The phrase "post-truth", often deployed when speaking of the rise of the internet, has always struck me as inadequate.
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It seems to simultaneously understate and overstate the crisis of information we face.
On the one hand, truth continues to assert itself (COVID-19 has reshaped everything; Trump, despite his best efforts, was forced to accept the end of his presidency; the Australian government is finally being made to recognise and respond to the risks of climate change).
On the other, our social, political, and financial worlds have been made virtual in such a way that success no longer necessarily requires any connection to reality.
Attempts to displace one reality with another are treated as contests of performance rather than contests of fact.
This unmooring from reality may have emerged with the internet, but it plays out in other arenas. Our Prime Minister, for example, is especially adept at creating realities that suit his purpose.
Last week, Cricket Australia announced it would cease referencing "Australia Day" in promotional materials, recognising that the date commemorates the colonisation and dispossession of the land of Indigenous people.
Criticising the decision, Morrison brought up the First Fleet, saying "it wasn't a particularly flash day for the people on those vessels either".
On Tuesday he published an opinion piece in The Australian where he again spoke of the experiences of colonisers and colonised as if they were equivalent, declaring, meaninglessly, that all 25 million Australian stories are "important" and "unique".
"Whether it is the story of our First Nation peoples' strong, ancient and proud culture and their survival in the face of dispossession and colonisation. Or the forsaken souls who came as convicts, not to start a new world, but because they had been banished from the old one. Condemned and outcast by empire, they too overcame," the PM wrote.
Like much of Morrison's rhetoric, this conceals deeply unreasonable logic with reasonable-sounding phrases, concealing any truths unsuitable to his faux-ocker brand of flag-waving Australian exceptionalism.
Most importantly, it shifts the terms of debate so that it occurs on his home turf. Rather than, for instance, speaking to the material conditions under which Indigenous people suffer, and the government's failure to ameliorate them, we are now having a discussion about culture war pablum.
The effectiveness of this strategy isn't confined to the history wars.
In November, the PM defended members of his cabinet accused of varying degrees of sexual misbehaviour, saying "Australians understand human frailty, and I think they understand the people who work in this place are just as human as anyone else and subject to the same vulnerabilities and frailties as anyone."
Light on details and heavy on cliché, he again obscured the facts while dismissing his critics as arguing in bad faith. In one stroke he acknowledged transgressions while minimising them, and performed condemnation and forgiveness so that any counterargument, read through the lens of ScoMo-Vision, became perversely antagonistic.
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I want to connect this with something important happening on the internet right now. It may seem of a totally different category, but the two events are linked by the same detachment from material reality.
The logic of the stock market - the idea that the market is, ultimately, efficient in its valuations - is currently being upended by an online Reddit message board (subreddit) called Wall Street Bets.
The users of this subreddit have collectively decided, for reasons best left to the internet, to invest their money in driving up the price of stocks in US video game retailer GameStop, far beyond what any rational observer would think possible - particularly given the dying market for physical copies of video games.
Matt Levine, a columnist for Bloomberg and a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, wrote this week that "a popular conclusion from the GameStop story is 'Well I guess the stock market is nonsense now,' and I'm not sure that conclusion is wrong."
The story here is not that small-time traders are hijacking the sacred financial markets. It's that the stock market, continuing to rebound throughout 2020 irrespective of the damage wrought by COVID-19, was already floating free from reality. Redditors have simply taken advantage of this unmooring (if you're willing to ignore, as they appear to be doing, the inevitable crash).
In 2021, we inhabit an increasingly abstract world, where wealth and words can have meaning without our knowing precisely what they signify.
Some of us are better at realising this than others.
Scott Morrison is simply riding a wave of virtual reality, wherein words like "Australia", "culture" and "important" are used to evoke vague feelings of pride and patriotism. These feelings don't withstand interrogation, so questions are unwelcome.
Where, I wonder, will this wave crash?
- Dan Dixon is a writer who teaches at the University of Sydney. He writes about literature, culture, politics, and America.