Dishonesty
Lying is probably the inevitable consequence of being able to communicate. Language
is an amazing tool, one that’s not available to most organisms, but I reckon as soon as
you have the power to pass on the truth, it’s going to occur to you not to. […]
So I suppose it makes sense that the advent of the most powerful communication
5 technology ever devised – the internet and the smartphone – should have caused an
exponential rise in dishonesty. […]
To be fair to smartphones (and I always like to be fair to inanimate objects), they never
seemed trivial in the same way as plastic straws. They seemed like they’d be useful.
And they are useful. It’s very useful to be able to communicate instantly and globally,
10 to be able to find things out, buy things and be entertained by things without having to
move, or while moving around doing something else which currently can’t be achieved
online, such as gardening or attending funerals.
It’s extremely useful to be able to do all that. The only fly in the utility ointment is
that everyone can do it. Frankly, that spoils it. If you were the only person with
15 smartphone powers – able to shop, watch TV, write and receive correspondence, make
phone calls, access more data than the Library of Congress wherever you were – that
would be brilliant. So labour saving! You’d never have to go to work. But when
everyone can do it, it effectively means you never leave work – if you’re lucky enough
to be in work, that is, which, if your area of expertise involves shops, restaurants, pubs
20 or any of the old media, you’re much less likely to be post-internet1. And that’s a
particularly rough deal because you’ve also got several extra monthly bills to pay in
order to remain a normal citizen: mobile, broadband, cable TV, maybe a bit of Netflix
or Amazon Prime, and rental of space in a “cloud” as well. Well, it all adds to the GDP,
I suppose, and conceals the fact that society is coming to bits. […]
25 Most insidious of all is the effect on truth. Suddenly it feels so flimsy. My whole view of
existence is predicated on the notion that, in the end, the truth will out. Possibly long
after the protagonists of any controversy have died, but eventually, and for the eternal
knowledge of posterity.
That’s how you get taught history at school. Tudor propagandists added a hunched
30 back to Richard III’s2 portrait, but we now know he only had scoliosis. The crucial
phrase is “we now know”. But what if the blizzard of words and imagery that the internet
generates about everything, often manipulated by malign interest groups, makes the
truth impossible ever to discern? It’s in that haystack somewhere, but it’s just one of
the pieces of hay. Suddenly the whole of human existence is like an episode of Poirot3
35 in which the murder remains unsolved.
And it’s not just the bare-faced lying that scares me but all the subjectivity. In the online
world, which has become such a high percentage of many people’s experience of existence,
almost everything we see has been curated for us: the adverts that appear,
the political claims that are made, the people we interact with, the products that are
40 suggested to us when we search for something and the news that we’re told about. It’s
all been tailored according to what we’re likely to respond to. No two people see the
same thing. […]
I can seek out the subjects I particularly want to find out about by myself. I want to be
able to find them, but I don’t want them pushed towards me. The level of interest an
45 algorithm thinks I’m likely to show in any given news report is not a meaningful gauge
of how important it actually is. If I only want to read stories about, say, cricket, I’ll go to
a cricket website or buy a cricket magazine. I don’t want all my news feeds to suddenly
start banging on exclusively about cricket because some machine has worked out I’m
into it, thereby giving me the illusion that the most important global events are all
50 cricket-related.
No wonder we talk about our online echo chambers, where everyone seems to agree
with each other and any transgression from a range of approved views is jumped upon
and the transgressor shamed. Social media corrals people into interacting solely with
those who share their viewpoint more effectively than the court of Versailles in the last
55 days of the Bourbons4.
This already dangerous situation is exacerbated by the fact that the only news, adverts
or products that each echo chamber will get to see are specifically designed to attract
the attention of its members – and so inevitably to confirm them in their opinions and
prejudices. How else can the censorious and admonitory extreme political correctness
60 of some university campuses coexist in the same world as the unabashed rise of
crypto-fascism5?
The fact is that, virtually speaking, they don’t exist in the same world. There is no unified
reality, and that really might be a disaster. Objective truth may always have been
unattainable, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth striving for.
65 If we all just settle into small, mutually ignorant online support groups exchanging
comforting half-truths, then civilisation is in for a rough ride. No one will know what is
really going on, and working out what is really going on has, for most of history, been
humankind’s main purpose. Losing that is a high price to pay for being able to order
pizza without speaking to anyone.