Solipsism For All
A friend of mine complained that she’d won an award, recently.
This is more to do with the nature of modern awards than me having strangely ungrateful friends.
The award in question was free, you see, but it came with some strings. Namely, that the award was from a magazine which essentially shortlisted every entrant (“short” lists really needs to have some hard parameters) and then asked them to come to the ceremony itself. Which cost £249.80.
This might sound like a con, but keep in mind there was a budget option of £3834.59 if you wanted to bring a table of ten, because these people are nothing if not reasonable. Also, if you want the magazine to tell people that you won the award, prices start at £450.
With revenue like that, you’d probably forgive me if I abandoned this right now and went off to start a magazine, but alas, my printing press is at the menders, so I’ll continue online for the time being.
Magazines trying to gouge people is sad and gross, but far from an unusual business model these days. It’s symptomatic of something wider, in that the internet, intended as a repository for all of human knowledge and a means of communication between previously distant people, may be having the exact opposite effect.
Consider reviews. You can look at products on Amazon with thousands of reviews and still have no honest idea if they’re any good.
The first reason for that is human nature. Way back when I first worked in a bar, online reviews weren’t really a thing, but we were still taught that someone who has a good experience with a product or a business will, on average, tell one other person about it. But someone who has a bad experience tells an average of five people.
This still holds true, so the only people who tend to be moved to write a review are people who are really pissed off about something, justifiably or otherwise. This leads to barrages of one-star reviews from malicious Karens who didn’t read the description properly and now declare whatever they bought to be utterly worthless because it’s a different size or colour to what they’d expected.
In order to counteract this, companies began hiring click-farms in the third world to post glowing five star reviews of their product as often as possible. The net result is that every product should end up with three stars, but click farmers get paid to work all day and the stupid and gullible only tend to type for about five minutes, so most products end up with great scores and a long procession of reviews by people who rave about an item’s brilliance without ever knowing what it is or speaking enough English to find out.
Not that the public are innocent in any of this. Most people are aware that reviews of services are now vital, so you can call an Uber only to find that the car is full of venomous spiders and the driver is doing a fifteen minute Don Rickles set at the expense of your ugly wife. You’ll still feel obliged to give him five stars because you don’t want to be the reason he loses his livelihood.
So, awards can be bought, reviews of products are spurious and reviews of services are often a sort of moral obligation rather than a reflection of quality.
We basically can’t trust any information we get online, which is annoying if you’re shopping but downright dangerous if you’re one of the stupid. The reason that vaccine deniers and flat-earth proponents and Trump supporters (there’s a lot of crossover) are on the rise is because these people understand at some basic level that the information we’re all getting can’t be trusted, but aren’t smart enough to sift through it and make informed decisions about which sources are legitimate.
People like Trump and Boris Johnson aren’t helping matters, as they hack away at the foundational blocks of society - things like “holding leaders to account when they lie” - because it’s much easier if they, personally, are allowed to lie and everyone else can go fuck themselves. This isn’t to say that previous leaders haven’t also been liars, but the process seems to be accelerating thanks to the internet.
All of which brings me to this woman, who I found on Reddit in a group called “Confidently Incorrect,” which posts examples of people who are absolutely sure of their delusions:
For those who can’t watch the video right now: This woman says she is baffled by people who talk about ancient Rome because, she assures us, it was imaginary. “A figment of the Spanish Inquisition’s imagination.” As evidence, she points out that there are no primary texts from the Roman empire and that Roman mosaics often have Greek writing on them.
Obviously, she’s fucking nuts. Aside from the fact that Rome was a deeply bureaucratic empire and left literal tons of primary texts, there are ancient buildings on every street corner in the city itself, all inscribed with various names and mottos at the time of their creation. You can’t get a much more definitive “primary document” than one that’s carved in stone. Also, Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman empire (ironic Latin phrase) because Latin is complex and difficult and most people were more comfortable in Greek. Latin, as continued in other countries later on, was reserved for formal use.1
None of which matters to the cat-faced woman in the video, because again: Information is now meaningless. Whatever I say, or whatever a qualified historian or linguist would say, can be counteracted by someone with a webcam expounding a different (and wrong) theory on YouTube. The only way to change her mind would presumably be to fly her to Rome and show her evidence.
This attitude - that nothing is true unless someone has seen it with their own eyes - might mean we’re entering into the worst period for information since the invention of the printing press. We might actually be looking at a future where nothing is believed without being experienced. Even victims of school shootings are accused by online paranoiacs of being “crisis actors” in “false flag operations.”
Unless you were personally shot at, there was no shooting. Unless you’ve been to the moon, the earth is flat. The enemy has always been Eurasia.
Most thinking people have considered, at one time or another, that they might just be a brain in a jar hallucinating the world. In a sense, we are. “You” are your brain, which is just a squishy thing piloting a bone suit covered in meat. But assuming I’m not a brain in a jar imagining everyone else, we all seem to have broadly agreed on reality up until this point, and the possibility of that cohesion fracturing is genuinely scary. There isn’t an easy fix.
The government doesn’t want to reform education so that people will understand how to think critically and evaluate the information that they’re given, because then they might notice when they’re being lied to. This was a morally repugnant but practical stance in the old days when the government controlled the flow of information, and didn’t want people to riot if they realised they were being screwed out of their money and freedoms.
Now that information is pouring in from every angle, however, we really need to start teaching people how to understand it and how to competently evaluate who should be listened to. For example, whilst snap judgements are never ideal, it’s probably worth teaching people not to take medical advice from someone who doesn’t know which form of “your” to use.
For years, “Media Studies” was sneered at as a bullshit degree because (think about why…) the tabloids dismissed it as “a degree in watching television” and the public took up the line. Now it turns out that an giving people the ability to competently study the media might be the only thing that can save use from catastrophe, as more people blindly accept something they saw on Facebook as being every bit as valid as any other piece of information.
Paying journalists to report things and firing them when they lie might be a good way to start fixing the problem. Otherwise you’re just another asshole like me, sounding off on the internet. And as we’ve established, people like that really shouldn’t be listened to…
Yes, I’m horribly over-simplifying this. Latin took root in the Western Empire and influenced the Romance languages, but in the Eastern Roman Empire most people would have spoken Greek day-to-day, including in what’s now the Middle East. Meaning Mel Gibson didn’t need to film “The Passion of the Christ” in ancient Aramaic, but he did anyway because he’s an idiot.