You Can Handle the Post-Truth: A Pocket Guide to the Surreal Internet

How could we possibly compress all of these contradictory reality bubbles into a single history textbook? The cat’s out of the bag — school kids have access to a dizzying array of alt histories at their YouTube-loving fingertips.

We’re now living through a gold rush for social capital accumulation: media influencers and extremists alike are competing with traditional religions to pull as many people as possible into their filter bubbles. And we’re becoming god-like in our ability to shape people’s realities.

Authoritarianism controls the flow of information so that conspiracy theories never spread in the first place. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have tried to moderate content on their platforms, but this has proved to be an extremely thorny game of whack-a-mole and a textbook example of a wicked problem. Countries like China, North Korea, and Iran ha... See more

And in the 21st century, “local” doesn’t necessarily have to mean “geographically proximate”. It can also refer to virtual spaces with internet friends who share your interests and passions, but live halfway across the globe. We’ll probably see more of this “digital localism” as Facebook and Google shift their focus to private communications.

Going local is a potential antidote to conspiratorial spiraling. If you have a “conspiracy theory” about how your neighborhood is being run, you can usually investigate for yourself, become a community organizer, and change things.

We need to take a hard and sweeping look at how people are becoming radicalized online. By now, most internet people are pretty familiar with the sensationalist cycle of YouTube’s recommendation engine. An innocuous search can lead viewers to radical content because YouTube optimizes for viewing time and sensational content is more engaging.

But they’re not alone — the internet has democratized the ability to create new reality bubbles and distort old ones. We’re just beginning to grapple with the consequences of this seismic cultural shift.

Lil Miquela and her CGI crew will expose the “inauthenticity” of our corporations and public figures, which will of course challenge our notion of authenticity altogether.