Monday, October 14, 2024
1964 Martin Luther King Jr. was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
1986 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, for his efforts to ensure the Holocaust was remembered
1991 Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize
1994 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres
In bed by 9, awake at 3:30, and up at 3:45. I let Lilly out at 5:20. The first birds show up at the feeders shortly before the 7:06 sunrise on this partly cloud, chilly, 43° morning. I let Lilly out again at 7:55.
Prednisone, day 153, 5 mg., day 4/28. Prednisone at 5:00. Breakfast was 3 pieces of toasted and buttered Dave's Bread w/ blueberry preserves at 6:45. Morning meds at 10:10.
The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. . . Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. . . But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants. . .
It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene.** Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”
This has all been building for more than a decade. On The Colbert Report, back in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness, which he defined as “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world. But the misinformation crisis is not always what we think it is.
So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.
What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.
In one sense, these attacks—and their increased desperation—make sense. The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly. But in turning away, they exacerbate a crisis that has characterized the Trump era, one that will reverberate to Election Day and beyond. Americans are divided not just by political beliefs but by whether they believe in a shared reality—or desire one at all.
** The photo I uploaded is not the one referred to in Warzel's article.
Three thoughts come to mind. The first is the "red pill, blue pill" choice in The Matrix. Our fellow citizens who traffic in the conspiracy theory disinformation want to believe it's true or don't care whether it is true or not so long as it furthers their dystopian view of government and society's institutions and elites. In the words of The Atlantic article above, " “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change other people's beliefs at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” The blue pill.
The second is Harry G. Frankfurt's 1986 essay "On Bullshit" which I printed off years ago and have kept in its own binder. Persons who communicate bullshit are not interested in whether what they say is true or false, only in its suitability for their purpose. Frankfurt argued that bullshitters and the growing acceptance of bullshit are more harmful to society than liars and lying because liars actively consider the truth when they conceal it, whereas bullshitters completely disregard the truth. "Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are," Frankfurt argued that, while bullshit may be tolerated more, it is much more harmful.
The third is Yuval Noah Harari's recent book Nexus which I won't be able to read because of my vision and mental limitations, but the main points of which I've heard him explain in interviews. He argues that there is a radical difference between mere information and truth. Truth is a very costly and rare kind of information. If you want to write the truth, you need to do a lot of research. It takes time, energy, and money and it is usually complicated and sometimes painful and unattractive, whereas fictions and delusions and conspiracy theories, you just write whatever you want. He argues that something is wrong with our information technology that is destroying our ability and willingness to engage in conversation with others. What we hear from Trump and others is that all institutions that claim to be interested in the truth, like journalism, science, and the courts, they are not really interested in the truth but rather are conspiracies of small elites that try to gain power by fooling people and this is why we shouldn't trust them. This erosion of trust in the truth institutions of society results ultimately in the collapse of democratic society because democracy is built on trust and when you have no trust in institutions and what truthful people say, the only system that can still function is dictatorship which isn't built on trust but on terror and fear.
Lest we think that all the talk about mis- and disinformation and conspiracy theories is exaggerated, this morning's WaPo carries a story out of North Carolina:
Around 1 p.m. Saturday, an official with the U.S. Forest Service, which is supporting recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sent an urgent message to numerous federal agencies warning that “FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, NC, to stand down and evacuate the county immediately. The message stated that National Guard troops 'had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there were out hunting FEMA.’”
“The IMTs [incident management teams] have been notified and are coordinating the evacuation of all assigned personnel in that county,” the email added. . .
Chimney Rock, in Rutherford County, has become one of the centers of tension and conflict after a rumor spread on social media that government officials planned to seize the decimated village and bulldoze bodies under the rubble. Authorities and news outlets debunked the assertion, but people still took to social media imploring militias to go after FEMA.
From Blazing Saddles: You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know—morons.” – Jim
Today would be Bill Guis's birthday, if only . . .
Picking up Andy at work this afternoon and taking him to Ogui's Garage to get the 2008 Honda.
From Appetite for the Absolute by Mary Gordon in Portland magazine, Autumn 2004.
I only know that when people call the acts of suicide bombers incomprehensible, I cannot agree with them, because these kinds of extreme acts are entirely comprehensible to me. I do not for a moment excuse them. I mean simply that I understnd the flavor of desperation turned to exultation. I understand what it could be like to imagine that a living body is less important than the homage due to the Lord of All. And the source of my understnding is precisely the history and experience of my own relligious life, and my having been steeped in the centuries-old traditions of Roman Catholicism.
What is the source of this impulse to sacrifice? Why do we imagine the divine glories in death? Although the Old Testatment tells us that God does not require burnt offerings, the entire shape of Christianity is bssed on a death, the offering of a life for something larger than itself. The offering of the visible to the invisible, of the living body to what is beyond the body. Greater love than this no many hath but that he lay down his life for his friend. I grew up with those words drumming constantly in my brain; it made me feel that as long as I was alive, I hadn't done enough. As a child, I believed that I was meant to pray for what was called the grace of a martyrs's death. I was meant to pray that if the Russian Communists held a gun to my head and demanded that i deny Christ, I would gratefully have my brains splattered all over the streets of Long Island.
From my memoir:
In June of 1950, as I approached my 9th birthday and entering 4th grade, Pius XII canonized the Church’s youngest ‘saint and martyr,’ St. Maria Goretti. Maria was stabbed to death in 1902 at age 11 years, 9 months, and 21 days, by Alessandro Serenelli, a 20 year old neighbor who attempted to rape her. She resisted at the cost of her life. This terrible crime was a cause celèbre in Italy and was picked up by some Church people as evidence of what was wrong with Modernism and Worldliness (Alessandro) and of the value and the primacy of Purity (Maria.) Maria’s canonization was more significant than most because she was made not only an official saint, but also an official martyr. “Martyrs” were traditionally those who were killed “for the Faith.” They were the Christians in the Coliseum, the Vietnamese martyrs, and the like. Alessandro killed Maria not because she was a Catholic or a Christian, but because she refused to “put out.” Designating this young victim of murder and attempted rape a martyr carried the message not that sexual assault was evil, a given, but that sex was evil. It was better for Maria to suffer the fatal penetration of 14 stab wounds than to suffer the unwanted but nonlethal sexual penetration. Maintenance of virginity was exalted over maintenance of life. The ‘sex is bad’ message was not lost on those of us growing up in the American, which is to say Irish, Catholic Church. Pictures of St. Maria Goretti joined pictures of St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower who entered the convent at age 14 and died of tuberculosis, a virgin, at age 24, on the walls of St. Leo Grammar School and countless other Catholic schools around the world.
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