Distrapathy

I’ll start by borrowing a story from the BBC’s A brief history of Fake News

After the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, news (both real and fake) was able to spread faster than ever before.

In the mid-1700s, the printing press helped to spread fake news about George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland. Facing a rebellion, the King relied on being seen as a strong leader to make sure the rebellion didn’t succeed.

Fake news about the King being ill was printed by the rebels. Other printers saw these stories and republished them, harming the King’s image. Although the rebellion wasn’t successful, it showed fake news could be weaponised to change people’s opinions.

It amuses us, how uninformed (if not backward) people were decades and centuries ago. Imagine living in a time when people could knowingly create fake news stories that were not only believed, they were repeated as true and spread through the population. It just goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun. Social media may do it faster, and spread the nonsense wider, but it relies on human gullibility which clearly hasn’t changed for centuries.

I used to teach a university class that focused on how citizens can change society. One of the key points that emerged each semester is that a fundamental precursor to change is awareness. No one marches in the street for causes they don’t know about. That makes ignorance a precursor for fake news. If you aren’t aware of the history that has lead to the current war in Gaza, you’re more likely to believe the next post you read that covers the conflict. That post will have been supplied to you by an algorithm who’s sole purpose is to make money.

I think the two factors that have joined are distraction and apathy. I call it distrapathy. TV, streaming services, sport on an endless loop (guilty), binge watching, paying the bills, food insecurity

To morph Yeats’ words…

The best are distracted, while the worst
Smolder with frantic apathy.

And what has Meta announced? History will not judge Suckupberg and his ilk kindly.

Then there’s Trump trashing free speech under the guise of protecting free speech.

In his book Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that for democracies to work they need functions that check executive power. These are functions like a free press, an independent judiciary and academic institutions free to be the critic and conscience of society. It is these functions that are being eroded in currently democratic nations.

Having elections does not make a country democratic - it’s the functions that challenge power. Russia, North Korea, China etc all hold elections and are all, by and large, dictatorships.

It’s not the elections that Trump is targeting in America, it’s the freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary and the authority of academic institutions (and therefore knowledge).

The big question I wonder is - when are people going to wake up? Or will we slide, distracted and apathetic, into the Orwellian/Nietzschean Abyss that awaits?