Authenticity in the Age of the Fake

http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/authenticity-in-the-age-of-the-fake

by dnetesn • 10 years ago

124 40 10 years ago

You've heard of Neilson ratings... How about a Trust Rating?

How about a third party that certifies the facts and guarantees that the opinion in which they are expressed by is not slanted past a certain degree. Perhaps give a slant rating. Also, These third party could give a balance rating to a company on a certain issue or candidate. Out of X number of news stories, how many (positive and negative stories) did a given outlet run on each side? The third party could have internal peer reviews and other checks and balances (who watches the watchers?)

Can you imagine what these numbers would look like this election season? One last thing. How about each story has the author name at the bottom, but the link to their profile includes their voting record and party affiliation.

Now that would be transparency.

How about a startup for a news aggregation that somehow did this in an open and transparent way. They would disclose the reasons for all their decisions to keep things honest. Finally a one stop shop to get a balance of stories and opinions, both sides of the story, the actual truth about what is going on. There are so many misinformed people today.

fao_4• 10 years ago

Voting record? Nope (At least not in the UK. I've heard it's the same for the US, too). You can only get who they say they voted for. Anything else is a gross breach of several data protection laws.

Party affiliation could be faked in some way, but isn't an absolute thing any way. I could easily see ~alt-right~ fascist journalists donating $1 to many different left-wing parties to get a record of affiliation, and then undoing those donations by writing opinionated articles against those parties.

throwanem3• 10 years ago

Party affiliation is a matter of public record in the US, as are the dates and amounts of donations to political campaigns and action committees.

I haven't heard of any case in which anyone claiming affiliation with the "alt-right" has used any of this information in order to attack anyone. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said on all sides; Brendan Eich's politically motivated ouster from Mozilla, for example, tends to crop up fairly regularly in discussions of such matters, as a good example of the sort of behavior considered entirely apropos and indeed quite virtuous among progressive biens-pensants.

Spooky232• 10 years ago

I could easily see ~alt-right~ fascist journalists donating $1 to many different left-wing parties to get a record of affiliation

Why? Anyone who cares enough to verify that will quickly see through it.

pjc502• 10 years ago

"Balance" in the partisan sense just gives you "Views On Shape Of Earth Differ" articles. Or, from CNN's ticker the other day, "Are Jews People?". It also provides a big incentive to go as partisan as possible in order to drag the Overton window about.

Spooky232• 10 years ago

Its pretty easy to identify politically motivated people who are affiliated with politicians.

For one, it's pretty obvious for a moderately discerning reader to identify talking points that come from a party and campaign. Second, most political activity is public record and you can get registration and contribution records for anyone. Dig a little deeper and you can figure out who the persons family does and where they work.

The fake news phenomena has nothing to do with all of that -- it's just pure propaganda. It's easy to identify, but 80% of the population isn't highly engaged (many people don't realize that clearly identified "sponsored posts" are paid content!) and has no idea... they are looking for infotainment.

return02• 10 years ago

It's a good thing that there is no equivalent of this in the information age. A digital copy is just as good as any original.

pjc502• 10 years ago

Authenticity just means something slightly different. What about "fake news"? What about phishing sites? Isn't the reddit/spez controversy entirely about authenticity and attribution?

csydas• 10 years ago

I appreciate the idea here, but it's really not what the article is discussing.

The article is talking about items only previously obtainable via harvesting naturally occurring items, for example, diamonds. Then suddenly because some smart people worked on it for a bit, we had lab made diamonds. Or how purple dye used to be a challenge.

Despite the prevalence and usefulness of artifical otions for many formerly naturally occurring items, there are still huge pushes and even social stigmas for not having "authentic" versions of these materials.

I understand how you're making the comparison here, but you're conflating the topics. This isn't about verifying authenticity in the case of the materials, it's whether or not a diamond made in the ground is intrinsically worth more than one made in a lab, and why so many people feel better about the one from out of the ground.

yk• 10 years ago

See also astroturf campaigns. However in some sense all of these examples are about deception (in some real or imagined sense). On second thought, the natural/artificial dichotomy in diamonds, food &c. is indeed very similar, it is about deception of getting a product that conforms to some ideal of natural. Compare the situation between food and tires, nobody would complain about non-organic tires, I wouldn't be surprised if most people demand non-organic tires even if there would be a plant based substitute. In food it is just the exact opposite.

return02• 10 years ago

thats not related

icebraining• 10 years ago

Not yet, anyway: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2834

brudgers• 10 years ago

Your comment reminded me of this: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

There seems to be some nexus between claims of originality/authenticity and DRM.

segmondy• 10 years ago

There is. First posts, high user id's on web forums, what's your slashdot ID? karma scores on HN or reddit, number of followers on social media. Some of these are hard to fake, some are not. Just 2 days ago, I saw a "stolen tweet", someone in another country took a funny tweet from someone else in a different country, changed the details to match his locale and got lots of likes. We see this in reddit, where people are called out for reposts and posting as if it was their own experience. What is real, what is fake?

ominous• 10 years ago

And the last question, "does it matter?"

devoply• 10 years ago

I think it says more about our culture and its value of the imaginary difference and individualism, where in the real world the difference is very limited, than it does about individuals. If you take a different culture, it may hate individuality and difference.

