The Internet of Us (11 page)

Imagine again that in the future, computers are able to run programs that create entire SIM worlds, indistinguishable “from the inside” from real ones. Suppose that these super-engineers travel back in time and offer you three choices (maybe they are
Matrix
fans and so offer you different color pills). They warn you that once you make the choice, you can't go back: it is a permanent long-term deal.

Choice 1 is to continue with your life just as it is now. Your friends are friendly and your lovers love you (or not, as the case may be). Choice 2 is to live the exact same life you are living now but as a SIM. How they do this is up to them—perhaps they “transplant” your brain patterns into a SIM, or perhaps they keep your body alive and just make your actual brain experience a SIM-life. Either way, they'll fix it so you don't know you are living in a SIM world, but you will be. Choice 3 is just like choice 2, with one very important exception: here some of your friends and lovers really despise you.
But you will never discover that fact
, nor will you remember ever having that information; their deceit will be perfect. From the inside, all three lives will be
indistinguishable; where the first causes you joy, the others do as well; where the first causes you pain, the others do as well, and so on to the grave.

Not much of a choice, really. Forced to choose, almost all of us will prefer the first life over the second two. Perhaps some may be ambivalent; they'll flip a coin. Presumably no one will
actively
prefer the third over the first, since it involves a double deception. Either way, our reaction tells us something about how deeply we dislike deception. If you are ambivalent, then deception matters less to you than it does to others. One door is as good as another. Others of us, however, will find this attitude odd, even repugnant. We don't want just
to seem
to have friends and lovers, we want actual friends and lovers, even if there were no discernible experiential difference between the one case and the other. Moreover, we want to want to be that way: we care about not being deceived. We would no more wish to be ambivalent about which of these choices to make than we would wish to willingly enter into a deception.

Our attitude toward such choices also tells us something about our attitudes toward truth. The fact that we prefer not to be deceived—even when the deception is undetectable—suggests that our preference for believing whatever is true over not doing so remains even when it would have no effect on how we experience life.
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But—you might be eager to ask—what if the super-scientists offer you the option of a SIM life that is all you've ever dreamed? In this SIM life, you can be whatever you want (famous athlete, successful novelist, rock star, all three, etc.). It would be like living in a video game. Call this choice 4.

How attractive choice 4 appears to people depends on how you frame it. I've found that answers vary depending on whether we are told we can just “try it” for a short time or whether it is a permanent choice.
¹⁰
Most people would be willing to try out a SIM super-life, especially if there were no negative consequences (just as most people would try certain drugs if there were no negative consequences). Some would choose it eagerly, and for longer times—especially if their “real” life is filled with pain. But most of us would still be wary if the choice was permanent. It would be a pleasurable experience, but it would be a bit like living life on an artificial high. Nothing would be earned, and the “knowledge” and “wisdom” we'd gain over our SIM life would be figments of a computer generation. That suggests that while truth is hardly our only value, we still value it overall.

But
whose
truth, exactly?

Falsehood, Fakes and the Noble Lie

When the monologist Mike Daisey got up in front of an audience at Georgetown University in 2012, he was in the midst of a media firestorm. Daisey was the author of a brilliant, funny and very biting show called
The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs
. In the show, which has no official script, Daisey—a self-confessed techno-geek of epic proportions—describes his awakening to the facts about the production of the Apple products he loves so much, in particular his iPhone. He talks about how, posing as a businessman, he was able to get into the plant in China where all such phones are made—an operation of staggeringly immense and dehumanizing size. He gives graphic details about the conditions
in which the Chinese factory laborers work, building and tortuously assembling each phone, and most of its component parts, by hand.

Daisey's show was affecting. It demonstrated just how willfully ignorant most of us are about how our digital toys are made. It provided a look behind the wizard's curtain. But it also contained some falsehoods. A few months before the Georgetown speech, Daisey had given a performance of the monologue on NPR's popular
This American Life
radio broadcast. The producers asked whether the show's claims about conditions in the Chinese plants would live up to journalistic standards. Daisey said they would. But subsequent investigation by reporters turned up inaccuracies: Daisey said he'd talked to people that his translator said he had not spoken to, for example, and that he'd visited places and personally witnessed certain events that he had not. The events in question weren't large in scale—they were more on the order of small details. But the errors were enough to prompt
This American Life
to do an entire “retraction” episode.

In his subsequent Georgetown speech, Daisey admitted that he had misrepresented some facts about what he had seen, and that he had collapsed others, so as to better present them in a dramatic form. He had, in short, taken quite a bit of narrative license. He apologized for misleading Ira Glass at NPR, and for misleading the people who had listened with the expectation that the show was a piece of journalism. But he did not apologize for making the piece. Indeed, he asserted that his point in making it was precisely to expose what is indeed an extremely important truth—a moral truth that had been largely hidden from
consumers. He was sacrificing certain small truths in order to expose one big truth.

The Mike Daisey story fascinates for lots of reasons. It has all the makings of a classic tragedy: a hero in pursuit of a noble truth, brought down by hubris; a touching and philosophical speech in the denouement. But it is also interesting precisely because it isn't isolated. A common theme, often voiced by the person caught faking details, is the “sacrificing small truths for one big truth” idea. And folks aren't always apologetic. The writer John D'Agata even goes so far as to suggest, in
The Lifespan of a Fact
, that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is illusory. D'Agata, in writing what the rest of us call nonfiction articles, attempts, he says, “to reconstruct details in a way that makes them feel significant even if that significance is one that doesn't naturally occur in the event being described. . . . I am seeking truth here, but not necessarily accuracy.”
¹¹

Now, clearly, any attempt to tell something complicated in a narrative way—the story of the Civil War, for example, as told by a documentary—will necessarily sacrifice some detail in order to illustrate the sweep of events. And in skipping some details, as any description of an event must do, it could be thought to “sacrifice” truth in a certain respect. But these facts don't bother most people. People know that details must often be left out of historical narratives. And they know that
recreations
of historical events must “fill in” where there is imperfect knowledge of the past. As a result, we adjust our expectations and, if we are wise, guard against taking the recreation as anything other than a bit of historically informed fiction.

