This Person Does Not Exist
Why does disinformation work?
In an essay on velociraptors in his book "The Anthropocene Reviewed," John Green writes that even though he knows the real velociraptor -- swan-sized and covered in feathers -- looked nothing like the brilliant hunter-killers on display in Jurassic Park, the representation of them from the movie is the only way he can imagine them.
"Knowing the facts doesn't help me picture the truth,” writes Green. “That's the wonder and terror of computer-generated images for me: If they look real, my brain isn't nearly sophisticated enough to understand they are not."
I would bet folding money that this is true for many people about many things. Our minds are factories dedicated to the enterprise-level production of assumptions, shortcuts, and poor assessments of risk and probability. The human brain is an immensely powerful miracle, and it has provided us with endless opportunities to assert dominion over the Earth. But that same power gets us into deep trouble, every day.
This is the long-tail risk of running around with a sentient supercomputer in your head: while all of your autonomic systems keep running, and you can catch a ball and drive a car and do math and sing songs, you can also be tricked into believing things that aren't true. You can be tricked by others who, having figured out that this bug may be repurposed into a feature, weaponize our internal mainframes for their own use.
In one benign version of this psychological hack, authors and filmmakers use their storytelling skills to achieve the suspension of disbelief. The audience, in this case, knows what they are seeing isn't real, but in going to the movies or reading a book, they are a conscious participant in the transaction. The audience decides to accept and believe what they see or read, for a limited time. They substitute themselves for characters in the story, and grasp commonalities between the characters' experiences and their own lives as waypoints towards narrative fulfillment in their own imagination.
In short, we (the audience) settle into the rhythm of experiencing a story, and we temporarily allow our minds to not only believe but embrace what we see. This is pleasurable, if only because it is a break from the survival-based vigilance that usually occupies our brains. In this moment of intentional relinquishment, this act of tactical forgetting, the interplay between audience and story is not unlike the link between narcotic and writer, tangentially described by Hunter Thompson: we buy the ticket, we take the ride. It isn’t done to us. We have this experience on purpose.
I have never understood the power of this transaction more completely than one night when I witnessed it go wrong. The story asking for my temporary belief was a horror movie, viewed live in a packed theater on Halloween in 1999. The transaction worked out like it usually does for me. It went terribly and inevitably wrong for the two guys sitting behind me.
It went terribly wrong because they absolutely freaked out and were openly weeping in fear and exhaustion by the final scene. This was inevitable because, as I heard them discuss in excitement as they took their seats behind me 90 minutes earlier, the pair had dropped acid on their way to the theater.
An hour in, they reached a turn in an experience which, second-hand, somehow sounded like both an escalation and a descent. They became convinced the movie was real, a depiction of true events. Disbelief wasn't just suspended for them. It was completely and unfortunately obliterated. The movie was The Blair Witch Project.
You probably know that this was one of the first feature films to make use of "found-footage" to create a relatively new kind of narrative first-person experience. It was certainly the first found-footage film to achieve massive commercial success. The marketing campaign for the film certainly hinted that it might have been real, but no serious person would believe that. Right?
Well, if you're ripped to the tits on LSD, you might be fooled into thinking you were watching a documentary. The hints from the spooky ad campaign could ostensibly grease the slope towards belief, with the acid providing a powerful cognitive push. This is because hallucinogens unmoor much of what anchors our observation of objective reality. Sometimes, that can be fun, and can even feel revelatory, resulting in what feels like insight or epiphany.
Other times, though, it is terrifying, because a central bug/feature pair of hallucinogens is knowing you are high. If it isn't going well, that knowledge somehow makes everything feel worse. Until your body finishes processing the blotter or mushrooms or peyote buttons that seemed like a great and fun idea 7 hours ago, you have no choice but to live through it. You bought the ticket, and the ride ends when it ends.
I study disinformation. When I first really started getting into it in 2016, I focused on who was doing it, and why, and what could be done to prevent such campaigns from being effective. Someone out there — many, many someones — was generating computational propaganda and they'd been doing it for years, a serious threat that appeared to be getting worse. I theorized that if I worked hard enough, I could solve the problem.
At the time, I did not know that disinformation was nowhere near as bad as it would eventually be. For instance, I didn't know that, in the near future, QAnon would be dictating public discourse and federal policy, or that disinformation would meaningfully contribute to a public health crisis that led to the deaths of millions of people from COVID-19. I also didn't know that warnings about disinformation would largely go unheeded. Maybe it was poor branding on the part of those of us who study it, for want of a snappier term than "computational propaganda." Or, perhaps, it was because the idea of memes-and-shitposting-as-existential-threat is so hard to believe.
Now, rather than worrying about who is using disinformation and why, I'm thinking about why we believe it. Why is it so easy and cheap to fool people?
