Copyright REN 2019
Remember when the Internet was new and full of promise? We called it the Information Superhighway. We had computers the size of a suitcase, and needed a noisy, screeching modem to get connected, but we were okay with that, like early aviators on rickety flying machines we knew it would get better, faster, more sophisticated, and we didn’t have to wait long.
Now, it’s true that in our excitement at this new technology our expectations may have been unrealistic. The Information Superhighway was the cure for our ignorance. It would bring the world together in harmony. Not that I was suffering from ignorance at the time, and I certainly don’t mean to disparage you, but for many people the information supply chain consisted of supermarket tabloids, talk radio shock jocks, and cable TV. We believed that a trip down the Information Superhighway would open the world to a new realm of facts.
It didn’t work out that way. Twenty years later there is a stupendous trove of information accessible to us, but information hasn’t brought us together. Were we really so naïve we thought that information alone could bring about harmony? We are more divided than ever, and nobody calls the Internet the Information Superhighway these days. Try it on a teenager stroking his way through an Instagram feed and see how he responds (he will assume you are being sarcastic.)
The term Information Superhighway always reminds me of Al Gore, who is said to have been the first to use the name. He popularized it in the 1990s when working in congress to get funding for Internet development, for example the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991, known as the “Gore Act”.
And what does the combination of Internet and Al Gore bring to mind? Surely it would have to be Al Gore’s bizarre claim that he ‘invented the Internet’. This monumental lie made Gore a laughing stock and probably contributed to his defeat in the 2000 Presidential election.
From Snopes.com: Despite the multitudinous derisive references to the supposed quote that continue to be proffered even today, former U.S. vice president Al Gore never claimed that he “invented” the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The legend arose from critics and pundits who plucked a relatively credible statement Gore made during the course of an interview, altered its wording, and stripped it of context to make it seem a ridiculously self-serving falsehood.
‘Al Gore said he invented the Internet’ is a meme. From Wikipedia: A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme.
Say what? The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term in his book The Selfish Gene back in 1976 to explain how cultural information spreads and evolves, as opposed to biological/genetic evolution. Dawkins wanted a way to understand why ideas can spread and proliferate even if they are false or harmful. Who benefits? Dawkins’ surprising answer was: the ideas themselves. Ideas are in competition with other ideas, and there are winners and losers. Dawkins has also called memes “mind viruses” and this seems appropriate for our Al Gore meme.
‘Al Gore said he invented the Internet’ went viral. It became part of our shared cultural consciousness. The fact that this meme lives on and is still repeated twenty years later means that even though most of us know that it is false, we also know that it has a power that makes it impossible to expunge. Which in turn means it is kinda true, a new measure of truth that came into being at the same time as ‘alternative facts’. Fact is we are not so big on truth any more. Some folks even say we live in a post-truth world. Al Gore said he invented the Internet? Sounds truthy to me.
In the very old days before the Information Superhighway, to start a big lie like ‘Al Gore said he invented the Internet’ you needed traditional media. Talk radio was, and probably still is, at the top of the list for spreading fake news, but there were lots of print publications and cable channels to back them up. Today we have social media, and it turns out that this is a powerful way to pack a big lie into a trendy meme, served hot and sweet on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms as the topic of the day.
Russian chess master Garry Kasparov says this about our situation: “The methodology of fake news isn’t to convince anyone exactly what the truth is, but to make people doubt that the truth exists, or that it can ever be known.”
The other day Al Gore was back in the news, hosting a climate change conference. Did I mention that climate change is a hoax invented by Al Gore to make money? I couldn’t resist following my fingers to the Breitbart website, where I dutifully read the story, and then clicked to read the comments. Warning: comment sections on political websites like Breitbart are dungeons of horror and not for the squeamish.
The comments were pouring in at amazing speed. What is it about Al Gore that raises the hackles of his enemies this way? Al Gore may have been out of the public eye for much of the last two decades, but he has not been forgotten. Climate change is a hoax invented by Al Gore to make money, and at the same time and sometimes in the same sentence it is a hoax invented by the Chinese to destroy our prosperity. You might think it was illogical to try to hold both positions at the same time, but the people typing the comments weren’t concerned.
But there was one thing they did unanimously agree on: Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet. They laughed and laughed and mocked him for his brazen lie. He never said it, and it can easily be demonstrated that he is innocent of the charge, but in the version of reality inhabited by the readers of the Breitbart website Al Gore is condemned to suffer this calumny until the day he dies.
This is where the Information Superhighway has brought us so far. If Al Gore really had invented the Internet, he’d be having second thoughts by now.