Daisey's case, however, illustrates how quickly these expectations
can shift. We typically don't treat storytellers as journalists—and this expectation didn't necessarily change just because Daisey was on NPR. It changed because of his message. His message was directed at uncovering a significant hidden truth about how iPhones were made—a truth that he thought, correctly, needed to be brought to light. That is, what his show was
about
was the fact that we were ignoring certain facts. When that is the content of your message, expectations change. We expect you to give us the right details, or to explain to us more clearly—as Daisey now does during the show—how and when details are being sacrificed for narrative drive. And this expectation rises the more we are convinced that there is something important at stake. That's why D'Agata's “I'm after truth, not accuracy” excuse rings hollow. If, as D'Agata says he is doing, I tell you that something is “significant,” I shift your expectations. So you are right to feel offended if I then ignore the very expectations I've helped create. When people sacrifice small-“t” truth—what D'Agata calls accuracy—for one big Truth, their deceptions essentially involve manipulating our expectations.

The Internet makes it ridiculously easy to manipulate people's expectations. That's partly due to the relative anonymity of the Internet. But it is also because the expectation-setting context is increasingly difficult to track.

Sock puppets are a good example. A “sock puppet” is Internet-speak for a manufactured online identity used to get people to believe information of some sort. A hotel manager or restaurant owner who logs on to a consumer review site to review his own business, or hires other people to do so, is using sock puppets. Writers who review their own work under aliases on Amazon,
and attack the work of others under that same alias, are doing the same. At a more sinister level, governments have been known to use sock puppets and social media to influence public opinion. Westerners typically associate such behavior with China and other oppressive regimes, and for good reason. In 2013, China was widely accused of creating dozens, perhaps hundreds, of fake Twitter accounts for propaganda purposes with regard to Chinese–Tibetan relations. But Western governments are hardly shy about using sock puppets. As the
Guardian
newspaper reported in 2011, the U.S. government has created Operation Earnest Voice, which awarded the Californian company Ntrepid millions of dollars to create sock puppets for the explicit purpose of spreading propaganda on the net in languages such as Arabic.
¹²

One common form of sock puppetry is the use of a socialbot. A socialbot is not one person pretending to be another (or many), but a robot pretending to be a human. By “robot” I don't mean a walking-talking robot of the sci-fi variety; I mean an algorithm-guided bit of software that steers its false human face to like real people's sites, to make posts, and to get others to like those posts. Socialbots have been amazingly good at fooling people. They independently post and repost, tweet and retweet about current events—all using expanding databases of information gleaned from the Internet. They can respond to emails. They are often programmed to tweet in patterns that mimic awake/sleep cycles. In one famous case, a well-known Brazilian journalist—allegedly with more online influence than Oprah—was revealed to be a bot.
¹³
Alan Turing claimed sixty years ago that if a machine could durably fool humans into thinking it was human, then we
had as much reason to think it was thinking as we have to think other human beings are thinking. By some standards, bots might seem to be passing this test.

Even if we don't think they are thinking (and I don't), the use of bots is incredibly disturbing. Part of the reason is that they are so cheap—you can buy “armies” of them for just a few hundred dollars. But they are also massive deceit machines, built for the purpose of getting people to buy things, do things, vote for certain candidates and not others. (This is partly why Twitter recently banned such bots.) Again, not all uses of bots may be harmful. But it is a mistake to write the whole technology off as simply a new and updated form of marketing or advertising. (Excusing one's manipulative behavior by saying it is “just advertising” is a bit like excusing one's infidelity as “just flirting.”) In reality, these bots are more like cons. They operate on getting people to assume they are dealing with someone real who is sincere in their assertions. And they take advantage of that.

As in the Daisey case, some people use their online personas, or bots, to try and get across general political or moral viewpoints (what they consider “big truths”) while perhaps sacrificing or ignoring inconvenient details. In many cases, this might be inconsequential, or simply a form of self-promotion. But there may be more at stake.

In recent years, various political organizations have used social media to great effect for propaganda. Again, the idea is often to broadcast what is perceived to be a “big truth” by misrepresenting the facts. One particular method is the use of photo-sharing. A common technique is to use an older photo but represent it as having been taken during a more recent event. For
example, a widely circulated photo on the Internet—which was reproduced by various reliable news services—showed a young child jumping over rows of covered corpses. The photo was represented as having been taken in the aftermath of the Houla massacre in Syria in 2012. In fact, the photo was taken a decade earlier in Iraq. Similar uses of photos have been widely documented, and have led to several efforts to come up with verification techniques to help the public and journalists spot such abuses.
¹⁴

In
The
Republic,
Plato explicitly suggests that it would be good for citizens to believe a myth that would have the effect of making them care about their society and be content in keeping it stratified. He called this “the noble lie,” and he seemed to think that it might be inevitable if the state is to survive. And of course, deception sometimes
is
justified: to protect someone, or to prevent a panic, or to minimize offense. Life is complicated and moral principles must always be applied with a sense of context. But the problem with so-called noble lies is that they are like potato chips: it is hard to stop with just one. That's because the moment a noble lie is discovered to be just that—a lie—it suddenly becomes just as “noble” to lie about whether it was really known to be a lie. Cover-ups become noble lies. Assassinations become noble lies. And soon we are sliding down the slope of the deck right into the jaws of the shark.