Fake News and Fake Views: It’s all a lie. And that’s the truth…..

Well, it’s been quite a week. The POTUS has accused those media outlets that are less than effusive in their praise for him of being fake news outlets and enemies of the people. We are, if you believe it, (woops, apologies) being overwhelmed with false reporting, fabrication, misreporting, honest reporting of fake stories and dishonest reporting of the truth. It seems we are awash in leaks from unnamed sources, all reputable but hidden.

It reminds me of an old AC/DC song that went "And its an eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Its a lie, and that's the truth"

Let’s face it, the truth has always been a rather elusive concept when it comes down to opinions and perceptions. It's a bit like its sibling reality - everyone's is slightly different. Today though, it seems it's gone from elusive to almost mythical and perhaps even unrecognisable. The speed-of-light transmission of breaking news leads to saturation before verification. Common sense filters are swept away in in-coming waves of competing stories where instantly perceived facts are blended with the detritus of hastily informed opinion and convenient assumption which is an easy morph away from fabrication. All are put through endlessly spinning media centrifuges and spat out for consumption by the masses 24-7, 365 repeat.

The proliferating choice of endless, competing news outlets means we have ever more options in choosing our particular brand of the truth. Invariably we gravitate to that which chimes most with our perceptions of how we would like the world to be. So CNN viewers will avoid Fox, just as Daily Mail readers won't agree with much that the Guardian reports. Some may even believe Russia Today (Ok, I’m exaggerating for effect). But does listening to the views we expect to hear really give us a fair perception of the world? In a sense we are having comforting conversations with ourselves; no one benefits from such warmly agreeable, sterile non-exchanges of views. And without a variety of views to challenge our assumptions, we risk becoming set in our thinking and instantly intolerant of the opinions of others. That last point seems a particularly chronic condition at the moment but please feel free to violently disagree.

 Much is being said about us being in an alternative fact, post truth sort of world and that this is all sort of conveniently synonymous with the rise to power of Donald Trump. Really? We do have short memories. Anyone remember the Iraq war, dodgy dossiers, Tony Blair and his army of spin doctors as just an arbitrary example?  The truth (apologies for using the word again) is that this has been going on for just about as long as civilisation, for as long as we have had language, lived communally, had social hierarchies (and had to explain our behaviours to others). We decide what we would like to believe and then look for the facts to prove it, when it should be the other way round. That applies to politics as much as it does to creation science.

Once we have settled on our views; our "truths", we are rarely then disturbed by the facts or unsettled by the absence of that extinct beast known as common sense. How many suicide bombers ever change their views?  This is not some new post truth or post fact development. It was ever thus. Perhaps what is new is the fury at being confronted by an alternative view point. How dare we be challenged? In a sense, as we insist on all our inalienable individual human rights, so we demand and exercise the freedom to believe in all the delusions and ridiculous notions of our choice and how dare anyone try to wake us from these dreams of the unreal.

 So here we are, grown bloated on our diets of confirmation bias and its after-effects of angry intolerance.

 

·         In a world of a thousand different viewpoints, it seems we only want to hear our own.

 

·         In a take on Orwell's animals all being equal but some being more equal than others, we demand the right to our free speech, but insist on the right to silence others whose views we “know” are wrong. 

·         The truth is become some spectre that haunts us with its absence in a world deafened by the vulgar shouting of those defined only by their angry, competing ideological dogmas.  

·         Facts are selectively assembled to support preordained conclusions and we brand as heretics and cast out those whose mean biases differ from our own.

 And since I’m in the mood to quote literary giants of rock music (don’t you dare disagree), I’ll paraphrase Roger Daltry of The Who….“Welcome to the new reality. Same as the old reality”

 

So, believe what you will, for it shall be your truth

 

 

(I wrote the grimy lines below long ago in another time (1990s) and place but they seem oddly appropriate at the moment)

THE NEWS

PARALYSED

I GAZE UP INTO THE

UNBLINKING EYE OF TELEVISION

GROPING FEEBLY FOR MEANING

BETWEEN CAREFULLY SELECTED REAL TIME PICTURES

AND VOICE-OVER QUASI-TRUTHs.

