It hadn’t seemed so difficult to parse through the false narratives and fabricated realities before this moment. It hadn’t felt this frictionless, as it appears today, to slip into the fringes and remain deep below. Or we had been familiar enough with the propaganda and the media bias and corporate or political control over rhetoric and were assured in our fluency. Today, this new construction, is too different, we contend. And we are wrong when doing so. Indeed, we only misidentified our susceptibility; it was always this loud, this slippery, this abstract.
What we are living through now, and what we are scrambling to combat and treat, the “generative AI era,” the “alt-right pipeline,” the “culture war,” the many toils of recent Orwellian events, can be marked as uniquely taxing matters as they interweave. They move together sympathetically, creating pockets under the surface that have begun to bubble. The plan of action has been left, for the most part, in the hands of the consumer. It’s up to them to identify what reads sincere on unmoderated forums or from faceless social media Truth Seekers. That we take serious, but misguided, concerns with a grain of salt is an insufficient remedy for an already concerned public. What we must consider is a missing media literacy of the most basic kind, re-evaluating why it is that we hunger to produce misinformation and why it is that we so earnestly believe it.
That I should define my terms as I discuss media literacy of this type seems required here (the term has morphed through many lives). Media, as I should describe it, involves the transfer of globalized ideas both by computational system or on print, and includes the written word as well as photo and video. And as ideas are inherently fluid and personal, media is a vehicle for creative expression, by way of fiction and non-fictional stories. Literacy, further, begs to infer and interpret these ideas with methods of analysis that stimulate the separation between a statement of truth over one of falsity. It should be said, however, that the perceived contrast between the two is rarely stark. This short space is the vitality behind the mass output of misinformation.
A curious restructure came of reporting somewhere in the last decade. A trust in legacy media was severed. We began to fundamentally review the powers that rent out the editor’s room, the elite, the billionaires who, with a swift command, redirect the opinion section for the inclusion of more matters on “personal liberties and free markets.” We saw the agenda from whichever side of the political scale we weren’t on. We felt deceived by those who demanded our confidence when we were told not to concern ourselves with devastation. A democracy of online spectators was instated to replace it. Only this type, which even soon began to include legacy media broadcasters, was able to provide, however conspiratorially, answers to the questions we have been denied to ask. And then we became independent journalists, answering with uncertainty and unsettling the debate.
The information buzzes from all corners. We have come to ingest it with breakfast, or instead of breakfast (it is filling on its own), on route, in line, passively consuming short-form fragments of tragedy. I wake to the news of drone strikes, of sanctions, of starvation, of hurricanes, defenses, and offences. Often, it is just offences. I absorb it all in a short spurt, grabbing as much as I can before I must concede to daily life. By the afternoon, I read what those who feel they have good judgement have to say on these matters. They weigh in using “unprecedented” and “decline” liberally, and offer neatly packaged thoughts to those with only scrambled ones (I find myself in both of these camps). In extended personal essays, they examine and warn of a nearing technofeudalism, speak of the unrelenting determinants of “late-stage capitalism,” the AI psychosis. On podcasts, they host the CEOs in control. We keep up this way, compulsively reaching for wisdom in a frenzied algorithm, trusting both the critic and the source so long as they fit into a preferred narrative. In this ubiquitous mode of consumption, one of passivity, obsession, and provocation, we strive to be filled in on the latest only to maintain our citizenship in the Conversation. The responsibility of a good citizen hangs on us as we look for nuance. Unattentive, without time to think, however, what are we—who are only standing in line, on route, or at breakfast—to make of an impossibly steep, unprecedented decline? At what point during this process do we find reason and thoughtfulness? The fact of the matter is, there is no time.
It seemed the only possibility for some was to invent new reasoning for which digestion was no challenge to start. For others, its uncomplicated promise was sufficient evidence, making a palatable courthouse for accusation and rumination. Indeed, to condemn a fiction means at least to condemn; the organic impulse for justice is met. They dreamt up transparency of profound evils and reduced them into mere caricatures, small villains that could easily be knocked down. As it happens, it is much easier to confront an immigrant than to confront a fascist.
The radicalization of modern media output cannot be pinned down to one distinct source. It first bled slowly, gently into the basin of information. Then it rushed and feet were swept under by a hurricane’s force, not paddling but drowning in the volume of opinion and theory. We lost, in the rising sea levels, the ground. “When a plane’s door rips off mid-flight,” writes Charlie Warzel in his piece “‘Evidence Maximalism’ Is How the Internet Argues Now” last year for The Atlantic, “it provides an opening.” The opening has grown as a concerned public grows more fearful, searching in a boundless sea for incongruent answers. We watch it expand or we enter.
More and more we find ourselves at the foot of our own oppression when we read, watch, listen in a state of fear. Our outrage becomes malleable in the hands of other outraged individuals—the many frustrations tether. In a panic, we shoot from the hip and hit our neighbour. And we rejoice that we have hit anything at all because celebration of any kind is scarce when livelihood is on the line. Winning, then, is a matter of reinforcing the oppressive system, not of revolution.
What the QAnon apostles and the wellness warriors and the self-proclaimed critical thinkers and the vast majority of us who concern ourselves with serious affairs have in common is a pursuit of a power shift. The deviation only occurs in the access, the details of credentials and faith. What we are all confronting, however, is an aptitude for wanting more, a cry for secure housing, stable income, clean water, affordable groceries, and, perhaps even, joy. But, I must note, where we deviate is consequential to this objective—we are unable to find the direction. By wrongfully attacking, on account of what one’s been wrongfully informed, other individuals among the struggling class, we tug at one another, pushing and pulling away from the goalpost. I speak to the corner-store attendant of this issue and we shy away from our direct labels or political affiliations. He tells me that it’s hard to live on his wage and maintain his car in the same month. He tells me later that he read news that vaccines are partially to blame. We have found solace in these stories, despite their colossal repercussions at the ballot, in the community, in our power. We have lost one another in this process. “That can’t be so,” I say to him.
Insofar as we continue this decorum of engagement with the media we consume and our attitude toward it, we fail to point fingers at the correct oppressor and oppression. To say the obvious—that science is fundamental to accurate insight, that diversity is instrumental to our well-being, an algorithm promoted by wealthy oligarchs has influenced entire communities and led them astray—is a radical rebellion to the mass output of misinformation.
We may have been speaking in different languages when I was told by the corner-store attendant that the culture, as we know it, is facing an unprecedented decline, and I nod my head in agreement. The worry, in its bare emotion and ambiguity, is mutual.