That excellent comic strip Non Sequitur has been running a series of cartoons this week on the phenomenon of people unquestioningly taking fake news that they read on social media as true, and that I wrote about earlier this week. The first two strips from Monday and Tuesday are below and you can see the rest of the week’s strips here.
It’s a feedback loop. All that happened is that the sources of media manipulation discovered a new channel and stuffed it, while the rest of us were developing disambiguation responses. Couple that to the “new media” conglomeration that broke down the existing roadblocks against outright lying and there’s a temporary storm of bullshit.
The next decade is going to be tempests of bullshit as the infosphere tries to reorient and figure out where truth comes from. My prediction is it will continue to be comedy central, which is reallty kind of sad and scary.
Marcus, keyword is consilience.
Something just made think about Ubik by Philip K. Dick.