NEW GLASSES AND DISINFORMATION

or How Foreign Interference Improved My Eyesight

I got new glasses.

They feel weird. I worry that they’re too big, too slippy, too different.

Then I went driving with them.

DID YOU KNOW THE WORLD IS IN HD NOW?

I’m seeing clearer than I thought possible.
I mean, I thought I was seeing clearly with my old glasses but it turns out that trees are not just amorphous blobs of leaves.

I’ve just been conditioned by my old scratched, scuffed and schmutzy glasses to think I was seeing clearly.

I wasn’t seeing clearly before at all.
I just assumed I was.

This got me thinking…

With the advent of social media some 15+ years ago we’ve slowly been conditioned to think we’ve got an accurate picture of the world around us.

I’m not sure we do.

With countless unaccountable takes on news and politics we’ve been under the impression that what people say and post online is as clear as reality gets.

Add in a healthy dose of intentional disinformation initiated by Russia or India’s current government and I’m now pretty sure that we’ve only thought we’ve been seeing the full picture clearly.

Disinformation doesn’t need to serve any one single politician or cause.
It merely needs to sow chaos and distrust and we’ll do the rest.

TV News?
Can’t be trusted.

Newspapers?
Biased garbage.

Politician we don’t like?
Obviously lying.

We want those to be maxims because maxims feel good in chaos.
They aren’t.

Should we explicitly trust TV News, Newspapers, and Politicians?
Absolutely not.

They all require a healthy distrust.
Trust is earned.
Trust is spent.

Trusting anything outright is as flawed as distrusting anything outright.

Pure distrust feels like clarity.
It is not.

It’s a old worn out pair of glasses we should have replaced ages ago.

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