Nicholas Carr reviews Jonas Bendiksen’s The Book of Veles, a photodocumentary about Romanian troll factories. It’s fake news all the way down, raising questions about facts, trust and the truth.
The spread of ever more realistic deep fakes will make it even more likely that people will be taken in by fake news and other lies. The havoc of the last few years is probably just the first act of a long misinformation crisis. Eventually, though, we’ll all begin to take deep fakes for granted. We’ll come to take it as a given that we can’t believe our eyes. At that point, deep fakes will start to have a very different and perhaps even more pernicious effect. They’ll amplify not our gullibility but our skepticism. As we lose trust in the information we receive, we’ll begin [...] to “doubt reality itself.” We’ll go from a world where our bias was to take everything as evidence [...] to one where our bias is to take nothing as evidence.