Lose Yourself In Fiction— To See What Is Fact
THE COMMERCIAL WEB steams on as a hopped-up, strung-out system of hyperlinks, engineered to mix Barnumesque humbug with authentic reports, and to overlap ads and news—the better to sucker the eye.
But the spirit of mischief that used to define the web has curdled. In place of pranks and profiteering are now exploitation, malice, fraud, racketeering, and warfare. Consider last year’s breakthrough: deepfakes, in which the images and voices of real people are animated in photorealistic pornography and fake news. Digital confections like these exploit individuals, corrupt information space, and undermine the reliability of all digital artifacts.
Lost in the funhouse, we’re told to be afraid—and to process every symbol we encounter with heightened diligence. The new catchphrase for web users is “Verify, then trust.” That is, before you so much as laugh at a goony photo of someone, dig deep on URLs and metadata analysis, and scan for the ever-changing hallmarks of image manipulation and deepfakery. It’s not enough to be defensive drivers on the information superhighway. We have to be prosecutorial ones.
I have to admit, this all sounds very ... hard. I want a Sunday drive on the web—flight info, advice on plant care, news about Syria. What do I need with deepfake forensics? For all of us dazed and confused, and tired, then, I propose a brand-new media literacy course. Don’t groan yet. It’s called the Netflix Binge, and it’s a criminally easy A. You spend every minute in class not critiquing anything, not studying botnets, not girding your loins for information war. Instead, you gorge on hour after hour of highly stylized fiction, including Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Seven Seconds, The Honorable Woman, Hinterland.
This story is from the June 2018 edition of WIRED.
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This story is from the June 2018 edition of WIRED.
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