Why nobody can agree on anything

The breadth of human knowledge continues to expand as the sciences advance. In parallel, people are becoming ever more connected with one another. 16% of people used the Internet in 2005. By 2017, that number had risen to 48% of the global population. We

Information is now at our fingertips, providing us with tools and possibilities that we could never have imagined before. At the same time, though, we paradoxically seem to be witnessing the empowerment of bogus ideas, the growing strength of conspiracy theories and an increasing denial of science and rejection of facts. We saw the rise of the term "fake news", which in turn quickly lost its meaning because people used it to refer to whatever they did not agree with. All of a sudden, it seems people are finding it harder than ever to agree on just about anything. As justice secretary of the United Kingdom in the era of Brexit, Michael Gove had infamously commented “people in this country have had enough of experts”. So what went wrong?

The Internet has given unprecedented power for corporations and governments to manipulate the flow of information. Russia's notorious interference in the last United States Presidential election, and its attempts to influence online opinion, are a case in point. Very recently, President Trump signed an executive order targeting social media companies, after Twitter labelled some of his Tweets as containing potentially misleading information.

Trump accused Twitter of “interfering” in the 2020 presidential election and “stifling” free speech. He warned on Twitter that Republicans “will strongly regulate” social media companies or “close them down” if they continue to “silence conservative voices.”

On one hand, social media companies are coming under increasing strain to censor content on their sites to fight misinformation, racism or other perceived social ills. On the other hand, the conversation around what defines free speech rages on. In an increasingly complicated world, in which different cultures and ideologies are allowed to have more in depth conversations over the increasingly dominant Internet, nothing can be taken for granted any longer. It would seem the world is becoming increasingly subjective.

Within that subjectivity, old and familiar points of reference are being replaced by new paradigms. As during the Cold War, proxy wars were fought between the two superpowers in third world countries due to ideology, the proxy wars of the modern world are now fought in Internet chatrooms, on Facebook, Twitter and many other sites besides.

Relishing this chaos, conspiracy theorists and propagandists take advantage of the lost and confused. It has become increasingly difficult to sift through the abundance of information and divide facts from fiction, as the production value of the fake equals that which comes from credible organisations.

False experts produce YouTube videos which look professional, and say things which sound sensible, allowing for people to reaffirm their confirmation bias and entrench themselves further into delusion. Everything becomes suspect in this world of smoke and mirrors, and people latch onto false prophets for stability and comfort, unaware of how they are being manipulated.

Amidst these wars of ideas and information, in which political powers, corporations and lunatics battle for domination, people begin to believe all sorts of selfdestructive nonsense. Some believe that coronavirus was a conspiracy for governments to grow their power, failing to comprehend the logistical and practical impossibility of pulling off that kind of globally coordinated stunt. Such thoughts fail to understand the geopolitical realities between governments, or how politicians are too busy fighting one another for survival to agree on some grand international conspiracy. Often times, though, simple lies offer more comforting realities than the complicated chaos beyond their control. In search of a simple villain in their story, people demonise institutions or individuals, seeking to regain a sense of order in a mad world. Climate change deniers fail to realise the vast danger they are plunging themselves and everyone else into by insisting on their reassuring delusion.

In such an increasingly complicated world, the best advice one can offer is to second guess everything that one reads or hears, and to cross-check and verify the information elsewhere. In the early days of the Internet, people learned the hard way that there is no Nigerian prince waiting to make us rich, if we lend him some money. The same logic applies to the growing challenges of our age.

No doubt, we will learn. It will be difficult to stay ahead of the curve of propaganda and disinformation. In the end, however, it is in everyone's interest to establish common ground with sanity. In the interim, well-intentioned governments and corporations would be well placed to actively fight disinformation, in search of a more peaceful tomorrow.