THOSE IN-THE-KNOW SMILE BENIGNLY

AND SPIN ELEGANT JUSTIFICATIONS ABOVE MY HEAD,

TURNING FAILURES INTO SALVATIONS AND WATER INTO WINE.

ELSEWHERE ON-THE-SCENE NEWS JOURNALISTS

ANALYSE AND DISTORT FRACTURED FACTS AND FRAMES

FORCING SOME DISTANT AGONY NOT MINE

THROUGH THE CORRUPTED PRISMS

OF THEIR MASTERS’ POLITICAL MYOPIAS.

 I GRAB FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

ONLY TO FIND

THAT WHAT WAS SAID

IS NOW EMPHATICALLY DENIED

THEY ALL SPOKE BETWEEN THE LINES

THE TRUTH WAS ONLY EVER IMPLIED

 I GOT

EYEFULLS OF ADVERTS NOW

SPECIAL PILLS

THAT WILL MAKE ME LIVE FOR EVER

OR I’LL GET MY MONEY BACK

The 4th Industrial Revolution: Now is getting faster ....

When many tens of thousands of years ago, those first twigs were rubbed together and a guttering fire produced, it was no doubt uttered shortly thereafter, in whatever crude grunts passed for language, that change was afoot. Similarly, when that first set of crude and probably not very round, teeth-loosening wheels rolled forth, onlookers would have pronounced, in more sophisticated tones, that a great change was taking place. We've always been saying it. And it's always been true. In a sense through its always been seen as a reasonably steady gently accelerating process, with the odd spasmodic jerk and a few localised and depressing plateaus like the dark ages. But the pace of change feels different now. That hardly needs to be written or said, for if you haven't noticed this in the last few years or so, it can be safely assumed you're living an exile's life in outer Siberia.

 

We are now in the 4th Industrial revolution. It is being driven by a technology revolution the likes of which we have never before experienced and its impact is sending transformative shock waves through every aspect of our lives. Much of this is being driven by rampant progress in the field of artificial intelligence ("AI"), which, having suddenly erupted into the public consciousness, underpins much of the recent progress in machine learning, automation and robotics. This alone is already changing our world in ways which not so long ago we would have considered almost unthinkable. This has resulted in a plethora of eye swivelling warnings and predictions about the imminent demise of the biological human through to us all living in a state of permanent holiday from work. The nature of this rapidly accelerating technology means that it will probably develop in many ways that, from today's vantage point, we simply cannot foresee or imagine.

 

This is because we have entered the era of exponential technological change, and it's not just an AI related phenomenon; its happening everywhere. It's there in the speed and power of our super computers with Exascale computing (a billion billion calculations per second) predicted to be with us by the early 2020s. At the same time quantum computing, and the race for quantum supremacy, may be even closer and could even eclipse the journey towards Exascale computing. True quantum computing could well deliver a further shockwave to a world already in the midst of its own technologically induced future-shock. Again, this could have the potential to change our world in ways which are very hard to predict.

 

Just for a moment, consider that entity which we used to call the Internet.  Can you even remember what it was like 20 years ago, aside from being comically primitive by today's standards? In 1996 could you ever, in your wildest dreams, have imagined what it has become today along with all its tangential impacts upon our lives. Now try to imagine what it will be like in 2036, or even 2026. The technologies about us are moving at such speeds and in such interwoven and unconventional ways that such predictions are almost impossible now. It's as if our forward windows of prediction have slipped from decades to years towards months.

 

This revolution is all around us. It's will be in the exponential increase in distances that will be traveled by driverless cars and fleets of trucks. It's the rampant increase in the interconnectedness and smart-chatter of the so called Internet of things, the full implications of which may not yet be really understood. We see it in the rapidly vanishing size and expanding power of our hand held devices, which we still whimsically term "mobile phones" when they are packed with enough technology to have filled a car boot only a decade or so ago. We can sense this sudden change is the arrival and power of deep learning and learning machines and of social robotics. We have seen it is the seeming emergence out of nowhere of the "Cloud", with all its implications and how so much of what we used to possess, hoard and store has migrated away into the intangible but ever accessible. We read about astonishing medical developments like the emergence of 3-D Bioprinting and the ability to artificially construct living tissue..

