Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans
TL;DR — Phillip K. Dick&#x27;s writing anticipated fake news.<p>:P<p>Alright, that&#x27;s too much of a simplification, and the article is worth a read—but I&#x27;d warn that it&#x27;s plagued by the annoying (and all too common) use of &#x27;reality&#x27; in place of &#x27;belief&#x27; or &#x27;theory&#x27; or other more appropriate options, which magically makes all kinds of statements sound more interesting than they really are.<p>&gt; <i>... Yet they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through which reality is socially constructed. Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.”</i><p>Now imagine if instead it were simply said that, &quot;the media, governments, big corporations, religious groups, and political groups attempt to conceal the truth and tell their own versions instead.&quot;<p>The term &#x27;reality&#x27; is kind of useful because &#x27;creating a reality&#x27; isn&#x27;t quite a simple as telling a lie, since it&#x27;s more like a network of lies used to present an alternate account of the state of things. But, it also carries with it the implication that there isn&#x27;t any objective reality, and that when a political group &#x27;creates a new reality&#x27;, that it is somehow ontologically equivalent to any other &#x27;reality&#x27; available.<p>I know this is kind of a side rant, but seriously, I can&#x27;t wait for the day when it&#x27;s no longer socially acceptable to talk about &#x27;constructing reality&#x27; in random contexts, whether the reader is aware of its particular meaning (it&#x27;s jargon from Sociology and spread to other areas) or not. I can just imagine how it would have felt to read the article if I didn&#x27;t happen to know the origin of that phrase (&#x27;social construction of reality&#x27;)—it would seem mostly coherent and would appear to be talking about something of the utmost significance, and yet with some kind of vagueness I couldn&#x27;t quite place (that&#x27;s my recollection of running into it years ago).