Context: Facebook staffers walk out saying Trump’s posts should be reined in
It is interesting to reflect that, shameless Executive bloviation notwithstanding, information and communications technologies from (for instance) Lascaux through emojis have never really been about truth and falsity so much as they have been about naked self-replication of the encoded system they bear. The autonomously self-propagating raison d’etre of complex information and energy-processing systems lies in their ability to optimise themselves and their environments for continuity.
Truth is non-trivially important, certainly, and without even aspiring to cultivate both it and an attendant cultural value system that respects facts and science we are all perhaps doomed (somewhat sooner rather than later). It is probably only where Globally-integrated communications systems reach a critical mass that the Janus-like duality of true-false information systems reveals itself in full idiosyncratic glory.
Information systems self-propagate in ways which prime their environments for receptivity – not for truth or fact, but for further transmission. This is why fakes fly faster and further than facts -it is an autonomously (i.e. blindly) self-optimising computational system sans agency or ego. Entropy favours fakes.
Daedelus Kite 