On October 30, 1938, the musical program of the American radio station CBS was suddenly interrupted by a terrifying announcement from a speaker: «Ladies and Gentlemen, I have to tell you something very serious. Scientific observations and the very evidence of the facts lead us to believe that the strange beings who landed tonight on the New Jersey farm are nothing more than the vanguard of an invasion army coming from the planet Mars». This announcement, which was part of a radio play produced by the then XNUMX-year-old Orson Welles, produced widespread panic and mass psychosis. The hoax artfully produced to increase the broadcaster's ratings was then amplified by the newspapers which, in the race for the audience, even spoke of the biblical exodus from American cities, of families locked up at home... This famous case can be considered the emblem of "fake news" in the new era of mass communication.
Ryzard Kapuscinsky illustrated what perverse effects the advent of the era of image-based communication can have for democracy.
The image shown by the TV has the power to grant the status of reality even to what is not reality: bodies with evident traces of numerous stab wounds on a body can be passed off as human beings subjected to torture. This is what was done in 1989 in Timisoara, Romania, by filming autopsied bodies to falsely demonstrate the use of torture by the Ceausescu regime, arousing unanimous international outrage and condemnation and thus justifying the summary execution, immediately after a farce trial, of the Romanian "conducator" and his wife. Kapuscinski exhorts, in the era of mass communication, to always distinguish between verisimilitude and truth if one does not want to frustrate the role of the media in safeguarding democracy. With the advent of the metaverse (which opens the door to a world that is not real but which is perceived as such) and artificial intelligence, the power of deformation of reality (of amplification or resizing up to cancellation) or simply its falsification – visually plausible and sometimes more sensationally plausible than reality itself – in fact grows exponentially.
The last frontier of this process – the so-called Midjourney, i.e. a software capable of inventing images that seem real – allows for example, as we saw a couple of months ago, to illustrate the arrest of Donald Trump in an extremely plausible and sensational via totally fake images. Last frontier so to speak, since the projection of holograms already allows to give life to artificially created people and moving things. Never before have technology and the transmission of images made it possible to give or deny a status of reality to things (what does not end up on the net does not exist), to deform them by falsifying their nature and arousing positive or negative value judgments in the public depending on of the fake image. Manipulation of the masses has certainly always existed, especially in times and in dictatorial regimes. Back in the days of the Soviet Empire, legions of regime officials painstakingly erased written texts and photographs of opponents (Trotzky was purged from official photos long before he was physically purged).
But the new digital technologies and artificial intelligence today allow authoritarian regimes with an unprecedented concentration of power to manipulate reality and exercise social control in an almost absolute way. And even in democratic systems a drift towards a systematic deformation of reality (or its denial) through digital technologies and artificial intelligence cannot be watched without arousing justified concern. For the simple reason that a distorted or denied reality does not allow citizens and their political representatives to assume responsibility, called to make political decisions on common coexistence and the natural context in which they live.
The denial or deformation of reality does not allow the application of that "principle of responsibility" which Hans Jonas considers crucial to deal with the possible drifts of the age of digital technology and the manipulation of nature (starting with the human one).
The temptation of manipulation or denial of reality does not only distinguish the media system and those who manage it, or the fourth estate. Part of the leading political and economic classes and strong social movements are characterized by a tendency to replace "actual reality" with an ideological approach that falsifies it. On the one hand - perhaps even without explicitly referring to it - in continuity with the ideology of a leading or enlightened party of the Leninist mold; on the other by referring to nationalist historical-identity visions fueled by a rhetoric that misrepresents the facts.
The warning on the need to reaffirm the primacy of "actual reality" that Niccolò Machiavelli had launched five hundred years ago to free politics from the manipulation of the politically correct of the time should be forcefully re-proposed today. Since the temptation to deny reality corresponds to a large extent to a refusal of complexity and the strenuous search for provisional but verified solutions, to replace it with hasty and Manichean ideological diktats. The era we live in reveals a growing ideological or unrealistic approach, not based on the actual reality of things but on apocalyptic scenarios or on the denial of evidence. The outbreak of a war on Europe's borders shattered a prolonged attitude of denial of reality which prevented Europe from seeing that the disintegration of the Soviet Union - without the creation of a new order of European security policy – would have heralded new and serious political and military conflicts on our continent.
An inability to look at reality without ideological glasses that has not let itself be scratched in its short-sighted certainties even by the terrible and long war in the Balkans and by NATO's military intervention which clearly preluded what is happening before our eyes in Ukraine today. Having simply outsourced defense over the last 30 years to the United States by the leader of the former Soviet Union Vladimir Putin and to Vladimir Putin himself the responsibility of guaranteeing us a large part of the continental energy supply, what is that if not the demonstration of an inability to consider the actual reality of things?
Beyond the traditional political alignments, the clash between supporters of an ideological approach and supporters of actual reality is a test case for the fate of democracy in the transition towards a complex society in which digital technology is increasingly playing a decisive role.
