You wondered how the Holocaust kind got started?
It sounds almost Monty Python’s “inquisition” sketch. Among the ways the right attempts to rewrite the history of the attempted Jan. 6 coup….
We’ve already seen history repeat itself with the reemergence of white nationalist authoritarianism. A revival of the 1939 German American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden even.
Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield consider how insurrection denialism works. They suggest that misinformation is a sanitized description of how the internet warps reality. Conspiracy theories about 9/11 or Vince Foster were just warmup acts, either crude efforts at brainwashing or relatively harmless (The Atlantic gift link):
But there is another, more disturbing possibility, one that we have come to understand through our respective professional work over the past decade. One of us, Mike, has been studying the effects of our broken information environment as a research scientist and information literacy expert, while the other, Charlie, is a journalist who has extensively written and reported on the social web. Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one. This dynamic plays into a natural tendency that humans have to be evidence foragers, to seek information that supports one’s beliefs or undermines the arguments against them. Finding such information (or large groups of people who eagerly propagate it) has not always been so easy. Evidence foraging might historically have meant digging into a subject, testing arguments, or relying on genuine expertise. That was the foundation on which most of our politics, culture, and arguing was built.
There’s more on that and nothing on AI and deep fakes. But it’s worth a read. The fight to preserve a common reality is just warming up. Once again, our tech is running ahead of our ethics and undermining our cultural underpinnings.
I don’t have an answer for that. Except to remember.
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