Does It Matter That Stories Posited as True on the Internet Are Obviously Fake?
I’ve been trying to wean myself off social media and my phone for the last two weeks with some success. I’m not in a great place emotionally right now and have not been for a good long while, and I want to be as calm, grounded, and in the moment as possible. If I’m looking at my phone there’s a good chance that instead I will be feeling angry, dysregulated and in the empty, destructive realm of cyber-space instead of sitting at home with my children, wife and dog and working.
It’s tough! I’m very, very addicted. ADHD is a big part of it. I recently learned that I have ADHD. Because of that, my brain is in a never-ending quest for sweet, sweet dopamine hits.
So I find myself doom-scrolling for hours on end, wasting vast amounts of my extremely limited time on utter bullshit.
Reddit is more addictive to me than Facebook or Twitter because it’s longer and more involved. I am particularly addicted to the wildly popular Reddit Am I the Asshole.
In it, folks with guilty consciences explain a situation in which they may have behaved like an asshole and ask the internet, in all of its wisdom, whether they are, in fact, the asshole.
You don’t get traction on Am I An Asshole unless you have a really juicy story with clear-cut heroes and villains and outlandish and objectionable behavior. There aren’t posts asking whether they’re the asshole because they forgot to bring a bottle of wine to a housewarming party.
Alas, really juicy stories with clear-cut heroes and villains and outlandish and objectionable behavior tend to be fake. They’re largely sordid fictions cynically masquerading as scandalous secret truths.
With Am I the Asshole, the question is perpetually, “Is this real, or did some asshole on the internet make it up for clout and to get attention?”
Your bullshit detector has to be on whenever you’re perambulating social media. That’s why it’s hilarious to me that so many on the right see The New York Times and The Washington Post as propaganda outlets pumping out fake news at the behest of their Marxist corporate masters but lionize Cattturd2 and Alex Jones as our last truth-tellers.
These folks seem to think that if something seems like it must be true and is reported as true in some of the most respected publications in the world, then it’s obviously false. But if something seems improbable, insane, or impossible to believe, then it’s clearly an explosive truth the elite are trying to bury.
My bullshit detector goes off fairly frequently while reading Reddit. It’s common to read a story or a scenario that seems too good, or rather too bad, to be true.
This morning, for example, I read a post ostensibly from a woman who married a man whose wife had just died and helped raise the son as her own from the time he was three years old.
The woman, who may or may not exist, and also may or may not be a woman, seemed like a perfect stepmother, kind, loving, supportive, and involved. At a party, the child apparently referred to his stepmother as his mother, which, in this story at least, threw the father into a rage. According to this yarn, he exploded and told this poor, saintly, selfless martyr that if his wife came back from the dead, he’d remarry her in an instant, and she shouldn’t go around thinking she has some kind of maternal relationship with her son just because she’s essentially been his mother almost all of his life.
I could see someone being uncomfortable with a child calling a stepparent “mom” or “dad,” but I don’t believe that anyone, no matter how rigid or cruel, would unload on a partner like that for the unforgivable crime of not responding to being called mom with, “No, I am not your mother. I could never be your mother. I am nothing compared to your mother, whom your father loves much more than he does me, and I will unleash hell if you ever call me mom again.”
The whole point of Am I the Asshole is to provide counsel to other Reddit addicts, but time and time again, I find myself reflecting on the Black Mirror-like scenario of real anonymous people online giving advice to people who do not exist about stories that are completely made up.
The internet is a wonderful place to cultivate a deep hatred of humanity. It’s hard to scroll through Facebook and not constantly think, “How can you think any of this shit is true?”
The insidious rise of AI has added to this confusion. Cynical “patriots” can post what is clearly an AI creation of Jesus and Donald Trump doing the Kid n’ Play Kickstep in a deepfake scene from House Party, and the comments will be, “The painter who created this wonderful scene was truly touched by the hand of God. Amen.”
Donald Trump is wildly popular on the internet because he understands that it doesn’t matter whether what you say is true or not; all that matters is the response you get and the irritation you engender in your opponents.
I spent eighteen years writing for the entertainment section of The Onion. So, I was amazed at what fake stories people believed were real well before the rest of the world.
Some folks had a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that The Onion looked and read like a newspaper but was full of fictional stories. People have only gotten more confused in the ensuing years, as the line separating truth from fiction and honest anecdotes from flat-out lies has become slippery and thin to the point that it might as well not exist.