The United States of Misinformation

I usually wait a while before posting. It's something I learned from my music. I used to record a song and proudly upload it to YouTube the same day, and a week later it's the most awful thing I've ever heard. I now let it simmer for a bit and look at it with fresh eyes later. This topic, however, I'd rather never think about again, as unlikely as that possibility is. Regardless, I want to be done with it as soon as possible. Hence, it is a bit less refined than most of my writings on here. It doesn't flow as well and isn't as focused as my standards usually require. I'm angry tonight and it certainly shows. I usually try and tone that down as it makes those who disagree with you even less likely to do so, but tonight I can't be bothered to care. Anyway, I could argue that it's good for posterity's sake - 8 years down the road when Trump refuses to give up the presidency, I can look back and remember how disgusted I was on day 1.

1/20/17 - Inauguration day I am terrified. It has occurred to me that with this last election season and the last few years in general, fake news is becoming more popular than truth. Data can back that up. I find this more disturbing even than Trump's actual election. Trump is just the poster boy for this movement - the people are the ones I find at fault for allowing it to happen. Trump is awful, but the only reason his election succeeded is this information problem. He has shifted the Overton Window on many disturbing fronts, but this one doesn't get as much attention as it deserves. It is now a plausible defense to simply deny factual data that disputes your claims. It’s like the country has suddenly morphed into 4th graders. Deny, deny, deny. Any resistance to the fake news being spread is met with ad hominem. People have literally stopped caring about the truth, I feel. They only care that their ‘teams’ view is the only accepted, no matter the validity. It doesn’t seem to be a thought even worth pondering - if what they say is actually true or not. All that matters is discrediting anyone who doesn’t agree. People want to be told they are correct more than they want to actually BE correct. I find it ironic that the past 2 or 3 years I’ve really embraced the pursuit of the truth. I had never been one to want to spread lies or anything, but before a few years ago, I had never described myself as one in a constant search for truth, either. This epiphany came to me on the cusp of the grand unveiling of the virulent ignorance of 2016 and beyond, Trump as their captain. Truth is treated as taboo and uncouth in certain circles. If what you say doesn’t advance that regime’s interests, you are branded an enemy and all efforts are taken to discredit you. What I truly fear the most is the further transformation of the internet to the point where you can’t confidently find the truth about anything. At the moment, though fake news has been spread more than true as of late, there are still plenty of safe havens. Almost all scientists don’t seem to care about politics one way or another, which works in our favor. What happens when the majority of the party in control, the head of the EPA, the president of the fucking United States, all do not believe in climate change, or at least that it’s not a problem or that humans aren’t the cause? Detached from their supposed ‘belief’, they also happen to be in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, but surely this is coincidental. *kappa* What happens when they realize that they can probably get away with taking all of the actual science off of the official EPA website and replace it with pseudoscience? What’s to say they won’t keep going at that point, realizing they can continue this strategy on anything that they deem hurts their personal financial interests? In a few years we could have the CDC website claiming that homosexuality is really a disease to be cured. Pence would love that shit. He has literally said before something along the lines of "There is a lot of hysteria, but smoking does not kill."

