has a duty to maximize profits.
How many times has he been sued for his immature behavior hurting shareholders?
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