We've Lost the Ability to See Reality

I never thought I'd experience so much dread looking at an image of two babies & a crab.

Hi,

Last night I lay down on my couch and started scrolling. In about 4.5 seconds I was looking at an image of two babies staring at a crab.

The photo had been fed to me because 408,000 people had reacted to it, 12,600 people had left a comment, and a generous 53,300 had shared it on their Facebook timeline.

The therapist I’m seeing keeps telling me to identify what emotions I’m feeling (hey, some of us are catching up) and when I saw those two babies and a crab my emotions all involved me thrusting my head into wall repeatedly, the overwhelming reality that we’re all fucking doomed felt in every fibre of my body.

Because if you stop for more than a second and look, you start to wonder if babies really can balance like that, or have the ethereal glow of a Pixar film. You wonder about the almost-too-perfect composition of an image posted with hashtags like #photographychallenge, #photographer and #photoshoot. What is up with the eyebrow on he far right? You stare at the instruments the babies are holding and go WHAT THE FUCK ARE THOSE THINGS and you wonder if those liking it have ever seen a crab or MET A BABY WITH SIX TOES.

Don’t pile on, don’t hate me, I know some kids are born with extra digits and all power to them (please comment below if you’re one of God’s chosen ones). But of course the image is AI generated and our timelines and our lives are increasingly filled with impossible things and impossible realities.

A lot of it is innocent, prompted to make our dopamine-riddled brains feel pleasure once again.

A cute kid with a sculpture of a dog made from — what is it? Plastic? Glass? There’s the hands, always the hands — a missing thumb here, a single hanging digit there.

“My grandfather made this wooden car for me,” posts an account called ‘Happiness All Around’, which boasts a quarter of a million followers. The nightmare hands are thankfully hidden, and we’re just left to wonder about this bi-racial family and their grandfather’s love of woodwork.

We’re hit relentlessly with utter bullshit, and it turns bleak incredibly quickly because we’re the human race and it’s what we do.

Tens of thousands of comments flow in with various questions and offers of prayer.

I adjust my position on the couch, and click through to a bunch of the commenting accounts. With a tiny sample size I figure about 2/3 accounts are bots weighing in, leaving a 1/3 of real humans reacting to a reality that never fucking happened.

The images exist to create likes and views and shares for pages that will feed you various ads and scams as time goes on. Certain accounts are all-in scams, initially boosted by bots to draw in real humans (me, alone, sadly scrolling) before a commenter slides into your replies going “Hey, thanks for liking my images, can I DM or email you?”

There’s a temptation to level the blame at boomers, for those who haven’t grown up with certain technology who are aging out of reality in some way — but this is wrong.

Patrick Gower (sorry, Paddy) — a journalist who makes compelling documentaries about important topics — liked that fucking crab.

I’m not alleging that Gower believed it, but he’s become part of a structure that keeps the bullshit flying. I’d guess the image was fed to me because someone I follow (quite possibly him) clicked “like”.

There are a lot of reasons to be worried, or — like me — have the urge to thrust your head repeatedly through some drywall.

“Why do you feel like that” my therapist would say next. “What has created that feeling — is it something real and ever-present, or is it fleeing and fleeting?”

In this case I’d answer that it’s very real, it’s getting worse, there’s no going back, and we’re doomed. There are people like Taylor Swift losing autonomy of their own bodies, fake nudes sending young fans into a tailspin, and I feel a pang of second-hand embarrassment for a 30-something in Hong Kong.

This wasn’t a boomer, this was a young finance worker at a multinational firm in China who sent $25 million to some offshore fraudsters, his legacy forever logged on CNN.com.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

But if I’m really honest, I’m not sure it’s the scams and dishonesty making me feel so frustrated. That story is nothing particularly new — any new thing we discover will be used in some dishonest, hideous way. Even eels aren’t safe from our ability to pervert anything we lay our dirty mitts on.

At its core, my worry is that we’ve lost the ability to understand reality.

Not to keep coming back to that crab, but amongst the bots there now are hundreds of thousands of humans marching through life believing they saw two tiny babies crouching down, staring at a curious crab. “Who gives a fuck it’s just a crab stop talking about the crab we get it you hate the crab!” I hear you saying and I totally understand that reaction.

But it’s not just a crab, it’s everything.

A giant portion of the human race is having their entire view of reality shaped by things that are objectively not real. People are moving through their lives — increasingly lived online — seeing and believing things that have a metaphorical six fingers.

It’s as if reality is being viewed through a heavy fog, eyes unfocussed; staring through things, not at things.

It doesn’t matter if the bad information gets corrected later — it’s already lodged in millions of minds that will forever treat it as real.

None of this is new. The AI taking over social media was found in the touch ups and photoshops that beauty magazines have been doing for decades. We’ve been primed to think a body and a face should look a certain way, and to believe the utter bullshit is the way we ourselves should look.

And yes, humans have always had a propensity to tune out of reality and plug into made-up worlds.

There’s a temptation to start talking about religion here — but I think that’s almost a totally different thing. With religion, people are actively trying to understand their reality; to get answers for a world that often doesn’t make a lick of sense.

But the crabs we’re facing — people aren’t searching for the truth, they’re not even looking. They’re not even thinking. They’re just observing whatever blurred reality is in front of them, absorbing it into their world view, and sprinting onto the next thing.

Unfortunately for all 8.1 billion of us, this non-reality informs our reality. Humans brains are fucking great — but unfortunately they’re increasingly filled with mush. And then we go out and do things like vote. We decide on women’s reproductive rights and climate change. We buy guns; we educate our children.

And we wonder why despite being the most evolved species on the planet we’re also the dumbest; becoming willfully blind, ultimately creating a planet that’s so increasingly deranged we’ll have no choice but to retreat even further into the fog.

What about you? Are you headed for the fog?

David.

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