In recent days, we've witnessed something that seemed like a sociological experiment. How would society react if, suddenly, what theoretically generated understandable concern—the irregularities and cases of corruption attributed to people linked to the PSOE—were replaced almost the same day by other, symmetrical issues—the irregularities and cases of corruption attributed to people linked to the PP? In a matter of hours, many citizens went from being very attentive to certain personal and partisan events to contemplating others that, in some way, cast doubt on the former (or vice versa). Certain improvised statements, later transformed into exercises in overinterpretation of reality by slicing them into pieces in talk shows, intersected with others that, conveniently reheated on social media, have now become part of the small local history of frivolity. Thank goodness these things never last more than twenty or thirty hours after the initial outbreak... All of this also has a global dimension. If Donald Trump were to announce today that he intends to get a divorce—this is the first example that comes to mind—it would generate a fleeting scrutiny on the subject, relegating the ignominious rubble of Gaza to the background. Let it be clear that I'm not referring to major natural disasters or other events that would justify a sudden change of subject, but to something inconsequential from a collective perspective.
The narrative construction of current events may seem like a kind of joke today, in some cases, in bad taste. The accusation—if anyone wants to read this as an accusation—isn't directed so much at journalists as at consumers of news of uncertain origin, of substitutes in the form of tweets, post-piled and transpiled news of all kinds and conditions, devoid of exchange value, to put it in a euphemism that some might consider cruel. That is, worthless. Many years ago, Jean Baudrillard predicted that once mass access to information was standardized, many people would end up feeling guilty for not having a formed opinion on each and every one of the things they heard on TV. And that was back in 2007, when Twitter was still in its infancy! The French philosopher referred to the notion of "continuous opinion" to designate that state of mind in which when the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at his cell phone. Boris Groys argued in a similar context that reality is no longer what it used to be because its flow is—or appears to be—increasingly dependent on the various layers of superimposed signs that the media constantly secrete. Between a text written in a newspaper and its potential reader, there is obviously also an equivocal play of distances—the shadow of a doubt—but in no case the constant, often reasonable, feeling of confusion between the reality of what is read and reality itself. First with television, and now, multiplied by a thousand, with the internet, everything shown to us is perceived as potentially suspicious, as a manipulated surface covered by infinite agglomerations of signs, by diapers of decontextualized images, by recomposed crumbs of unknown photographs, by texts by uncertain authors, or even by the like. Media doubt becomes a habit, a kind of skepticism by default, but paradoxically mixed with extreme forms of credulity. Groys adds a subtle note: "Suspicion not only ruins old foundations, but replaces them with new ones. Suspicion permanently transfers old signs to new media". Translation: The classic Dreyfus case, for example, is not closed, but is periodically reborn and mutated into other themes and formats thanks to the logic of scandal.
Currently, generative artificial intelligence (GAI) means that certain documentary evidence based on images or audio begins to have a very relative value. What will happen when it becomes materially impossible to distinguish between a real conversation and one generated by GAI technology? Just five or six years ago, this hypothesis would have seemed objectively exaggerated, a dystopian hyperbole (in fact, some time ago many interpreted certain communications experts in this light). Today, this is no longer the case. The strategy of most of the people who appeared in the Catalunya operation was based precisely on appealing to suspicion about the recorded material that incriminated them. Reality will not even be liquid, but directly gaseous—if it ever comes to that.