*1/21/16 update: Yup, climate change information has already been erased from whitehouse.gov, as well as healthcare and civil rights, /espanol and /lgbt. Didn’t take long* I think the public has largely already realized. The bullshit they spread, regardless of if it’s believed or not, furthers their goals. They are flooding the information market of the internet with trash and pseudoscience and bullshit which then makes it easier for them to claim in the future that any factual article with real data is fake or bogus or a hoax or ‘has been debunked’ or whatnot. The more lies spread, the lower the percentage of truth on the internet, thus, it’s easier to discredit things you don’t like. 2016 has taught me to have no faith in humans. I can see some kind of legal action eventually against the likes of Wikipedia, forcing them to allow fact-free changes to things like the civil war - claiming the South didn’t secede due to slavery discrepancies and such. I can see many of the gatekeepers to the few honest places on the internet being labelled essentially heretics or dissenters, eventually. I remember a meme from years ago along the lines of “What would you tell a person who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago if you had the chance?” Reply: “In my pocket, there exists a device which contains all of the collective knowledge that humanity has gathered that I can access at any time. I use it to look up pictures of cats.” At the time, I found it humorous, though I noted that we, as a society, don’t have enough respect for education. Now, I just find it saddening. Poignant. I’m worried we are now about to squander the relative clarity of truth we had only a few short years ago. There have always been lies on the internet, but an iota of critical thinking could almost always pick them out or at least be wise enough to suspend judgement. That being said, older folks, now all over the internet as well, simply don’t “get it” often, no matter how clever they are. People in my own family still harbor suspicions that Obama is a Muslim Kenyan or think that Trumps fraud litigation against him was a ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘he had no part in it’ or ‘is fake news/never happened’ or, when all else fails, ‘shows how smart of a businessman he is’, empathy to the wind. I thought age was supposed to bring wisdom? It turns out many of them might be even more susceptible than the rest, and that’s saying something. I’m worried this informational pollution won’t clear, but rather increase ten-fold. I have been an optimist most of my life, but I fear that has largely evaporated. I didn’t like the kind of person Hillary was either, but told myself, as though a mantra, that there was no chance people would be that gullible, that crass, that unempathetic, to vote for the demagogue king. It’s only a small consolation that he lost the popular vote. I honestly can’t say of that makes it better or worse that he won. I am running out of reasons to have ever believed in humanity. Only once before have I ever had this feeling: I had randomly been invited into a Facebook message thread with a few of my friends. Having been invited, I was able to see everything that had been written in the thread, including messages sent before I had been invited. I discovered I and perhaps 20 others had been invited in for the sole purpose of humiliating a friend of mine who had said some very personal things to the friend who had invited me. Simply inviting all of us in, allowing us to see the personal information, was bad enough. But by the time I had joined, almost all of those who had been invited were openly making malicious jokes about her with her still in the message, able to read it all. I have never been more ashamed of my friends in my life, and they all stopped being friends of mine that day. I expressed how fucking terrible of people they had to be to do something like that and some had the gall to actually argue with me about the morality of the situation. Some, at least, were never seen again in the thread. One other who had been included messaged me and acknowledged it was fucked up, but even he had joined in the mockery a bit before I entered the conversation. I could be wrong, but I believe I have a pretty average smattering of friends. It’s not like I simply ‘hang around’ the wrong people. So, am I to understand that only 1 (and a half, maybe) out of 20 average people are decent human beings? Maybe my definition of ‘good person’ is flawed, but to me, any reaction other than disgust at what he’d done to her was disgraceful. Horrified and in a state of shock at the diminishing quality of my friends, I eventually told both my female roommate and my girlfriend at the time of the event - both people I had believed to be some of the most morally sound people I knew. Turns out, because of some petty fight they were having, they both answered something like “Well, she shouldn’t have burned her bridges”. That exact moment is the one I was referring to. Most of the people in the message thread were mere acquaintances - on the fringes of my circle of friends and easy to excommunicate, and all were men. You don’t know these women, so you can’t fully understand, but they were both good people that I trusted absolutely. I didn’t expect people to start crying in sympathy, but to be met with anything but condemnation… I lost any convictions I had about my ability to understand humans. Terrible things, they are. In that moment, my expectations for the decency of the human race were forever scarred. I have the same feeling again because I had been expecting most people to scoff at Trumps transparency. I mean, technically, most people apparently do, but he lost the popular vote by only a few percent. Why can’t it be simple and let me generalize crazy angry ignorant people at only 10% of the American population? Instead, I have fucking family members whom I know to be good people at heart completely corrupted, saying that the white terrorists who tried to bomb a Somali apartment were ‘good boys’ and were ‘stupid by talking about it and getting caught’.

I have been constantly reminded of the quote from the Orson Scott Card book, Enders Game: "For a moment, as Ender looked around at the laughing, jeering faces, he imagined their bodies covered with hair, their teeth pointed for tearing. Am I the only human being in this place? Are all the others animals, waiting only to devour?" People tried going with fake news out of desperation, boredom, maybe fucking nihilistic masochism, but with the election of Trump, they found that it works. If something completes your goals, why do it any other way? In horror, I imagine a world where any scientific documents concluding that humanity was the cause of the hundreds of flooded coastal cities and fertile land destruction that will apparently soon be incoming via climate change ignorance, are all illegal to share or possess, accessible only on the black market. Maybe on the darknet, hoarded then by decent people like gay porn currently is by homophobic Christian right Senators. The truth has lost its value to much of the population. We have been in the information age for some time, but all truth seems to do is discredit much of what many people wish so badly to believe. Hence, they have started to see the truth as the enemy. If people with those minds get into power, do you believe NASA would continue to get a single dollar of budget? The Overton Window is absolutely sliding that direction. Science is being vilified due to pettiness, fear, and unwillingness to change. All of science is on the line. Agricultural science, psychology, medicine, engineering and energy department research - all have the potential to be hamstrung by people so terrified of change that they destroy arguably the greatest advantage that our populace hardly took advantage of: freedom of information. In 40 years, I honestly don’t see a big enough gap in plausibility between mostly operating like we do today or our then-president trying to grow crops with gatorade. Were I in Vegas, I would not commit a bet to the likelier outcome. 1/22/17 update: That didn’t take long. This is the exact reason I am fearful: http://www.newsweek.com/white-house-accuses-media-lying-trump-crowd-size-546005 The president gets to order his people to lie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdantUf5tXg Blatantly, and without remorse. They know that those loyal to them won’t question it. All anybody need do is watch the time lapse video above to see proof. This is the white house lying to the American public, knowing full-well that 2/3rds of the population are scoffing at the audacity of the claims but doing it anyway - confident that the blind lemmings who follow them are too terrified to take off their blindfolds. I need to read some Orwell, apparently.

#president #trump #fakenews #inauguration #misinformation