What I tell myself to retain sanity is that there is no truth and never has been: everything is subjective.
This is definitely true. Emphasis on never has been. Yet, it is a difficult way to live, because it is so easy to fall into the pattern of trusting a source or trusting what you see. It's also difficult to build with such a world view: we can't spend all our time second-guessing our priors. And of course the flat-earthers are just stupid.
This used to be the only heuristic
We are all probably used to the idea that words can lie, but even before the days of a camera in every pocket, I think we had a sense that it was harder to lie with a photograph (and even harder with video). In the 80s and 90s (when cameras really became widespread), an image could trump the source...I think -- not that it always did, but it could.
Then there was a brief shining moment, maybe 2010 - 2020? where digital cameras were suddenly in everyone's hands, while the means of believably faking images was not -- it felt like all of a sudden you could get as it was happening photos and videos of events around the world. There were still many ways to distort the truth or lie, but it felt like you could learn something from an image itself, regardless who posted it. This is what I think has broken.
In that decade, I think we all got somewhat used to seeing an image and believing it or being able to tell somewhat quickly that it was photoshopped. If we couldn't tell that it was faked, this was due to the changes being relatively subtle.
Trump's photo of Maduro easily could have been any slightly graying latin man -- the face is mostly covered. Using an actor was always a viable way to fake the image, yet the sheer prevalence of digital cameras made me at least think that fakes were harding to achieve...someone would leak a photo of the actor getting ready, chatting with a soldier or taking a smoke break (remember the fad of covid actor images where the morgues were full of bodies but then other images showed us the same bodies getting in a last puff before getting into character?).
These slight hopes at accessing truth are gone now. Perhaps you're right and we are only back in the same square as we were in the 90s, but it feels like we lost a little edge we had gained in the battle over control of information.
This is definitely true. Emphasis on never has been. Yet, it is a difficult way to live, because it is so easy to fall into the pattern of trusting a source or trusting what you see. It's also difficult to build with such a world view: we can't spend all our time second-guessing our priors. And of course the flat-earthers are just stupid.
We are all probably used to the idea that words can lie, but even before the days of a camera in every pocket, I think we had a sense that it was harder to lie with a photograph (and even harder with video). In the 80s and 90s (when cameras really became widespread), an image could trump the source...I think -- not that it always did, but it could.
Then there was a brief shining moment, maybe 2010 - 2020? where digital cameras were suddenly in everyone's hands, while the means of believably faking images was not -- it felt like all of a sudden you could get as it was happening photos and videos of events around the world. There were still many ways to distort the truth or lie, but it felt like you could learn something from an image itself, regardless who posted it. This is what I think has broken.
In that decade, I think we all got somewhat used to seeing an image and believing it or being able to tell somewhat quickly that it was photoshopped. If we couldn't tell that it was faked, this was due to the changes being relatively subtle.
Trump's photo of Maduro easily could have been any slightly graying latin man -- the face is mostly covered. Using an actor was always a viable way to fake the image, yet the sheer prevalence of digital cameras made me at least think that fakes were harding to achieve...someone would leak a photo of the actor getting ready, chatting with a soldier or taking a smoke break (remember the fad of covid actor images where the morgues were full of bodies but then other images showed us the same bodies getting in a last puff before getting into character?).
These slight hopes at accessing truth are gone now. Perhaps you're right and we are only back in the same square as we were in the 90s, but it feels like we lost a little edge we had gained in the battle over control of information.