{"id":127960,"date":"2018-08-01T09:00:40","date_gmt":"2018-08-01T13:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127960"},"modified":"2018-08-02T11:29:48","modified_gmt":"2018-08-02T15:29:48","slug":"the-vanishing-of-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/01\/the-vanishing-of-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vanishing of Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Do I want to interfere with the reality tape?<\/em>
\nAnd if so, <\/em>why?<\/em>
\nBecause, he thought, if I control that, I control reality.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Philip K. Dick, \u201cThe Electric Ant\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Surreal<\/em>\u00a0and chaos<\/em> have become two of those words invoked hourly by journalists trying to describe daily reality in America in the second decade of the new millennium, a time when nineteen kids are shot every day in the United States, when the president of the United States plays a game of nuclear chicken with North Korea\u2019s Kim Jong-un, when artificial-intelligence engines are writing poetry and novellas, when it\u2019s getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between headlines from The Onion <\/em>and headlines from CNN.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s unhinged presidency represents some sort of climax in the warping of reality, but the burgeoning disorientation people have been feeling over the disjuncture between what they know to be true and what they are told by politicians, between common sense and the workings of the world, traces back to the sixties, when society began fragmenting and official narratives\u2014purveyed by the government, by the establishment, by elites\u2014started to break down and the news cycle started to speed up. In 1961, Philip Roth writes of American reality: \u201cIt stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.\u201d The daily newspapers, he complains, \u201cfill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise \u2026\u2009\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Roth\u2019s sense that actuality was exceeding fiction writers\u2019 imaginations (and throwing up real-life figures like Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn who were the envy of any novelist) would be echoed more than half a century later by writers of satire and spy thrillers in the Trump era. And his observation that novelists were having difficulty dealing imaginatively with a world they felt to be confounding helps explain why journalism\u2014particularly what Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism\u2014began eclipsing fiction in capturing what life was like in the sixties, as the Esquire\u00a0<\/em>anthology aptly titled Smiling Through the Apocalypse <\/em>(featuring classic magazine pieces by such writers as Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, and Gay Talese) attests.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Politicians had always spun reality, but television\u2014and later the Internet\u2014gave them new platforms on which to prevaricate. When the Republican strategist Lee Atwater observed in the eighties that \u201cperception is reality,\u201d he was bluntly articulating an insight about human psychology that Homer well knew when he immortalized Odysseus as a wily trickster, adept at deception and disguise. But Atwater\u2019s cold-blooded use of that precept in using wedge issues to advance the GOP\u2019s Southern strategy\u2014and to create the infamous Willie Horton ad in the 1988 presidential campaign\u2014injected mainstream American politics with an alarming strain of win-at-all-costs Machiavellianism using mass media as a delivery system.<\/p>\n

Nearly three decades later, Trump would cast immigrants in the role of Willie Horton, and turning the clock back further, he would exchange dog-whistle racism for the more overt racism and rhetoric of George Wallace. At the same time, he instinctively grasped that the new Internet-driven landscape and voters\u2019 growing ignorance about issues made it easier than ever to play to voters\u2019 fears and resentments by promoting sticky viral narratives that serve up alternate realities. He also amped up efforts to discredit journalism as \u201cfake news,\u201d attacking reporters as \u201cenemies of the people\u201d\u2014a chilling term once used by Lenin and Stalin.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t just that Trump lied reflexively and shamelessly but that those hundreds upon hundreds of lies came together to create equally false story lines that appealed to people\u2019s fears. Depicting America as a country reeling from crime (when in fact the crime rate was experiencing historic lows\u2014less than half what it was at its peak in 1991). A country beset by waves of violent immigrants (when in fact studies show that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than U.S.-born citizens). Immigrants who are a burden to the country and who should be vetted more carefully (when in fact thirty-one of seventy-eight American Nobel Prizes since 2000 were won by immigrants, and immigrants and their kids have helped found an estimated 60 percent of the top U.S. tech companies, worth nearly four trillion dollars). In short, Trump argued, a nation in deep trouble and in need of a savior.<\/p>\n

