Beyond Pranks, Satire, and Sensemaking
How do we catalyze awe and humility without just triggering more fear and confusion?
I have always been a fan of fake news. I don’t mean the kind that we see in today’s disinformation campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. It’s the work of 1960’s pranksters such as Paul Krassner, Abbie Hoffman, or Robert Anton Wilson and the Discordians that I always admired. That tradition has been carried on well to this day by fabulous media activists including my friends with the YesMen, Adbusters, Ubermorgen, and the Birds aren’t Real movement (who contend that the CIA has replaced all real birds with spy drones).
Yet while I applaud any and all activity that wakes people up to the illusions perpetrated by capitalism, the war machine, or the many institutions of social control, I wonder how much such pranksterism makes sense in the current environment. Yes, we need to have fun. But given that we live in a world where the President of Russia can claim that tens of thousands of dead bodies in Ukraine are actors murdered by Ukrainians (begging the question of why use actors if you’re going to kill them, anyway? Don’t regular people act just as dead once murdered?), I can’t help but worry that more disorienting media madness — however playful — may just untether us further. How do we pull the rug out from under those…
