Your Reality Has Been Canceled

by Robert Auerbach <robert@robertauerbach.us>

Due to lack of consensus, your reality has been canceled.

Jump in the Wayback Machine with me. It’s 1988 and I’m at the GenCon gaming fair. I have the opportunity to talk to “Maximum” Mike Pondsmith about a new science fiction game he’s working on called Cyberpunk.

(Is this the same Mike Pondsmith responsible for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and the best-selling computer game of the last few years, Cyberpunk 2077? Why, yes, yes it is. They say overnight success takes about thirty years, and Mike is a shining example.)

Thirteen-year-old me is absolutely enthralled by this vision Maximum Mike is putting forth, and with benefit of hindsight, Maximum Mike is overjoyed to have a bright thirteen year old taking him seriously. He’s enough of a historian and futurist to understand that if he can get bright thirteen-year-olds to take him seriously, his stranglehold on the future is secured.

Maximum Mike told tales of a future just a few minutes away. One of the things he cautioned was that in the future reality would be a multiple-choice exam. As media moved from analog to digital so too would forgeries, and the same underlying principles making digital media more widespread would also drive digital fakery, until we could no longer trust our own history.

He said it would start small at first. Someone would edit the Apollo 11 moonwalk recordings to correct Neil Armstrong’s blunder. He intended to say “that’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” but in the stress of the moment he forgot the ‘a’. Someone will out of the generosity of their heart correct that, and soon the correction will become the agreed-upon consensus reality, and…

I saw this happen seven years later when the Ron Howard movie Apollo 13, an ultrarealistic dramatization of the Apollo 13 mission, made the artistic decision to have Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) say “Houston, we have a problem,” as opposed to the historically correct “okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here” which was actually said by Jack Swigert (played by Kevin Bacon).

(In the movie’s slight defense, Lovell repeated Swigert’s statement about a second later with the words “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” The point remains: the most famous line about the Apollo 13 mission is entirely a mass hallucination caused by people mistaking a movie for reality.)

I consoled myself for years by telling myself that Caesar’s last words were unlikely to have been “et tu, Brute?” either: we have Shakespeare to thank for that. Popular media has always mythologized and warped the historical record for narrative purposes; I might as well rail against clouds for bringing rain.

But that wasn’t what Maximum Mike warned me about.

He warned about a future where everything was multiple choice. He predicted there would be some threshold reached where a teenager could create a realistic newsreel of Nixon, instead of declaring his resignation on live television, blowing his brains out with a handgun. Confronted with no epistemological justification for one over the other, people would instead believe whatever felt right to them and would use the forgeries to dress their prejudices in veneers of objectivity. The ability to establish provenance would become critically important, he said, but he didn’t see how any fact-checking system could keep up with the torrential flood of partisan hacks looking to rewrite history for their own ends.

From 2008 to 2016 I was deeply involved in digital forensics R&D for the United States government. My job was simple: develop tools and technologies to help the U.S. government deal with the flood. My particular specialty was tools to triage battlefield evidence. In recent years this led journalists to come ask me to vet footage for them. This claimed site of an IDF airstrike on a hospital — real or fake? These bodies torn limb from limb by blast — is the blood real or just a bunch of pixels? Has this surgical strike footage been scrubbed of civilian casualties? Places like Gaza City, Bucha, and Irpin started occupying my nightmares, and so I had to end my involvement in verifying images for journalists. I thought the world had atrocities enough, but apparently the world’s ideologues see the need to digitally forge more.

To paraphrase Seán, “[w]hen [we] can no longer tell truth from falsehood, when satire struggles to exceed and mock reality, truth is dead.”

Due to lack of consensus, your reality has been canceled.

Fenian House Publishing credits