Abstract

This article reflects on the problem of false belief produced by the integrated psychological and algorithmic landscape humans now inhabit. Following the work of scholars such as Lee McIntyre (Post-Truth, MIT Press, 2018) or Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall (The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, Yale University Press, 2019) it combines recent discussions of fake news, post-truth, and science denialism across the disciplines of political science, computer science, sociology, psychology, and the history and philosophy of science that variously address the ineffectiveness, in a digital era, of countering individual falsehoods with facts. Truth and falsehood, it argues, rather than being seen as properties or conditions attached to individual instances of content, should now be seen as collective, performative, and above all persuasive phenomena. They should be practically evaluated as networked systems and mechanisms of sharing in which individually targeted actions are combining with structural tendencies (both human and mechanical) in unprecedented ways. For example, the persuasive agency of apparent consensus (clicks, likes, bots, trolls) is newly important in a fractured environment that only appears to be, but is no longer ‘public’; the control of narratives, labels, and associations is a live, time-sensitive issue, a continuous contest, or ongoing cusp. Taking a social approach to truth yields observations of new relevance; from how current strategies of negative cohesion, blame, and enemy-creation depend crucially on binary ways of constructing the world, to how the offer of identity/community powerfully cooperates with the structural tendencies of algorithm-driven advertiser platforms towards polarisation. Remedies for these machine-learned and psychological tendencies lie in end-user education. So the Arts and Humanities, whether via comparisons with previous historical periods, or via principles of critical thinking and active reading, offer crucial resources to help counter what since 1997 silicon valley executives and scholars have called ‘persuasive technology’ (Fogg in Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What we Think and Do, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003; Hamari et al. (eds) in Persuasive Technology, Springer International Publishing, 2014; Harris in How a Handful of Tech Companies Control Billions of Minds Every Day, 2017; Lanier in Who Owns the Future? Simon & Schuster, 2014 and Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Picador, 2019). The article proposes a paradigm shift in public understandings of this new social environment: from a culture of discovery, where what matters is what exists or is in fact the case, to a culture of iteration, where what matters is what gets repeated.