“From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!” – George Orwell, 1984.
“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” The quotation was from a line in George Orwell’s novel 1984, the same book as the above epigraph. Orwell was describing a totalitarian government’s method (modelled after Stalinist Russia) of distorting history, where truths and facts were manipulated to fit the narrative the totalitarian government wanted to convey to its people. The book is rich with new terms that are very popular nowadays to describe a totalitarian regime: Big Brother, doublethink, thought police, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, memory hole, proles, and 2 + 2 = 5. Even in a situation, or an idea, or a societal condition which is destructive to the welfare of a free and open society is being described as Orwellian. Orwell was forewarning the world when he published his book on 8 June 1949 of upcoming onslaught of the “Big Lies”. The warning fell into deaf ears.
Now there’s another warning in the air. What we see may not be true. Reality has been distorted to present another reality. So beware! What’s in front of your own very eyes may no longer be the real fact. An alternate reality referred to as “deepfake.”
This is the subject matter of a book by Nina Schick entitled Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalyse (2020). She defines deepfake as “a type of synthetic media, meaning media (including images, audio and video) that is either manipulated or wholly generated by AI.” AI is the acronym of artificial intelligence. She cited at the very beginning of the book about the viral video of President Obama on YouTube to make her point if we are not careful of what we view in the internet. Obama didn’t say those words nor did he appear in person in front of the camera. The video was created with the help of AI.
Schick claims that “we are already in the ‘fucked-up dystopia’. In the Age of Information, our information ecosystem has become polluted and dangerous. We are now facing a monumental and unprecedented crisis of mis- and disinformation. In order to analyse and discuss this problem, I needed to find a word to adequately describe this ‘fucked-up’ information environment that we all now exist in. I settled on Infocalypse.”
Schick is not the originator of the word “Infocalypse”, however. It was first coined in 2016 by a US technologist Aviv Ovadya to warn us of the overwhelming flooding of bad information which society is hard-up to cope and control. The word calls for urgent and serious attention to the issue, if only people would listen.
According to Schick, Russia is the “master of information warfare”, well ahead of any country. When tracing the history of fact manipulation, she cited the photographic tampering during Stalin’s regime. Those political friends and allies of Stalin, who appeared in photographs with him, were then edited out once they were purged as enemies of the state.
Most recently, we came to know about the Russian efforts to influence the result of the 2016 US presidential election which resulted in the Mueller investigation. The hacking and the social media manipulation, of course, had the blessing from Putin. His aim was to sow division and chaos in U.S. democracy and institutions. He found his bogeyman in Donald Trump and the Republican Party. So for four years, Trump delivered more than what Putin expected, including the January 6 attempted “coup” by Trump.
Before they became the leading expert of disinformation, the Russians embarked on trial-runs. As an example, Schick referred to a July 1983 article in The Patriot, a little known publication in New Delhi, entitled “AIDs may invade India: Mystery disease caused by U.S. experiments.” The piece boldly claimed that the U.S. military had invented a deadly AIDS virus that targeted to kill black and gay men. Schick referred the campaign as Operation Infektion. When the AIDS epidemic worsened, the Soviets stepped up Operation Infektion with a flurry of articles repeating the lie that the AIDS virus was created in a Pentagon laboratory. Soon the story went viral and was picked by newspapers in the West such as Sunday Express, The Times and The Sunday Telegraph.
The Infocalypse continues. This time, Schick refers to the Internet Research Agency (IRA) set up by Russia in 2013 as part of their foreign policy engagement through social media manipulation. Since the U.S. is Russia’s main enemy, the IRA activated an operation known as Project Lakhta in charge of infiltrating U.S. public debate by posing as authentic Americans in social media and sowing lots of conspiracy theories for the sole purpose of polarization, division and discord. Project Lakhta was ubiquitous in the 2016 presidential election. Though it didn’t carry enough influence for a Trump victory in 2020, IRA is still very active and more sophisticated today.
There’s no indication that the IRA was involved in Trump’s Big Lie that the election was rigged. This is all the work of Trump’s relentless assault on common sense, with the help of the Republican Party and their die-hard base. The motives seem to be obvious: power and money and the vicious hatred of the Democrats. Still we wonder why the obvious is not really obvious. And Trump is making a lot of money in the process.
Deepfakes have penetrated in seemingly innocuous areas of human interest. The brushing or photoshopping of pictures to present a better version of ourselves; the highly-improved special effects technology used in the cinema; the production of robots that mimic the neural networks of the human brain; a software that teaches a machine to mimic a person’s tone, inflection and cadence; the face-swapping techniques that start appearing in YouTube and other media platforms. The sky is the limit and there’s not much we can do to stop deepfakes from their dangerous path.
At the conclusion of her book, Schick remains hopeful but her warning has to be taken seriously now. She leaves us with the following words: “Be careful about what information you share. Verify your sources. Correct yourself when you get something wrong. Be wary of your own political biases. Be sceptical, but not cynical… It is time for all allies to unite. As the Estonians did to the Russians, we still have the chance to say ‘no’ to the Infocalypse.”
Long ago, there was a strongman in the Philippines who claimed “that democracy and revolution are inseparable – that democracy is the revolution.” To make that revolutionary change to happen, he needed the powers of Martial Law. Once he made himself above the law, his propaganda machine started spewing community-inspired slogan such as: “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina and kailangan”. Then came the release of his two books, Today’s Revolution: Democracy (1971) and Notes on the New Society of the Philippines (1973). Never lacking of words, he further justified his unconstitutional action with more lies: “My countrymen: we have reached a turning point in our history. The choice is yours. Shall we venture into this brave new world, bright with possibilities, or retreat to the safety of our familiar but sterile past? I am crossing the frontier.” How the Filipinos were suckered into believing his noble quest to make the country great. Will they be suckered by the son as well in the upcoming 9 May 2022 presidential election?
Lessons are usually hard to be learned. Another politician with dictatorial and violent tendencies became president again in the Philippines. He promised “law and order”. But then the drug users and criminals never got the chance for a court hearing. Instead, they were extra-judicially killed. Human rights organizations had documented over 1,400 alleged killings by death squads operating in Davao between 1998 and 2016 when he was the mayor. It’s to be noted that his presidential campaign had the slogan: Tapang at Malasakit. But when opposed, he laced his vehement temper against his perceived enemies with foul language, jail time and potential body harm.
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, was quoted to have said: “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes accepted as truth.” Donald Trump, according to The Fact Checker, made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his White House tenure. One survey estimated that 50 million Republicans believe Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him.
Why are lies believed? Why do conspiracy theories survive the test of time?
The answers to these questions perhaps could be explained by our mistrust of others as our nature’s default. We remain suspicious of strangers until we get to know them better.
On the flipside, why are people easily conned?
Psychologists think it is because our brains easily fall into what’s known as the “Trust Trap.”
No wonder we are such a mess and confused and can’t explain the explainable, or understand the understandable.
But we have been warned again. The Big Lie can be spotted. It’s all up to us to see it clearly. Facts are the truth. And I will end this discussion with another quote from Orwell’s 1984: “He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way, the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried the human heritage.”*****
21 April 2022
