The soup de jour is disinformation: I found myself watching the movie World War Z (again) recently. The biological plausibility of a zombie virus that can detect and avoid sickness as a critical vulnerability and plot twist wasn’t quite enough to render the movie as being anything significantly other than “Brad Pitt saves the world, […]
I wonder if we should be more concerned that fake news (as mis- and disinformation) exists, or that reality is so easily decoupled from our descriptions of it. It says quite a lot about the tautological dynamics of communication systems (of belief) that they are generally and only ever referentially anchored upon themselves.
As almost all of our self-representations are now so profoundly inflected by digital curation, I wonder if we should even try to pretend that not only does social media lie, it is fundamentally incapable of telling the truth. Image: Bing’s version of DALL-E 2.
The essence of communication in linguistically-bound domains is to generate just enough ambiguity (reads here as “falsity”, but elsewhere as “nuance”) to optimally self-propagate syntactical and semantic artefacts. It is a kernel and core bias of communication to orient itself towards those heuristics of self-replication that themselves, well, self-replicate and notwithstanding that all of us […]
The thing about lies and falsehoods or fakes and the aggregate self-deception of contemporary technologically-mediated information landscapes is that we generally fail to acknowledge that communication has never been primarily about truth. Communication serves first and foremost as a primary mechanism and transmission medium in and as which information systems optimally self-propagate and, as fakes […]
Context: The misinformation virus Systems of belief are without exception only ever aspirationally grounded upon the objects of their attention. It is as a function of endemic logical (as much as material or cognitive, cultural and communications system) extensibility that these systems become anchored as effective tautologies upon themselves. In this way they can adaptively […]
Context: Logical Fallacies Curiously, though, logical fallacies have a largely unacknowledged and arguably pivotal role to play in the successfully sustainable continuity of cultural (as much as cognitive) communications systems. What is inaccurate or even outright absurd often carries more information entropy and influence than that which is, strictly speaking, factual or true. It is […]
Context: The simple reasons online disinformation may never be fixed It is not only a question as of how best to engage the persistence of disinformation so much as it is of how the Global (as much as political or strategic) information-processing and media system has come in many ways to functionally depend upon the […]
Context: Social media users more likely to believe misinformation The adoption of a “social” communications technology walks hand in hand with the suspension of disbelief as to the veracity of curated information broadcast on that channel; a wilful or semi-unconscious cognitive entrapment as progressive desensitisation to serial falsehoods. This may have taken a particular shape […]
Where we speak of disinformation it is quite plausible that we do not reference any kind of antithesis to information or the logical, structured and relatively well-ordered patterning upon which cognition as much as civilisation depends. Rather, disinformation is a functional representation of the inconsistencies and discontinuities that are endemic, irreducible and omnipresent to (and […]
Finding myself endlessly questioning the reality of all that with which I am presented, two things become clear. First, that which is true can often appear as a lie but in most cases a lie will assert infallible truth and this is in itself a key differentiator and indicator of that which can or should […]
Some general philosophical questions and reflections on disinformation: To what extent is disinformation not only evidence of directed or (even, in a limited sense) desirable artefacts, belief systems or entities, and to what extent is disinformation itself an irreducible property of large-scale sociotechnical systems? Our languages and institutional, geopolitical and self-organisational logics require we leverage […]
Daedelus Kite 