Apocalypse Postponed
The word 'apocalypse' is usually associated with the end of the world. The dictionary definition has it that way but it actually comes from the Greek 'apokalyptein' which means to uncover, to reveal. The Latin has it as 'apocalypsis' which means 'revelation'. I guess that's why the last book in the good book has that name.
With revelations around Russian influence on the 2016 US election, the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal and developments in AI software an information apocalypse has been heralded from a global digital trumpet. In 2016 the technologist, Aviv Ovadya, predicted a toxic crisis of misinformation which in its early stages contributed to the rise and success of Donald Trump
He (Ovadya) recognised that the algorithms that dominate the major social platforms of the internet are geared towards promoting sensationalism and polarisation. Facts and truth don't really have anything to do with it and this will lead (has lead) to a crisis in our democracy.
Ovadya recently blew another trumpet regarding the development of certain technologies that have the capacity to alter our perception of what is real entirely. The most well known example of this at the moment is the DeepFake app which allows users to to take some footage of a person and by combining it with other footage make it appear as if someone is doing or saying something they are not doing or saying. It can make it look like a politician is saying something they never said, for example. Right now the quality and effectiveness of this is hit and miss but it's fair to assume that it won't be long before the fake footage will be indistinguishable from real footage.
Not only that but audio could be produced to sound real which, aside from enabling fake footage to seem more real, could be used to automate fake phone calls to politicians for lobbying purposes. AI will also soon be able to analyse emails and social media posts and then mimic the style of an individual and contact you as if from them and you would have no idea that you had been contacted by an entirely fake Artificial Intelligence source. If you thought you had some clue about what was going on before you certainly won't soon.
As has already happened and is happening this is all open to manipulation. Not only by major state and intelligence players but by every bell end with an iPad. The emergence of this technology is double edged too because the very existence of it allows someone to cast doubt on the reality of anything you might hear or see in the media. So even when you are seeing something real if someone denies it and blames the tech you'll never really know whether it's true or not.
The manipulation of reality for political purposes isn't new. I've spoken about it and the difficulty of knowing what the fuck is going on before, but it's probably easier these days than ever before and not just because of the advancement of the technology but also because of how we've been positioned, in relation to our media and each other, by our culture. Post modernists spoke years ago about how television made people respond to different cultural areas as if they were the same. It fed us a mashed up culture and 'the mass' failed to discern the difference between the political, the advertisement, the high culture and the low. They all end up like that brown blob of Plasticine that you get when you mix all the colours together and we're left with that to make our culture with. The ascendancy of Trump isn't a surprise when you consider this. In his reality TV show he seemed authoritative so why wouldn't he be presidential material? As Woody Allen once quipped life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.
In addition capitalism, to survive, needs growth and one way it achieves this is by separating us. If people share there's less inclination to buy your own barbecue or hedge trimmer and our system has increasingly driven wedges between us to sell more barbecues and hedge trimmers. The rise of suburbs in the 19th Century put us in our own little castles, with our own little hedge turrets and the rise of car ownership in the early 20th put us in our own little chariots.
Television could've united and informed us but instead it anaesthetised us, the internet began as a great tool of connection but has turned into an unassailable echo chamber creating greater polarisation than I've ever seen in my lifetime. Last but not least we now all have access to the world in our pockets and we hang our heads down to our devices everywhere we go - on the street, the train, at home, in bed. Paradoxically this thing that should connect us more than any other technology in history has caused us to stop looking each other in the eye.
We have sleep walked into our own isolation and have filled the gap of actual socialisation with 'social' media that sways us personally, commercially, politically and creatively according to mass manipulators and exploiters of data like Analytica. Now that social gap is going to be filled with even more stuff that we can't trust the validity of. We will, without exaggeration, be unable to trust anything at all.
To look on the bright side though, because it is manipulable by anyone this new technology could be used to show us a truth previously concealed. We could blow our own seventh trumpet. This could all be apocalyptic in the revelatory sense of the word, revealing what we as a people truly value. It could allow us to project what is important to us as humans. If we can create the very world we perceive then what utopian vision will we project? What will we do with that awesome responsibility?
Well, if the DeepFake app is anything to go by, what we'll do is stick celebrity's heads on porn actors bodies and organise to put Nicholas Cage's face in every film ever made.
Which, come to think of it, probably makes about as much sense as sticking Donald Trump in the Oval Office, so what's to criticise?
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with Nicholas Cage's face
