Fake news

October 1, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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A man in Florida pleaded to guilty to selling $16 million of fake HIV drugs to pharmacies. A German museum worker was convicted of swapping expensive artworks for forgeries and then selling the originals to fund his lavish lifestyle. And it was revealed that some United Airlines had discovered counterfeit parts in some of their aircraft engines. Barely a day goes past without news of counterfeits, forgeries, pirate material, copycats, plagiarists and imposters. We can’t avoid them.

Fakes and frauds have a long history, from copycat Roman statues of Greek originals to Piltdown Man to the Hitler Diaries. In days gone by, when information was harder to come by, it was common for paintings or sculpture from elsewhere to be copied, and easy (if you chose) to pass a copycat off as an original work. Witness the Turin Shroud: is it a genuine relic or medieval fake? (And did it even matter to those who worshiped it?)

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When printing arrived on the scene it enabled copying to flourish: publishers looking for a big hit would find popular books from overseas and produce their own unsanctioned copies for their local markets and reap the profits. By the late 19th century the author Mark Twain was so angry about pirate copies of his work popping up in England that he lobbied for new copyright laws and invested nearly all of his fortune into new-fangled printing technology. It almost bankrupted him.

Exploiting this information gap was something that lasted a long time, and perhaps still can, from time to time: in 1969, when “Time of the Season” by The Zombies became a chart smash, unscrupulous promoters put not one but two fake versions of the band out on tour to try capitalizing on the song’s success. 

Mass manufacturing added another twist. Not only do the tools of manufacturer mean that original ideas become easier for rivals to mimic (Sony co-founder Akio Morita once said his company was lucky if it got even six months before rivals would copycat new products like the Walkman) but passing off your fraudulent version as the real thing gets easier and easier too. In fashion, particularly, where exclusive branding is part of the product, it’s big business. Fake labels. Fake clothes. Fake bags. They’re everywhere. Some estimates put counterfeit fashion at $600bn a year.

And if physical piracy is a big issue, then the digital world has shifted it up by an order of magnitude. After all, when the original artwork is merely a collection of ones and zeroes, they can be replicated perfectly and spread through new markets and distribution networks. It’s what helped Napster rise, and part of what led to Amazon’s recent influx of terrible AI-generated spam books.

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It’s many years since I traveled to Shanghai to profile Jan Chipchase for Wired. Jan was—and remains—an utterly fascinating individual, but really the assignment gave me an opportunity to visit China and get a better understanding of the country’s “shanzhai” culture. 

As Byung-Chul Han’s book on shanzhai puts it, the word was a term “originally coined to describe knock-off cell phones marketed under such names as Nokir and Samsing. These cell phones were not crude forgeries but multifunctional, stylish, and as good as or better than the originals.” 

I was fascinated by this culture precisely because they walk the very fine line between copycats and forgeries. They have the right look, but the audience has the knowledge. When you see a shanzhai edition of Harry Potter and the Chinese Porcelain Doll most people know that it’s basically fan fiction—just as when you see a kid wearing designer-branded clothing that should cost them thousands: for the most part everybody knows they’re fake—perhaps stolen, at best. But the signals it sends are still meaningful.

That’s what I witnessed in China—a kind of forgery-as-innovation—or, as a young software developer with roots in shanzhai told me at the time: “Shanzhai products are innovative because they’re mainly aimed at niche markets… the big brands need to design for the mainstream, for the mass population.”

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Fakery has taken a different turn in the years since: less about forgery and more about trust—or mistrust. 

Misinformation and propaganda is spread by networks of trolls supported by fake followers and click fraud. “Fake news” became a battle cry for the Trump administration, even though, for the most part, the news wasn’t fake. And now AI—whether in text material produced by generative language models or in video deepfakes of influencers used to hawk products 24/7—has us questioning whether what we’re seeing is real at all. And there’s been a decline in fact-checking services as social media platforms scale back their efforts (in part because lots of people apparently want bad information, in part because they can’t control a problem they have exacerbated.)