Our ability to perceive the uncanny valley is getting better, bit by bit, because here in the late spring of 2021, many more people on Earth now understand that disinformation is even a thing that exists. We've seen deep fakes on Twitter and TikTok (or even less savory places). Many of us know that, for instance, that one guy is not really Tom Cruise, even if he got the center tooth right. We know that that's Jordan Peele doing his Obama impersonation, even if the video is much more convincing than the audio, in which he is doing a bit we've heard him do in the past, and he lets us in on the joke.
A smaller subset of us know that deepfakes get easier and cheaper to make every day, and that language models and machine learning are getting better and more efficient at an astonishing pace. A news conference in a summer blockbuster that features a real president talking about fictional events no longer takes you out of the movie because it no longer looks and sounds like dogshit. (And the newer version cost barely a fraction of what it once did to bolt a bad impression and a movable mouth onto Obama or John Kennedy.)
Despite our species’ overall improvement in media literacy and digital savvy, political disinformation campaigns still succeed with huge audiences while relying on content far less sophisticated than a deepfake. A rumor becomes a meme and then turns into a full-blown conspiracy theory, becoming the obsession of a private Facebook group. Within 24 hours Sean Hannity is yelling about it to an audience of millions. Many of these theories are fully dipped in a culture war borne of white supremacy, whether the adherents to each sub-belief know it or not.
From birthers to Jade Helm to migrant caravans to Antifa to Critical Race Theory, these imagined boogeymen and stalking horses are always built or amplified in bad faith by people who know the truth and do it anyway, for political gain or to consolidate power.
The current disinformation environment in the United States is a nightmare. There's always more, and it is always worse. For instance: It didn't take long at all for elected GOP officials to stop hollering about how it was unfair to say all Republicans are racist and to start making it illegal to teach factual American history about slavery and systemic racism in schools.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently announced the 1836 Project, a course of fictionalized state history that goes deep on Texas exceptionalism and, by law, excises any question or examination of anything racist or oppressive or bad that Texas (or Texans) might have ever done. Any true interrogation of the big events in Texas history — like, say, the Alamo — challenges the fundamental mythos of the state and its classical heroes, and so is no longer allowed in the state’s classrooms.
This is a focused attack on the imagined strawman of Critical Race Theory, and a proxy for an attack on any effort to understand the very real and brutal history of systemic racism in America. This history isn't even in the past. The multistate, coordinated move to erase it from any shared understanding produced by public schools is definitive evidence that systemic racism still exists and is, perhaps, capable of becoming more powerful and destructive than ever. White supremacy also exists. So too does class war, and culture war. In all of these conflicts, as of right now, the truth is on the losing side.
Aleksandr Pushkin wrote that "The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths."1 I think that this exultation of "us" is the hallucinogen that makes conservatives, evangelicals, anti-vaxxers, QAnon moms, and Young Republicans believe that the insane narrative being projected upon them is true.
These are people who are certainly smart enough to understand that slavery was not only real but a fundamental and shameful part of how this country was built, and that it was the actual reason behind southern secession and the Civil War. They are smart enough to understand that Jim Crow was real and that the dehumanization of Black people specifically (and non-whites in general) was and is a matter of both culture and policy in the United States.
They are also fully capable of understanding the objective reality that Hillary Clinton doesn't eat babies, and that Tony Fauci didn't engineer Covid-19 and unleash it upon the world, and that George Soros isn’t engineering a new world order. But because the information environment in America is one in which we can't even investigate a violent insurrection and attack on the US Capitol that happened 6 months ago, these people feel exulted by conspiracy theories.
As a result, those theories are more dear to them than any reality. Indeed, knowing the facts doesn't help them picture the truth. The wild disinformation that reinforces white supremacy and misogyny and attacks on the poor and violence against LGBTQIA+ communities exalts them. It celebrates their myopic hate and rewards them for being willfully dumb.
Observing this state of affairs makes me look for hope. I suppose this is similar to a climate scientist who latches on to any piece of good news, no matter how small, as a brief respite from the terror of inevitable decline which dominates most of their waking life. This hope, for me, takes root in the occasional story of beloved Fox News grampas and Facebook Aunts who come back from the fevered brink, who ask for help, who shake off the brainworms and wake up from a bad dream, who try to reconcile with the horror in which they were recently steeped.
I like those stories, but they are the exception to the rule. What would give me real hope is if one — just one! — ShitPosting EdgeLord Elected Official achieved self-awareness and, as a result, had a brief and dazzling moment of clarity. After years spent in the eager promotion of racism and white supremacy and bigotry (and, when it suited them, anti-Semitism, or anti-Muslim hatred) and the destruction of western democracy, this person is overcome by a flash of insight and understanding.
This person looks around and says, "Hey, whoa, this is getting out of hand. I should change my ways before this gets to the point of no return. Democracy is at stake."
I need that, but I won't get it. This person does not exist.
A noble-born poet exiled by Tsar Alexander I for, among other pieces, his poem "Ode to Liberty," it is ironic that Pushkin, or at least a sanitized, heavily revised version of Pushkin, was revered among the pantheon of Soviet heroes.