#5. In Search of the Truth
In the age of information, why is the truth so hard to find?
Background
“History is written by victors”. Winston Churchill was fond of this line. He used it on multiple occasions, most famously to Joseph Stalin. He’d also used it in the 1930’s in a debate with then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin but on that occasion he followed it up with the somewhat chilling line “because I shall write that history”.
It is well known that the ‘truth’ has been distorted over history to fit whatever narrative the Ruler of the day was pushing. Anyone challenging the established ‘truth’ would often find themselves in trouble with the law. Take Galileo.
Galileo had observed that the Earth orbited the Sun and proposed the Heliocentrism model. The church fiercely opposed this and accused Galileo of heresy, a ‘crime’ carrying life imprisonment or in some cases, execution by burning. Seems reasonable!
Galileo was spared a roasting but was ordered to retract his proposal which he of course did. Nevertheless the ppint was made. The church had ordered that the provable ‘truth’ be in fact not true.
Throughout history there is ample evidence of authorities suppressing the truth in order to maintain a narrative. It was easy for them to control too. The authority wrote and vetted the texts that would eventually reach the hands of school children as well as the common man. The progress of man could only move as far as the narrative allowed the truth to be stretched.
Truth by force was possible as long as the authorities had control but all that began to change with the rise of the internet.
The Information Age
The rise of the internet allowed ideas, expression and information to be shared by any individual to any user with a network connection. The monopoly on information all of a sudden was broken. As more users went ‘online’ new mediums were created to communicate information and ideas. The rise of forums such as 4chan and Reddit in parallel with Social Media sites MySpace and Facebook in early 2000s made information sharing easier than ever. All of a sudden the ‘truth’ was no longer the truth. Users from all the around the globe could traverse their nations media boundaries and ‘report’ on the real truth.
You Can’t Handle the Truth!
The information age kicked off a flurry of information exchange at high speed. This ability to challenge the status quo was hugely exciting but also dangerous. We were, and still are, in a period of history where sensitive information puts a target on your back. Wikileaks and it’s founder Julian Assange is a perfect example of this. In 2010, Assange published leaked cables from US Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning which brought to light war crimes committed by the US military in Afghanistan. In one case referred to as Collateral Murder, US soldiers shot and killed a group of men from an Apache helicopter. The men were citizens including two Reuters journalists. The US soldiers could be heard laughing in the tapes.
The publishing of this event as well as others landed Manning in Federal Prison and an arrest warrant issued for Assange. Assange would eventually end up spending 7 years holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to the US. In 2019, Assange was arrested after the embassy allowed the Met police to enter. To date, Assange remains in Belmarsh Prison appealing extradition to the US. All he did was publish the truth. But the truth was inconvenient.
This event, one of many examples globally, highlights the authorities desperate attempts to take back control.
The Fog of War
For the first in the modern era the normal citizen found themselves with a plethora of information that would arm them in the face of lies. The truth could be determined to be so. In the Assange case, it’s clear that the truth is evident. The Government couldn’t deny the truth but instead punished the publishing of it. This strategy, although not hugely damaging, created issues for the government. They sensed that although they can rule by fear, it’s not a practical way to maintain law & order.
So the tactic shifted. By the mid 2010s we started to see the introduction of the term, disinformation. None more so then in 2016 during the Brexit vote and US elections. All of a sudden the strategy wasn’t ‘truth control’ but rather ‘truth obfuscation’. The goal wasn’t to control the truth but it was to blur the boundaries between truth and fiction.
Former LBC journalist Maajid Nawaz explored this further in a podcast with Joe Rogan. In it Nawaz discussed the known establishment of Troll Farms. These Troll Farms are large organizations that are in some cases funded by Governments to, in effect, create uncertainty through disinformation. These farms publish content that is purposely filled with disinformation and through analytics are pushed towards specific user groups to feed their biases. In a previous article I posted, Tribalization of our Nations, I highlighted how the tribe members reject the truth that doesn’t fit their tribes narrative. This sly ploy by the troll farms exploits that.
Maajid also explains how there is serious psychological warfare going on behind the scenes. An example he cites is Twitter’s [pre-Elon Musk] hiring of Gordon MacMillan, an officer of the British Army’s 77th Brigade. The 77th Brigade was created in 2015 to conduct psychological operations using social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook to help fight wars "in the information age.”
And so we’ve entered a period where it’s hard to understand what is real and what is fake. An era where reality and fiction is so utterly indistinguishable that the rule of law no longer matters. The fabric of society has another loose thread. A thread that leads to a world of fiction.
Not Everything is as it Seems
The truth has become so hard to identify that it creates a sense of disillusionment. To make it worse, new technologies such as Deepfakes are making it impossible to differentiate between reality and fiction. And all of a sudden we live in a world where the message is unverified, the messenger unreliable and the source unidentified.
Imagine for a second a troll farm or Government psyops [the source], publishing a video of a person [messenger] speaking about things [message] that aren’t true. That message gets transmitted to groups that do not like said person. That message becomes truth. Why wouldn’t it? It’s real. You see it. You hear it.
Let’s go one further. Imagine an Assange figure exposing inconvenient truths. How hard is it nowadays to create a video of that person in compromising positions? It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to look true. And so the person is discredited, their reputation destroyed and their truth totally inadmissible.
George Orwell famously wrote in his iconic book 1984, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Soon enough, even your eyes and ears won’t be real.
“There is no Spoon”
Within a generation we will have VR technologies so powerful that there will be economies and jobs within the VR world. There will be real people plugged into VR for so long that their reality will exist there. The real world will exist for the hardware to power the software, within which many will live.
As we’ve seen, understanding the truth in the real world is hard enough. Understanding the truth within a program is nigh on impossible. We’ve seen with the Twitter Files and Facebook’s collaboration with Cambridge Analytica that we cannot trust tech companies to filter out disinformation. And so in a generation or a less we’ll have a large section of the population living in a fake world, listening to fake news, from fake videos. All the while we will hold fake elections for potentially fake politicians to govern our all too real world. The real world of course is where the resources and real assets exist.
They say the Matrix is fiction but maybe it’s the only thing that’s real.
Nice work!
“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
― Bertrand Russell
First of all, thank you, Jack, for writing such an enlightening material with so much depth, clarity and comprehensiveness. In fact, this has just been shared. The fact that you have traced the history of conflict from Galileo to Assange in terms of the truthfulness and reliability of information is indeed good food for every reader's epistemological quest. From this article, we have not arrived at a definite solution, but, at least, I, as a reader has now been invited to question things and to exercise greater critical thinking when it comes to information that affects my daily life. Indeed, perhaps, we won't be able to stop the trend of obfuscating the truth as it is expected to become more rampant as AI technology evolves, but all we can do is learn to understand what is happening. Reading something as objective as this article by Jack Daniel Muscat is the first step.