So, how do we deal with fakery in this new world? And what tools do we need? The problem might not be new, but the shape of it is changing faster than we can keep up with.

Related reading

Genius vs scenius

September 29, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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“What really happened was that there were sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work.”

Brian Eno on the concept of scenius, quoted in The Creative Life.

Making decisions together

September 28, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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“At the end of the day, the benefits of making decisions together far outweigh the extra time it sometimes takes to include people in decision making. In a time of journalist burnout and cynicism, bringing in democratic and power sharing models allows staff to feel heard, valued, and excited to come to work—and stay here.”

Intrigued by this democratic decision-making framework for news organizations put together by staff from The Appeal. Won’t work everywhere, but trying new approaches is always interesting. (People give alternative structures a lot of stick, but I actually got a lot out of holacracy at Medium, for example.)

The plastic problem

September 25, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Inside the Legoland California build room

Earlier this year, we went to Legoland California for a family trip. We were lucky enough to get a VIP tour of the build room, the place where designers and architects build the displays. Inside, the tables were groaning with models-in-progress, and the walls were stacked with drawers containing every conceivable size, shape, and color of Lego brick. I was excited, of course, a fan in his element. We all were.

But I also had this sudden moment of realization: I don’t know how long it would remain. It was like a graveyard, a paean to plastic. How long would a place like this last? How long should it?

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Take away my petrol, and I’ll drive electric. Bump up the cost of air travel and I’ll pay for my emissions—or stay home. Make plastic bags forbidden, and I’ll use paper. But take away my Lego bricks and you’ll have a riot on your hands. 

I know a lot of people (parents, for the most part, but definitely not just parents) for whom Lego is their dirty little environmental secret. Their homes, like mine, are essentially playing host to an extra, unmentioned occupant: a massive blob of fossil-fuel derived plastic, that has been made palatable because it’s been chopped up into little 2×4 rectangles and peppered with studs. 

Many of us were invested in Lego’s plan to go green by using recycled bottles for its products instead of oil-intensive ABS plastics. And many of us were disappointed when the company revealed that it was ditching the idea.

The reason they gave wasn’t financial cost, or time. It was, they said, because the switch would have actually created an even bigger carbon footprint. Says CEO Niels Christiansen:

“In the early days, the belief was that it was easier to find this magic material or this new material… that doesn’t seem to be there. We tested hundreds and hundreds of materials. It’s just not been possible to find a material like that.”

I applaud the honesty in some ways. No doubt they will get pelters for this. It would certainly be easier to say “we’re carrying on with this bottle plan” and just hope nobody looked too closely. Numbers are malleable, and enthusiasm can paper over many cracks, the PR problem can be something to deal with further down the line. But they seem to be admitting reality—a reality that many people and companies face. We’re so invested, so enmeshed, in an unsustainable practice that the obvious ways out are worse than staying still.

The real question becomes: what’s next? Lego says its plan is to make the ingredients of ABS a little more recycled or derived from plant-based materials; to move the needle a little more slowly, but perhaps more effectively. 

But when your whole business is built on something environmentally pernicious, the reality is that perhaps there just is no good answer. It’s a fundamental challenge to what Lego is.

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My mind went back to that Legoland visit. What will it seem like in a future without plastic? Will it be simply unfashionable or seen as totally inhumane? Is it bloodletting or a lobotomy? 

In a few generations, I suspect society will look back at factory farming and see it as utterly baffling, barbaric practice. Why did we ever allow it to happen? Our children, and their children, will find it impossible to understand why we did what we did. Why we shared our information with advertisers. Why we used water so freely. Why we smoked cigarettes.

Perhaps one day we’ll look back at Lego and all that ABS and be shocked and ashamed that we ever liked it at all. If I tell my grandchildren about our visit to Carlsbad, maybe they’ll be repulsed by the idea. A whole theme park paying tribute to plastic—or a museum celebrating our own arrogance.