 

It seems wherever we look, this multitude of strange new technologies is expanding, converging and multiplying with hitherto unprecedented speed and in increasingly unpredictable ways. And even as we recognise it for nothing like we have ever seen before, we may well remember this time as it being in its infancy.

 

For years this revolution has been expected. Initially it was foreshadowed by the authors of hard science fiction and a few lone Cassandras but gradually it has gained momentum as more serious intellectual and industry heavy weights, like Stephen Hawkings, Bill Gates and Elon Musk spoke up. Now it is entering mainstream consciousness as those respected periodicals of the establishment like the Economist are suddenly talking about AI, Uberisation and a universal basic income. Even still, this emerging wider awareness is still lagging behind the speed of developments, we still think of our future world according to our models of the past, yet it's not the rules of the game that are changing - it's a new game and very few of our "old world" institutions and mind sets are geared to keep up.

 

Our science fiction is quickly losing its fiction. Now, year by year, month by month, technology is accelerating with relentless speed with new developments seemingly rushing towards us. Despite this, technology will never move this slowly again. And that old, calmer world of just a few years ago will increasingly seem like some lingering twilight memory of a distant childhood, where everything seemed so much safer and more stable. Yet, like our childhoods, that is gone for good now. This is the new normal.

 

"Now" is getting faster and it will never slow down.

Killed by Death: Lemmy remembered

 

 

 

When Motörhead's  Lemmy Kilmister died in December 2015 part of rock music died with him. Lemmy was the only really, true rock n roll star. The rest have only ever been pretending.  

 

Since I was about 14 I've been listening to Motörhead and Lemmy week in week out.  I was a typical scrawny kid with a cheap cassette recorder listening to badly recorded music on dodgy tapes but I've always loved rock music and it's Lemmy and Motörhead who have, rather discordantly and bombastically, been the sound track to so much of my life. Like so many fans of the band, it a life long thing, it's part of you. You don't grow out of it or move on to quieter more sensible or conventional music. As your tastes change, so they stay the same....

 

When you went to a Motörhead concert it was like the annual gathering of a strange, dark tribe beneath a pyrotechnic sky of swirling lights and amidst a primordial storm of volume. It didn't matter who you were or where you came from, whether you were a hustler, or a brain surgeon, a biker, an anarchist or an auditor. You were part of the tribe.

 

Lemmy seemed indestructible and uncompromising in a horrible, vulgar world, impoverished with its vapid fashion and  cheap shallow instantly disposable music. He was a snarling voice of anger cursing an increasingly Orwellian world that would like to decide how each individual should think and act and speak. It's free speech for all as long as we as we all agree that none us disagree. He was no respecter of all those systems and beliefs that we fool ourselves into thinking give us purpose and order in our over managed, over cautious, over insured and under-lived lives. His voice was a gruff roar, with his bitter telling lyrics curled around snarling low slung riffs, monster-clanking bass runs and the thrashing beat of the world's most terrifying drummer.

 

Yet we knew this moment was coming. His frailty over the last 2 years of his life was a haunting but very real harbinger of what we knew was inevitable. He was fading away before our very eyes. This pale and drawn old man, standing on stage, in a way bidding his goodbyes with each passing show in the only way he knew how. Even from within the maelstrom of the music the final silence was not far away.

 

Motörhead have played their last show now and Lemmy is long gone. Yes, we will still play those songs but there will be no new music. This is not just a silence that is the absence of decibels. This is the sadness of memories that stretch over a life back to a 14 year old kid sitting with his best friend trying to decipher the lyrics to a hysterically bad Top Of The Pops recording of Ace of Spades.

 

Lemmy was once asked what the secret to a long life was. The typically pithy response was "not dying". Tragically, in 2015 he ignored himself for the last time. The world is a sadder, and slightly quiter place as a result.....

 

"You know I'm going to loose, and that gamblings for fools, 

But that's the way I like it baby,

I don't wanna live forever......"

 

 

Lemmy Kilmister 24 December 1945 to 28 December 2015.