Ming the Mechanic
The NewsLog of Flemming Funch

Tuesday, November 23, 2004day link 

 Technologies of deception
picture Posted on William Gibson's blog, this is from an interview with Alvin Toffler, in "Modulations: A History of Electronic Music":
"Today, the technologies of deception are developing more rapidly than the technologies of verification. Which means we can use a television camera, plus special effects, plus computers, etc. to falsify reality so perfectly that nobody can tell the difference. And the consequences of that eventually could be a society in which nobody believes, everybody knows that seeing is not believing, and nobody believes anything. With the exception of a small minority that decides to believe one thing fanatically. And that's a dangerous social/cultural situation.

One of the consequences of living through a period like this, which is in fact a revolutionary period, is that the entire structure of society and the processes of change become nonlinear. And nonlinearity I think is defined almost by the statement that 'small inputs can have large consequences.' While large inputs can sometimes have very small consequences. That also means in a political sense that very small groups can, under a given set of circumstances, achieve power. And that is a very threatening idea for anything remotely resembling what we believe to be democracy. So we're going into a period, I think, of high turbulence and considerable danger, along with enormous possibilities."

Hm, so should we let go and resign ourselves to not believing anything, as it is all just a virtual reality anyway? Or should we invent more advanced methods of verification? Truth and lie detection. Or maybe all of the above. Getting used to living in a fluid world where everything is virtual, but developing or maintaining a superior sense of what is REAL.

We do indeed run into that a lot of people still think there's only one reality, so they think they don't have a choice, and they can't fathom that people can manufacture realities for them. For a similar reason they've never learned how to distinguish truth from untruth. Because they've sofar mistaken well-crafted realities for truth.
[ | 2004-11-23 22:04 | 3 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

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