Fighting a fake future

If there was ever a time that truth mattered, it’s in times of crisis when getting accurate information can be a matter of life and death. History, the source we draw information from is often the best form of protection, but, these days that is becoming increasingly difficult when anyone can make anything look incredibly authentic. Using our perceptions to delineate the truth and the bunk, is getting becoming more difficult by the day.

Since the dawn of the COVID-19 crisis, fake news has spread deep and wide. Technology is often at the beachhead of these stories, from the crazy theory that 5G causes/spreads COVID-19 which resulted in 5G towers being set on fire in the UK, to the false claim that Bill Gates will launch human-implantable capsules that have ‘digital certificates’ which can show who has been tested for the coronavirus and who has been vaccinated against it. It isn’t without a sense of irony, that the same technology is used to spread these fabricated anti-technology stories. 

The truth, as humans perceive it, is in a constant state of flux. It used to be true that the sun went around the earth… until around 500 years ago. The telescope, new technology at the time, reframed what we knew to be true. Even after Copernicus, people such as Giordano Bruno were burned at the stake for promoting what was then regarded as cultural heresy.

Our truth is shaped not just by new discoveries, ideas, and possibilities, but also mostly by our perception and what we deem to be acceptable to believe in.

Technology makes new things possible that were once not just impossible, but indistinguishable from magic. When I’m asked what I believe to be the most incredible technology of all time, it’s not something that’s come along recently. For me, it’s air travel.

While digital technology has been transformative to the global economy and is on the precipice of the unimaginable, it isn’t there yet. It feels in many ways like a rational extension from analogue communication technologies. Mail to email. Broadcast TV to narrowcast live video on a phone. It feels like everything is just smaller and faster – but not unbelievable. If we went back in time, say 100 years and explained our current technology, I’m sure that people would find it plausible, maybe even inevitable.

Now compare that to international travel on a jetliner. Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, on a chair in the sky, 10 kilometres above the ground, sipping a beer, watching a movie to arrive on the other side of the earth in under a day. That is something anyone from 1850 would have found very difficult to believe. It would have been an inconceivable idea. Never to be true – maybe even fake news.

It’s easy to see why unscrupulous operators would create fakes. They leverage the value created by others without any of the brand investment required to create it themselves. They can either co-opt consumers wanting a cheaper version or even trick them by passing their product off as real. The marketing of the ‘fake’ has a long and fascinating history. It comes in many shapes and forms, and it’s not a new problem. In the 1980s it was fake Reeboks. As long as they looked real many consumers were happy to play along. In the ’90s it was haute couture handbags at a local market, for a few hundred dollars instead of thousands for the real thing. In the early web era, things got a little more treacherous as we went beyond fake fashion and into fake medicine buying pharmaceuticals online.

Things got real!

And today what do we have? Mostly, fake people. Fake was once limited to manufacturing output – which makes sense in the factory era. Now, in a digital era, where everything is meta, people are getting their fake on. The early web was a bastion of hope where, all of a sudden, we could fact check anything and everything. ‘Is that true?’ It seemed like we were entering an era where only the authentic could survive. How could anyone ever lie again if the truth were just a few clicks away? But what we failed to foresee was the ingenuity of humans who choose to deceive.

One by one people started putting on their digital disguises.

Enter Fake Lives: a world where the five minutes of bliss in anyone’s 24-hour day became the billboard of their life. A few minutes gaming, the lighting and the angle of a photograph in a restaurant, on a beach or at any fancy locale showed a wonderful life. Passing it off as social sharing – people dived deep into brand (or, should I say, ego) building.

Enter Fake News: a world in which people with an agenda can create whatever narrative they please as few people on the receiving end of questionable content worried to check out if it was true. What was once fact, became opinion and the truth got lost in the extreme battles between left and right. None of this comes as a surprise. Like most things, technology democratises. Fake isn’t new, it just scales much better than ever.

So why do we fall for this? For the longest period of time, our species has been reliant on the wisdom of crowds. This was a pre-digital phenomenon where the reliability of something could be assessed by its popularity. From which waterhole our tribe should get its drinking water from, to the value equation of market leading products. The problem we have now is that Algorithms Usurp Wisdom. When we see a story has been shared, liked or commented on many times we can be tricked into believing it has been filtered by crowd wisdom. When in truth, it’s probably feeding the outrage algorithm better than the true version of the story did. Our modern information economy has been redesigned by algorithms which are optimised for engagement. The issue this raises is that enragement is the best form of engagement.

Now we are entering the era of Deep Fakes. A world where the last forms of provable truths evaporate in front of our eyes – video so realistic we can’t tell whether the global leader actually said that at a news conference (in Trump’s case he probably did), or whether that celebrity really did make a porno.

The scariest part? It’s all possible via open source software where a few random pictures and a voice sample of almost anyone can be concocted to create deep fakes that could be life-changing for the victims.

Last, let’s consider something a little crazy. What happens when we can make robots that are indistinguishable from humans? Robots with soft-exo bodies, natural sounding voices, and smooth movements. Once that becomes possible – and it will – it’s only a matter of time before we have a world in which fake humans leave the screen and enter the street.

This brings me to the most valuable asset any brand will have in the future. The ability to be known for truth. True content, true people, true ingredients and no corporate chicanery. Instead, they will offer the ability to be a proven fortress of truth in all that they make and represent.

It may seem like an impossible task, given the eventualities proposed. But technology is always a double-edged sword; almost everything it creates can be juxtaposed. What we need to create now is a brand differentiated by truth, and maybe even the tools to help others do it too.