Long before he entered politics, Trump was using lies as a business tool. He claimed that his flagship building, Trump Tower, is sixty-eight floors high, when in fact it\u2019s only fifty-eight floors high. He also pretended to be a PR man named John Barron or John Miller to create a sock puppet who could boast about his\u2014Trump\u2019s\u2014achievements. He lied to puff himself up, to generate business under false pretenses, and to play to people\u2019s expectations. Everything was purely transactional; all that mattered was making the sale. He spent years as a real-estate developer and reality-TV star, promiscuously branding himself (Trump Hotels, Trump Menswear, Trump Natural Spring Water, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Home Collection), and like most successful advertisers\u2014and successful propagandists\u2014he understood that the frequent repetition of easy-to-remember and simplistic taglines worked to embed merchandise (and his name) in potential customers\u2019 minds. Decades before handing out MAGA<\/small> hats at his rallies, he\u2019d become an expert at staging what the historian Daniel Boorstin calls \u201cpseudo-events\u201d\u2014that is, events \u201cplanned, planted, or incited\u201d primarily \u201cfor the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boorstin\u2019s 1962 book, The Image<\/em>\u2014which would inform the work of myriad writers, from French theorists like Baudrillard and Guy Debord to social critics like Neil Postman and Douglas Rushkoff\u2014uncannily foresaw reality TV decades before the Kardashians or the Osbournes or any number of desperate housewives actually showed up in our living rooms. For that matter, he anticipated the rise of someone very much like Donald J. Trump: a celebrity known, in Boorstin\u2019s words, for his \u201cwell-knownness\u201d (and who would even host a show called The Celebrity Apprentice<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Boorstin\u2019s descriptions of the nineteenth-century impresario and circus showman P.\u2009T. Barnum\u2014who ran a New York City museum of curiosities filled with hoaxes like a mermaid (which turned out to be the remains of a monkey stitched together with the tail of a fish)\u2014will sound uncannily familiar to contemporary readers: a self-proclaimed \u201cprince of humbugs\u201d whose \u201cgreat discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived\u201d as long as it was being entertained.<\/p>\n

Much the way images were replacing ideals, Boorstin writes in The Image, <\/em>the idea of \u201ccredibility\u201d was replacing the idea of truth. People were less interested in whether something was a fact than in whether it was \u201cconvenient that it should be believed.\u201d And as verisimilitude replaced truth as a measurement, \u201cthe socially rewarded art\u201d became \u201cthat of making things seem true\u201d; no wonder that the new masters of the universe in the early sixties were the Mad Men of Madison Avenue.<\/p>\n

Baudrillard would take such observations further, suggesting that in today\u2019s media-centric culture, people have come to prefer the \u201chyperreal\u201d\u2014that is, simulated or fabricated realities like Disneyland\u2014to the boring everyday \u201cdesert of the real.\u201d<\/p>\n

Artists like Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson, Stanis\u0142aw Lem, Philip K. Dick, and Federico Fellini grappled with similar themes, creating stories in which the borders between the real and the virtual, the actual and the imagined, the human and the posthuman blur, overlap, even collapse. In the story \u201cTl\u00f6n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,\u201d Borges describes \u201ca secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, mathematicians, moralists, painters and geometricians\u201d who invent an unknown planet named Tl\u00f6n: they conjure its geography, its architecture, its systems of thinking. Bits and pieces of Tl\u00f6n start surfacing in the real world: an artifact here, a description there, and things speed up around 1942; eventually, the narrator notes, the teachings of Tl\u00f6n have spread so widely that the history he learned as a child has been obliterated and replaced by \u201ca fictitious past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Borges draws direct parallels between the power of fictions about Tl\u00f6n to insinuate themselves into human consciousness and the power of deadly political ideologies based on lies to infect entire nations; both, he suggests, provide internally consistent narratives that appeal to people hungering to make sense of the world. \u201cReality gave ground on more than one point,\u201d Borges writes. \u201cThe truth is that it hankered to give ground. Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever that gave the appearance of order\u2014dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism\u2014was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tl\u00f6n and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too, is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance with divine laws\u2014I translate: inhuman laws\u2014which we will never completely perceive. Tl\u00f6n may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas Pynchon\u2019s novels explore similar themes\u2014more relevant than ever in a world suffering from information overload. Reeling from a kind of spiritual vertigo, his characters wonder whether the paranoiacs have it right\u2014that there are malign conspiracies and hidden agendas connecting all the dots. Or whether the nihilists are onto something\u2014that there is no signal in the noise, only chaos and randomness. \u201cIf there is something comforting\u2014religious, if you want\u2014about paranoia,\u201d he writes in Gravity\u2019s Rainbow, <\/em>\u201cthere is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a 2016 documentary titled HyperNormalisation, <\/em>the British filmmaker Adam Curtis creates an expressionistic, montage-driven meditation on life in the posttruth era; the title (which also seems to allude to Baudrillard) is taken from a term coined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe life in the final years of the Soviet Union, when people both understood the absurdity of the propaganda the government had been selling them for decades and had difficulty envisioning any alternative. In HyperNormalisation, <\/em>which was released shortly before the 2016 U.S. election on the BBC\u2019s iPlayer platform, Curtis says in voice-over narration that people in the West had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realized that \u201cin the face of that, you could play with reality\u201d and in the process \u201cfurther undermine and weaken the old forms of power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some Trump allies on the far right also seek to redefine reality on their own terms. Invoking the iconography of the movie The Matrix<\/em>\u2014in which the hero is given a choice between two pills, a red one (representing knowledge and the harsh truths of reality) and a blue one (representing soporific illusion and denial)\u2014members of the alt-right and some aggrieved men\u2019s rights groups talk about \u201cred-pilling the normies,\u201d which means converting people to their cause (in other words, selling their inside-out alternative reality, in which white people are suffering from persecution, multiculturalism poses a grave threat, and men have been oppressed by women).<\/p>\n

Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, the authors of a study on online disinformation, argue that \u201conce groups have been red-pilled on one issue, they\u2019re likely to be open to other extremist ideas. Online cultures that used to be relatively nonpolitical are beginning to seethe with racially charged anger. Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities\u2014having accepted run-of-the-mill anti-feminism\u2014are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas. \u2018Ironic\u2019 Nazi iconography and hateful epithets are becoming serious expressions of anti-Semitism.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the tactics used by the alt-right to spread its ideas online, Marwick and Lewis argue, is to initially dilute more extreme views as gateway ideas to court a wider audience; among some groups of young men, they write, \u201cit\u2019s a surprisingly short leap from rejecting political correctness to blaming women, immigrants, or Muslims for their problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many misogynist and white-supremacist memes, in addition to a lot of fake news like Pizzagate, originate or gain initial momentum on sites like 4chan and Reddit before accumulating enough buzz to make the leap to Facebook and Twitter, where they can attract more mainstream attention. Renee DiResta, who studies conspiracy theories on the Web, argues that Reddit can be a useful testing ground for bad actors\u2014including foreign governments like Russia\u2014to try out memes or fake stories to see how much traction they get.<\/p>\n

DiResta warned in the spring of 2016 that the algorithms of social networks\u2014which give people news that\u2019s popular and trending, rather than accurate or important\u2014are helping to promote conspiracy theories. This sort of fringe content can both affect how people think and seep into public policy debates on matters like vaccines, zoning laws, and water fluoridation. Part of the problem is an \u201casymmetry of passion\u201d on social media: while most people won\u2019t devote hours to writing posts that reinforce the obvious, DiResta says, \u201cpassionate truthers and extremists produce copious amounts of content in their commitment to \u2018wake up the sheeple.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

Recommendation engines, she adds, help connect conspiracy theorists with one another to the point that \u201cwe are long past merely partisan filter bubbles and well into the realm of siloed communities that experience their own reality and operate with their own facts.\u201d At this point, she concludes, \u201cthe Internet doesn\u2019t just reflect reality anymore; it shapes it.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Michiko Kakutani\u00a0is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning literary critic and the former chief book critic of<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em> New York Times.<\/p>\n

Excerpted from<\/em>\u00a0The Death of Truth<\/a>. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Michiko Kakutani. Published by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why? Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality. \u2014Philip K. Dick, \u201cThe Electric Ant\u201d Surreal\u00a0and chaos have become two of those words invoked hourly by journalists trying to describe daily reality in America in the second decade of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[13160,2476,34849,7789,99,34850,15294,4386,877,25743,2561],"class_list":["post-127960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-federico-fellini","tag-jorge-luis-borges","tag-lee-atwater","tag-philip-k-dick","tag-philip-roth","tag-pt-barnum","tag-stanislaw-lem","tag-thomas-pynchon","tag-tom-wolfe","tag-trump","tag-william-gibson"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Vanishing of Reality by Michiko Kakutani<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Politicians had always spun reality, but television\u2014and later the Internet\u2014gave them new platforms on which to prevaricate.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/01\/the-vanishing-of-reality\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Vanishing of Reality by Michiko Kakutani\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 1, 2018 \u2013   Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? 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