ObeyTheGuts2• 10 years ago

There are difference between natural and fake diamonds, natural diamonds have some impurities which make detection of artificial ones possible. I think those impurities give "character" to natural diamonds and make em more valuable. Same all stuff u get when u eat fruit like fiber, slows down vitamine absorbtion and we are adapted to that, thats why sintetic vitamines must be taken with food.

nailer• 10 years ago

There are difference between natural and fake diamonds

Synthetic diamonds are not fake or unnatural. The distinction is between 'mined' vs 'made'

I think those impurities give "character" to natural diamonds and make em more valuable.

I think they make mined diamonds more impure. And I think mined diamond companies use them to exploit men through artificial scarcity.

ObeyTheGuts2• 10 years ago

How its artificial scarcity if it is possible to tell man made vs natre made diamond, they are two different this then!

Purity of man made stuff is why it sucks, pure iron will rust the fuck away, u need add carbon and some metals to make good steel, same pure diamonds dont break light passing trough in such beautiful way as natural diamonds, and those impurities so far were not recreated by man.

77pt773• 10 years ago

If "manufactured" diamonds carried the exact same impurities everything would still stand. It's just another post facto excuse. No one used that argument for extracted ones before manufactured ones where even a thing.

Diamonds are about status projecting/social proof.

Manufactured ones would continue to be considered sub par because "reasons".

StavrosK• 10 years ago

s/reasons/diamonds' only purpose as jewelry is to show you spent a lot money on them/.

Even the article misses this. Literally the only reason people buy diamonds for is because they want to show that they burnt a large sum on it. If you buy fake diamonds, other people shame you because "I didn't burn the sum so you could reap the same social benefits without actually wasting your money", so fake diamonds have a stigma attached to it.

out_of_protocol• 10 years ago

Strong crypto to rescue. Just make it user-friendly. If %agency%/%publicperson℅ is spreading fake news you can proof it even if article/tweet/etc was deleted

77pt773• 10 years ago

But the disdain expressed toward the garish colors that Perkin’s purple, and related dyes such as magenta, made accessible to the general public from the 1860s had within it a clear distaste for the arriviste. Now that simply anyone can wear what once marked you out as a person of consequence meant that new ways were needed to arbitrate social distinction

A similar thing happened to lobster. It used to be considered poor people's food because of how abundant it was. Prisoners used to eat it.

A good source for this is: https://psmag.com/how-lobster-got-fancy-dab39dcf688a

tunap• 10 years ago

Fun Thanksgiving fact: the Mayflower colonists were starving next to a bay/coast full of "mud bugs" when the locals, overlooking earlier transgressions that depleted their winter stores, took pity on their starving "guests".

threatworking• 10 years ago

reminds me of the story about Han van Meegeren, a Dutch painter and portraitist considered to be one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century.

In May 1945, Van Meegeren was arrested, charged with collaborating with the enemy and imprisoned. His name had been traced to the sale made during WW II of what was then believed to be an authentic painting Vermeer to Nazi Field-Marshal Hermann Goering. Shortly after, to general disbelief, Van Meegeren came up with a very original defense against the accusation of collaboration, then punishable by death. He claimed that the painting, The Woman Taken in Adultery, was not a Vermeer but rather a forgery by his own hand. Moreover, since he had traded the false Vermeer for 200 original Dutch paintings seized by Goering in the beginning of he war, Van Meegeren believed that he was a national hero rather than a Nazi collaborator. He also claimed to have painted five other "Vermeers" as well as two "Pieter de Hoochs" all of which had surfaced on the art market since 1937.

tomjen3• 10 years ago

For those of you too lazy to google: he was convicted of fraud, but sentenced to only one year. Unfortunately he died in prison.

greeseproof• 10 years ago

What kind of fraud?

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

The ghost of Thorstein Veblen, and the concept of Veblen goods -- those which exist and function to signal the social status of their bearers -- is all over this article, though never once mentioned.

In a world in which any good may be synthesised or fabricated cheaply, it is expense itself which is distinctive. "Story" or "provenance" cannot be fabricated, and so, despite the fact that it's irrelevant to the functional characteristics of a product or good, the immaterial becomes material and significant.

Closely related: Trevor Noah's observation on language:

Language and accents govern so much of how people think about other people. It's been happening since the beginning of time. Even now in America, you know when people say they "hate immigrants," they're not referring to a Canadian immigrant, they're not referring to somebody who has an accent [that] is slightly different to theirs — it's often that voice that throws you off. ... When you hear somebody speaking in an accent, it's almost like they're invading your language while they're speaking to you. Because if you hear someone speak another language, you almost don't care, but when they speak your language with an accent it feels like an invasion of something that belongs to you. ...

http://www.npr.org/2016/11/22/503009220/trevor-noah-looks-ba...

Language, as with manners, etiquette, and deep cultural familiarity, is an expensive and deep signifier of class and status.

Authenticity in the Age of the Fake

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