Before social media, there was already significant trade in what are called ‘urban myths’. Factoids that…

Before social media, there was already significant trade in what are called ‘urban myths’. Factoids that sound amazing, and are repeated widely. That are actually compete bollocks. Social media poured petrol on this fire. It’s now our culture. ‘Zero gravity’ as an example. /1 https://t.co/lBoZoVBwNa

You often see stories about astronauts in orbit, with pictures like this. Claims about the fun of being in ‘zero gravity’. Even reputable news outlets and sometimes even science bodies do it. /2 https://t.co/6NoH20g2La

It’s a factoid. Completely wrong, but repeated so often it’s believed. There’s almost as much gravity in orbit as right here on the ground. These astronauts and their fruit and the space station they’re in are all just falling. /3 https://t.co/kE9MjwGEJJ

Continuously falling, and never landing. That’s what an orbit is. Falling downwards, and sideways, when added together, produces roughly circular motion. An orbit. Or you get images like this, look what water does ‘in space’! /4 https://t.co/rb8lLFIvZH

Except, again, this water isn’t in zero-g. It’s just falling. What does water do here on Earth when it falls? It forms drops. Raindrops, for example. The world of the factoid is social media world. A bizarre blend of narrative and fact. /5 https://t.co/poNIDG0leW

Where the narrative wins every time, the more shocking and tabloid it is. We’re seeing this now with AI, where most of the even serious narratives are really only some edited version of a Terminator movie. ‘What happens when the machines get smarter than us and take over!’ /6

Serious thinkers actually believe this nonsense. That people and machines are two separate things, facing off against each other. Because they’ve watched Terminator. Other serious thinkers counter with ‘a machine is only as smart as the humans creating it’. /7

Really? So the entire universe has only the agency that we humans inject into it? Tell that to the people who debug software, or troubleshoot network failures. Where they try to find the cause of a disaster that nobody actually programmed into the systems. /8

Factoid-life is knowledge shorn free of its institutional underpinnings. Where facts float freely in various types of social networks, ‘liked’ according to their narrative sexiness. Right now, we’re ’living with’ a pandemic. And ‘Covid is over’. /9

Two more outrageous factoids, completely decoupled from reality. But in social media/populist society, where popularity determines reality, these factoids are winning. Generate enough likes, and you now determine reality. /end