Instead, we have created a swamp of unreality, a world where you don’t know whether the emotions you are feeling are manipulated by men or machines, and where — once all news moves online, as it surely will — it will soon be impossible to know what’s real and what’s imagined.
Anne Applebaum
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Washington Post columnist
In a 2017 column about social-media bots, Anne Applebaum wrote that people would soon be unable to tell what was real from what was imagined.
Washington Post columnistPublished July 28, 2017 · date of remarks not establishedAnne Applebaum
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Which is my point: Maybe we’ve been imagining this scenario incorrectly all of this time. Maybe this is what “computers out of control” really look like. There’s no giant spaceship, nor are there armies of lifelike robots. Instead, we have created a swamp of unreality, a world where you don’t know whether the emotions you are feeling are manipulated by men or machines, and where — once all news moves online, as it surely will — it will soon be impossible to know what’s real and what’s imagined. Isn’t this the dystopia we have so long feared?
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