Wenner speaks

September 20, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Lots said about Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner’s interview with David Marchese—from his comments on inarticulate black musicians, to his inability to see the limits of his imagination, to his shruggy response to the UVA campus rape story. But beyond the headline-grabbing parts, the most interesting to me is this answer: his unapologetically defensive boomer viewpoint, so absolutely of its time: “What didn’t the rock ’n’ roll generation do? I mean, it didn’t get everything done. But I have no fundamental, deep criticisms. Is there something that you think we didn’t get right?”

Related reading:

• Nice historical overview of Rolling Stone that gives you some of the context

• Everyone should read A Bomb in Every Issue, the fantastic, rollicking tale of Ramparts magazine, a progenitor of Rolling Stone.

The most cyberpunk thing I’ve seen in years is… ABBA

September 17, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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There are moments when you realize you are living in the future.

Watching a driverless car pull up to a stop sign, front seat empty, a handless steering wheel starting to turn. FaceTiming a family member on the other side of the world, remembering what it used to take to talk with them 15 years ago. Seeing a moment, taking a photo, editing it, contextualizing it and sharing it with a global network of people in an instant. It’s up to you whether these are utopian or dystopic, but they are times when a tomorrow that you once imagined is poking its head through into the now.

But there is absolutely nothing that made me feel that keen and conflicted tension of the future arriving around me than sitting with 3,000 other people to watch performing avatars of four Swedish pensioners.

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Earlier in the summer, when we were back in the old country visiting family, we took a trip to see ABBA Voyage in London. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was intrigued. There was talk of holograms. Astounding visuals. A performance that took a team of thousands and cost millions to make, but was also hard to describe. What was this mystery show?

It turned out to be one of the strangest experiences of my life.

Voyage is a 90-minute multimedia performance that takes place in a custom-built arena, mostly focused on digital avatars of Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Benny and Bjorn, projected on huge screens, singing their way through the band’s greatest hits. And for an hour and a half I veered through a frankly baffling range of emotions. I was amazed, terrified, confused, surprised, joyful, disgusted, bored, thrilled… and want to go back to see it again so I can understand what happened to me.

The basics we can put to one side. The show features most—but not all—of the big numbers, plus a few new ballads that felt like album fillers, ABBA-esque melodies that almost could have been written by AI. There are light shows, vintage footage, and animated interludes that give it all some texture, and—smartly—a live band who pop up to give the whole thing the zing of a flesh-and-blood concert. The audience, meanwhile, was a mixture of bopping boomers and glittery Mamma Mia-era zennials (they were also overwhelmingly white, which felt a little odd in such a multicultural city.)

As a whole, Voyage is exceedingly well crafted: an incredibly smart combination of scale and movement to combine the best elements of concert film, music video and live show.

I don’t think the band members are holograms, just extremely well-lit digital models on massive screens. But from a distance, when the avatars are human-scale and standing or dancing around the stage, they are indistinguishable from the real thing. In close-up, though, they are a little less convincing: movements that are almost the real thing; eyes that miss a little sparkle; textures that are not quite there.

It left me almost constantly disoriented. At times it was close enough to believe you were there, watching the band 40 years ago; at others it was like watching the most expensive video game cutscene in history. One moment I was inquisitive: was what I was seeing real? The next, I was uncomfortably far into the uncanny valley. 

The crowd was euphoric, for the most part. They had an emotional connection to the songs, and an awe of the band that transcended everything else (Agnetha drew wolf whistles at some point, a category of multifaceted ick I hadn’t experienced before.) Their enthusiasm added to my confusion. Was nobody seeing what I was seeing? Were they expecting these avatars to be alive?

Then I argued with myself. Don’t we have the same reaction at the cinema? When people go to movies and clap the action, they don’t expect a response from what’s on screen. Don’t we get invested in video games and their almost-real digital people? We have loved fiction for as long as we have been people. Don’t people gather by the thousands for virtual festivals in Fortnite and Roblox or to watch augmented reality perfomances by Billie Eilish? Am I not a hypocrite?

