"WHAT YOU'RE SEEING AND HEARING ISN'T WHAT'S HAPPENING"
Disinformation and propaganda has always been with us. In fact, it's been a thing since ancient times. Kings of the old kingdoms would disseminate information amidst their people to keep them from revolting, or induce negative sentiments about kings from other kingdoms.
Information was very tightly controlled back in those days. The correct information was even more tightly controlled because it led to knowledge which, as we know, is power.
The type of people allowed to even read the Bible in those days was strictly confined to theologists, priests and royal men. Women were prohibited from reading the Bible because, apparently, it would lead to heresy since they were perceived to be incapable of rational thought. The same went for people, men or women, not of royal blood, or weren't men of the cloth. This meant that all religious information was centralised. The knowledge, hence the power, was thus consolidated.
As such, who ever controls the information, controls the masses!
We are in an age now where the cat is out of the bag. It got out during the advent of the printing press when, for the first time, text was made available to people who didn't have access to the library, or couldn't get into the Vatican. Don't get me wrong, the Vatican is still hoarding quite a bit of information that isn't available to the rest of us even to this very day, but we've been able to navigate around the walls and arrive at some of the knowledge via other means - through science for instance.
I remember when I was in university and had to actually take books out of the library to get at some information. It was the very early days of the Internet back then, so even though there was some information "online", it was even more difficult to get to than physical libraries. It was easier for me to travel physically up to Nottingham to read a book in a library there, because it was the only available copy in the England, than to find excerpts of it on the Internet.
There was no such thing as Google. Yahoo was in it's infancy with fewer than a hundred thousands pages. The way we used "the net" back then was to log in to other university databases of articles and journals using text-based green screens! Those were the happy days :)
Today I found an old textbook I paid £75 for in my first year at university. You had to budget for books back then. Second hand books were also quite the thing, mind you, the revisions sometimes came in to coincide with new academic years, so you'd usually have to sell your old books at rock bottom prices as they became obsolete. In retrospect, this was clearly a tactic by the publishers to maintain book sales. Bastards!
Anyway, I did a search for the book on Google with the prefix "PDF". Lo and behold, it came up. A full PDF version right there for free. I'm not sure if this was legally posted online, but there it was. Students nowadays don't know how good they have it. The information is here, there and everywhere.
I remember learning about Quantum Physics by reading paragraphs of boring text in Old English in typewriter font. Now, you can just sit back and watch a movie on YouTube for free.
FAKE NEWS DECENTRALISED
Unfortunately the prevailing forces have responded to the times too. With the breaking free of information, facilitated originally by the printing press and recently by the Internet, disinformation has evolved. There was an attempt made in the beginning to fight the change by building gates around the Internet, but the free folk responded with cryptography and very recently, blockchain technology.
So now we have such a thing as fake news. Fake news is often confused with biased news or propaganda. These are all different things. The misunderstanding of the differences itself is a product of deliberate propaganda to totally confuse the onlooker.
People perpetuate, and even create, fake news regularly without knowing it. It is truly decentralised. I remember once starting a rumour about a certain former head of state of Nigeria having passed away. It was supposed to be an April Fool's joke, but it resulted in the said person having to make a public statement about still being alive. I'm not 100% sure if it was because of my joke, which then went viral, or if other people also independently made the same joke. All I know is that I was at least partially responsible for creating, and spreading, fake news deliberately.
Fake news is not necessarily malicious. It's usually meant to attract eyeballs for a certain cause. The most common is monetary. There are many fake news farms that specialise in creating news that appear plausible, but yet are shocking enough to arouse curiosity in the onlooker. This is often to attract them to a paying site of some kind; either by Google Adsense, affiliate marketing or a sales funnel. Others traffic in fake news for political gain.
DEEP FAKES
Fake news has gotten so good in the recent years that even the most skeptical and analytical people fall for them at times. Things are about to get a lot worse. We are moving into a crazy era of unprecedented disinformation. The analytical tools we had are being eroded by the finessing of techniques used by people that create fake information.
Artificial intelligence, computer learning, computer generated imaging (CGI), fuzzy logic photoshop, virtual reality, robotics, bio-synthetics materials, and so on, are ushering in an age when the line between fake and real will be blurred.
We have already seen videos of Obama saying things that he never said. If you hate Obama, the confirmation bias will add to the AI to convince you. In this new era, Trump will be correct in saying "remember what you're seeing and hearing isn't really what's happening". He will be unwittingly correct.
One of the only tools we will have against disinformation in this new era is blockchain technology. The availability of immutable data will mean we can go back and have a look at what actually happened in a trustworthy way. We can then contrast that with the attempted AI altered reality.
It's really quite brilliant, genius even, that if you no longer control information by centralising it, then you can just pollute it such that it becomes useless. You, the power that be, can then come out and decipher for the masses what's fake and what's real. So we're back to appealing to authority again, just like in the good old days.
Peace & Love,
Adé
