Flaubert would say that we live in a profoundly obscene era – 03/05/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

The Fake News PL, the first major legislative battle of Lula’s third term, was named because, when it was born, it had “only” –with many quotes around “only”– the purpose of combating the pandemic of disinformation that has spread through the networks social, undermining the collective intelligence of the species.

There was a recent time when many argued that there was nothing new in fake news, that it was just the current incarnation of the old politically interested lie. Thus, they failed to take into account the crux of the matter – the unprecedented scale of the phenomenon provided by a new medium.

Understandably, given the complexity of the matter, the Fake News PL was embodied until it encompasses a package of regulatory norms for the performance of the networks as a whole. This is, as we know, a land still without law, or, rather, a frontier of recent exploration in which the law of the fittest prevails, with the so-called big techs in the role that was once played by pioneers and cowboys.

If the subject is nothing simple, even touching what may be the great civilizational knot of our time, it must be recognized that the main global effects of these years of deregulated social networks are so crystalline that any child understands them.

The extreme right grew, with its cultivation of violence, irrationalism and policies based on fear and hatred of difference. Democracy lost ground – and with it a whole set of values ​​rooted in the Enlightenment, such as belief in science and the understanding of human diversity as wealth.

There is no reason to believe –unless you are given to conspiracy theories, one of the most successful genres on the networks– that all these psychosocial effects were devilishly planned in Silicon Valley, between ping-pong tables and latte machines .

More likely they are the fairly unpredictable product of the interaction of a revolutionary new communication technology with old human nature. This one, as good novelists have always known, does not lack areas of darkness interspersed with bands of light: everything will depend on the buttons you press.

Why is it that, as several surveys have already found, fake news is more likely to be shared and travels several times faster than true news? Why is clicking on the video of a barbaric murder irresistible for so many of us, even – or especially – when violence horrifies us?

If we’re being honest, we’re forced to recognize that the most basic answer to these questions is buried deep in our souls—algorithms come later. In this sense, social networks are just a magnifying mirror placed before the species.

What big tech did was find ever more sophisticated ways to commercially exploit these ancestral traits, milking human weaknesses on an industrial scale to make money. A lot of money. It is understood that they react with violence to any attempt to organize the suruba.

Whether or not the Fake News PL is approved, the war will be long. Speaking of the truth of art, related to but different from that of philosophy, the novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote: “Once something is True, it is good. Obscene books are only immoral because they lack truth.” The father of “Madame Bovary” would say that we live in a profoundly obscene era.

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