History of Fake Things on the Internet

Résumé de History of Fake Things on the Internet

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   The Digital Masquerade: Our Collective Virtual Imagination

   

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   In 2016, a photo showing Donald Trump meeting with Russian officials sparked outrage online. The lighting looked natural, shadows fell correctly, and the subjects interacted convincingly. Just one problem: the meeting never happened. This sophisticated fake exemplifies the phenomenon Walter Scheirer explores in "A History of Fake Things on the Internet." Rather than simply condemning digital deception, Scheirer reveals its rich cultural history, showing how manipulation has always intertwined with human creativity. Drawing from his dual expertise as computer scientist and cultural historian, he offers a nuanced view of why we create, share, and believe fake content-and what it reveals about our collective imagination.

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   The Internet as Our Shared Mythspace

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   We're experiencing a rare civilizational transformation that alters our relationship with information. The global population now moves between physical and virtual realities, with the Internet functioning as an extension of our collective imagination. While this fuels unprecedented creativity, it also brings dangers from misinformation to the erosion of shared reality. Humans have always sought to transcend physical reality through imagination. Claude Levi-Strauss noted that myths across cultures share remarkable similarities, suggesting they're essential to human thought. From ancient creation stories to modern urban legends, myths provide simplifications that resolve contradictions, creating new possibilities and relieving anxiety. The internet has simplified reality in ways that echo ancient mythmaking, but at unprecedented scale and speed. Social media platforms, with their algorithmic feeds and echo chambers, function like traditional myth-making structures, creating simplified narratives that help users comprehend an increasingly complex world. From QAnon to viral marketing campaigns, these modern myths spread faster than ever before, profoundly shaping public opinion and behavior.

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   Memes: Ancient Cultural Transmission Reimagined

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   Internet memes didn't originate in the early 2000s - they're part of an ancient tradition spanning millennia. Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in 1976, tracing these cultural units back to antiquity, where Socrates' philosophical ideas persisted through replication and adaptation. Visual mediums have always been powerful meme vectors. Greek pottery functioned as an ancient equivalent to today's social media platforms, found in households across the Mediterranean. These vessels were decorated with scenes showing heroes in comedic situations, gods in compromising positions, and citizens in various activities. Ancient artisans used recognizable character types and familiar settings much like today's Doge, Pepe, or Wojak characters serve as templates for modern memes. The pottery's artistic language revealed ancient thoughts through techniques still used in contemporary meme culture: parody, absurdist humor, visual puns, and exaggerated features. Scholars have even discovered nonsense writing on ancient artifacts - strings of letters carrying cultural meaning but no literal sense, functioning similarly to modern absurdist memes like "covfefe" or "stonks."

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   Hackers: The Original Digital Mythmakers

   The world of computer hackers transcends stereotypes of awkward criminals. From the 1980s to early 2000s, this subculture focused on using technology in unintended ways. Operating under pseudonymous handles that protected identities while enhancing mystique, the community attracted diverse participants from counterculture figures to engineers seeking creative expression. The Cult of the Dead Cow's 1993 HoHoCon conference hoax exemplifies their ingenuity. They invented "Quentin," a character supposedly featured on NBC's Dateline revealing government UFO secrets. When asked who remembered this nonexistent episode, half the audience raised their hands. The group then showed a grainy, fake clip with one member's sister playing Quentin, presenting "evidence" of a NASA cover-up involving the Apollo 1 fire. Their fabrication cleverly incorporated elements from "The Six Million Dollar Man," creating a prototype for modern conspiracy theories by blending factual elements with obvious fiction. The prank successfully manipulated news media, bulletin boards, and live audiences, becoming legendary in hacker culture - and revealing vulnerabilities that persist today, as political actors exploit journalists' hunger for sensational stories.

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   The Photographic Illusion: From Darkroom to Digital

   Photo manipulation predates the digital age by nearly two centuries. One of the earliest fake photos was Hippolyte Bayard's 1840 "Self Portrait as a Drowned Man," where he depicted himself as a corpse to protest being overlooked for his photographic innovations. By the late nineteenth century, darkroom specialists had developed sophisticated techniques for photo doctoring. For removing people, photographers used cropping, effacement (selectively cutting negatives), or blocking (painting over subjects). Albania's leader Enver Hoxha routinely purged enemies from photos, sometimes leaving behind chilling details like shoes of the erased subjects as warnings about his control over reality. Photomontages were created by filling voids with cutouts from other images. Double exposure captured multiple images on the same negative - particularly effective for creating "spirit photography" supposedly showing the living with ghostly images of deceased loved ones. Digital editing in the 1980s brought significant advances: operations became reversible, new manipulations emerged, editing became accessible to untrained users, and images could be easily shared across computer systems. Perhaps most consequential was text overlay, which embedded captions directly into images, laying the foundation for Internet memes.

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   The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Media Forensics

   Media forensics began by trying to solve a nonexistent problem. For twenty years, researchers lacked actual malicious photo manipulations to study, so they created their own fake examples - inadvertently providing blueprints for the very manipulations they aimed to prevent. The field expanded rapidly from 14 academic papers in 2004 to 440 in 2020, with researchers insisting that technical solutions were the only defense against fake content. This perspective ignored how people actually consume internet media. The 9/11 "tourist guy" photo that spawned countless memes showed that internet users were already comfortable with competing realities, treating the internet as a creative space rather than a factual repository. While sophisticated fakes exist today, the most disruptive forms are often crude but socially damaging images like memes. Perhaps most concerning is the rise of falsified scientific images, with journals like Nature reporting that "up to one-fifth of published life-sciences papers contain at least one digitally altered image," some intentionally modified to change experimental results.

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   Toward a Creative Digital Future

   The foundation for today's virtual reality began in 1965 when Ivan Sutherland described digital displays as "a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland." This vision became more achievable in the early 2000s with broadband, smartphones, and massive data centers. Technology has democratized creativity beyond professionals. While AI's progress in technical applications has been slower than expected, its creative capabilities are surging. Visual artists quickly recognized this potential, fostering collaborations with AI researchers. Platforms like Art Blocks and Brain Drops generate art directly onto blockchains, while interfaces like Artbreeder allow anyone to modify an image's "genes." When addressing fake content online, we should avoid extreme reactions like abandoning social media or imposing draconian controls. Instead, we should evaluate whether technologies enabling fake content might benefit humanity's common good - distinguishing between harmful uses like political disinformation and beneficial ones like satire. The problems with fake content are manageable through existing norms and functional politics. Understanding media context is essential for interpreting digital fakes, as they express myth cycles propagating through new communication technologies. Our global digital village needs its dark alleys to capture the full human experience, requiring thoughtful consideration of what we encounter and how we contribute to our shared virtual imagination.

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