When I go to a concert I might hope to make eye contact with the performer, but I go to football matches and (as my friends and family can attest) shout vigorously at the players, even though they’ll never hear me. And I’m looking forward to seeing the re-release of the Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense—a performance of roughly the same vintage as Voyage.

Those conflicting signals and counterarguments are all true, I suppose, but it was the combination of formats and the effort that generated the emotional response that took Voyage to a new place for me. It challenged me. It walked a line between the real and the unreal, between history and simulation. What did I experience? Who did I experience? Did ABBA even really exist? And if they didn’t, would it matter?

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At the end, the audience—whooping, ecstatic—filed out of the arena and headed towards the train station. It was the height of summer, late in the evening. The future had just reached through into my present, and the sky above the city was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.

How does the future make you feel?

January 9, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Lots of little gems in John Seabrook’s 1994 New Yorker profile of Bill Gates, but this note stuck with me particularly.

For years after the telephone was invented, in 1876, people thought it was a device that would transmit news, drama, and music: the idea that the telephone was a way to talk to other people took about twenty years to sink in here, and about thirty years in Europe. Similarly, today one hears about shopping, banking, and renting movies on the information highway. These are all possible ways of making money, of course, but the point of the information highway, it seems to me, is that it offers a new way of talking to other people.

The story itself is an interesting case in how you write about something new. The article still stands up, more or less, but so many of the ideas that are revelatory to Seabrook at this specific moment in history—email, the internet, even computers and software—became so normal so soon after. How can you capture that sense of novelty and not look foolish when tomorrow comes to call?

Things I found this week (53)

January 5, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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books / Link / Media / Things my friends have made

• Brocken spectres are the terrifying ghosts that appear when you cast a shadow on a cloud that has a light source behind it. 

• Marcin Wichary is getting ready to launch his many–years-in-the-making book about keyboards, Shift Happens. The effort and dedication to making this thing is visible in every element of how he has put it together, including the book’s delightful website.

• Did you know the CIA has a museum?

How to disappear completely

January 3, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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There are many ways to become invisible. If you’re a person you can try to go underground, take yourself off the grid. If you are a new US military bomber, you can use the laws of physics and materials science to stay off the radar. And if you are a glass frog, you can simply turn your blood transparent.

We’re transfixed by invisibility, the art of disappearance. It’s magical.

Sometimes that absence is a problem: a lost job, a family member who is suddenly gone. 

But other times, invisibility is success, like the panic about the hole in the ozone layer. That particular anxiety only disappeared because we stepped in and stopped the worst from happening.

“Had the world not banned CFCs, we would now find ourselves nearing massive ozone depletion. ‘By 2050, it's pretty well-established we would have had ozone hole-like conditions over the whole planet, and the planet would have become uninhabitable,’ says Solomon.”

But counterfactuals fuel conspiracy theories. It’s easy for deniers to argue that this disappearance wasn’t the successful avoidance of danger, but evidence that the threat was never a real problem in the first place.

Progress is often about disappearance, and the conflict around it. Does progress mean something is really gone? Or has it merely made the problem invisible?

That vanishing act, I think, is part of what causes worry around technologies. Sometimes work is genuinely gone, or transformed completely: think of an engine doing the work of a human.

But sometimes it’s just under a veil, the mundanity masked to look like magic. Take Laura Preston in N+1 on being a fake smart chatbot.

And often it’s in an awkward spot between the two. Military drones, for example, simply make the job of killing remote. And the driverless cars that are starting to appear, for real, are exhilarating and terrifying too.

And look at Eileen Guo’s latest investigation, exposing how the Roomba vacuum cleaner often takes intimate photos as it makes its way around the house—and that those images sometimes end up leaked into the world. In this case, training an AI to do its work inevitably requires human intervention, which in turn leads to exposure and invasions of privacy.

Out of sight, out of mind, as they say. Whenever I’m faced with “progress” I’m just left wondering if this is magic, or a mask.