The best way to resist Internet lies is to refuse to rush to judgement
Early in the history of the Internet, one key idea was that truth would be revealed in the white heat of debate. In short: the Internet would vastly expand the public sphere that had, hitherto, been constrained by financial and political interests.
Indeed, Wikipedia is based entirely on this idea, with the wisdom of the crowd eventually triumphing over falsehood. The results have been mixed.
Whatever about the failings of Wikipedia, notably the ease with which sections of it can be captured by motivated actors, the concept as a whole has suffered more than a few dents in recent years. It turns out that financial and political interests, not to mention those of bands of simple ideologues or the naked self-interest of people who see manipulating discourse as a means of climbing life’s greasy pole, are not so easy to shake off. Social media in particular is rife with dubious information, much of it emanating from shady sources.
The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence this week heard of the ‘hybrid geopolitical threat’ the country faces, which includes the promotion of intentional disinformation. In truth, disinformation and misinformation are nothing new. What is new, however, is the Internet firehose shooting information at us at such a rate that no human mind can possibly integrate it into a rational schema.
The context for this, of course, is ongoing geopolitical strife. One need not be a genius to see how this plays out today: pick your team and have at it. And there is no question that in an environment as febrile as today’s that power players will be jockeying for a share of people’s hearts and minds, as well as hoping to sow discord among the other side.
Countermeasures
How a country might face down a geopolitical threat is, as they say, above my pay grade, but there the question of truth raises interesting philosophical and social questions that I think deserve some consideration.
The last decade has seen the wheels come off the idea that the Internet will make us better informed. The development of social media and smartphones in particular, has radically changed how information is spread, something that has alarmed many and resulted in a kind of Twitter trench warfare. Nonetheless, appeals to authority are no answer to misinformation and disinformation, and with the best will in the world, so-called ‘fact checking’ operations simply pose the age-old question of ‘who watches the watchmen?’.
It seems to me that a more profound problem even than either lies or bullshit is that we are experiencing some form of alienation or dislocation. Social fragmentation and the resultant individuation of people (and small micro-groups of people), both of which are processes that began long before the Internet but that have certainly been facilitated by it, have left us not as powerful, striving individuals reaching out to grasp life’s possibilities, but alone and afraid.
Many of the institutions that once bound us together have been broken apart largely as a result of their own hubris. The result of this, no Irish person need be reminded, was a much-needed freedom, and so we should be slow to fantasise of a return to any half-imagined golden age. However, neither we should not blind ourselves to the dark side of the world we have built for ourselves in response.
Society today suffers from a crisis of authority, with once respected institutions and professions discovered to have feet of clay. To a very significant degree, this decline in authority is deserved. Politicians routinely out themselves as know-nothings and even genuine experts are often unable to see the wood for the trees. Other sources of authority, not least the press (of which I am a member), have also embarrassed themselves, with the chase for clicks driving a precipitous decline in its ability to do the job it is supposed to do: provide the grounding a person needs in order to build up a representation the world in which they live and must act.
But if the end result of all of this questioning of authority has not been a maturation into a world where each of us strives to become informed actors, what has it been? Humans remain given to age old errors, not least of which is confirmation bias. Calls to ‘do the research’, a frequent refrain of the conspiratorially-minded, amount to little more than ‘read and uncritically repeat the same Facebook posts and WhatsApp messages as I do’.
Working knowledge
The truth is, we don’t need perfect truth, which is just as well because ever discovering it would be impossible: all accounts of history, all news reports, and even the results of scientific studies are necessarily partial because, at the very least, they are subject to the possibility of new information coming to light. Let’s not even speak of how partial opinions are. What we must never do, however, is give up on striving toward truth, no matter how difficult the terrain. And if errors made in good faith can be lived with, the question then returns to: what do we do about bad faith?
Educationalists – and sometimes even politicians – wax lyrical about the value of critical thinking. No doubt they are correct, but I fear it is paid little more than lip service. It would certainly require a broad education and a healthy dose of what we call common sense but is actually the result of lived experience.
In the short term, perhaps the best thing we can do is to simply slow down. In a world of TikTok videos and smartphone-aided endless distraction, refusing to react emotionally and instead committing to letting things wash over us, to reading and thinking precisely by letting information percolate, may be the best defence against the warping of our own minds.
Much of what we read on the Internet comes at no cost to us. And it’s worth every penny that we pay for it.
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