Can we trust the images and videos flooding our social feeds?
For the past 20 or so years, I've been trying to decipher a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." It seems to reflect almost perfectly the way in which the "connectedness" of social media and the internet's nonstop flow of information have birthed a state of unreality. In the story, Borges's narrator comes across an encyclopedia about an unknown world where people speak a language without nouns and where the metaphysicians are "not looking for truth or even an approximation to it: they are after a kind of amazement." |
In the story's postscript, the narrator tells us what happens after the logic and language of "Tlön" invade the world. History and science are replaced by a type of self-contained matching game in which symmetries and patterns stand in for the real world. "Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account," Borges's narrator writes. "The truth is that it longed to yield." |
The story has many competing interpretations, most of which are too in the weeds to discuss in this space, but it's always read to me as a warning of what can happen when an alluring ecosystem of information overruns the physical world. What resistance do human beings really have to such assaults on reality, especially when they match up with what we want to believe? |
Today, the language of "Tlön" has been replaced, in large part, by scraps of video that circulate on social media. There are certainly instances like the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 that were rooted in the reality of the murder of a man as well as the reality of police violence against protesters, but it's hard not to be concerned about the ways in which similar videos could be manipulated. |
The invasion of Ukraine is another instance in which the world has responded in righteous fashion to a real injustice. The past week has brought us verified, horrifying images of missile strikes, burned out buildings and heroic Ukrainian resistance. But it also has brought an avalanche of unverified or false stories, much of it in video form, that has turned a harrowing story of a military power exerting its will over a poorer, sovereign nation into something that's better suited for Hollywood. What shocked me was the speed of it. As with "Tlön," it almost felt like reality wanted to yield. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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