The problem with modern media is that your fictions are fucking our futures.
This didn’t used to be a problem when truth was held to be truth, and anyone who tried to spread some sort of conspiracy or fantasy was laughed out of the room but there is too much money to be made grifting the gullible and money is now more important than truth.
Disease is now disputable, health is now beyond science, reality isn’t real anymore.
You can literally say something that the entire medical world has proved over decades is true is false, and the modern media barely pushes back because its all owned by rich bastards who don’t really care about anything but money, power and influence.
You can promote half baked statistical probability machines and living thinking toasters and no one pushes back.
You can tell people stuff that was a comfortable fiction in any number of movies over the decades is now fact, and it is accepted by far too many people.
You want to spread the story that there is a shadowy global cabal that controls the world, done. All the while ignoring the fact that the Billionaires that control all the media that are helping tell you this are getting richer while everything you pay for gets more expensive. And they do it loudly and proudly. Shadowy my ass. They spit in your face and tell you its raining.
They tell you some glorified guessing machine is going to take over the world, take your jobs, think and feel for you, making sure their share price goes up and no one of serious note asks why they haven’t made a profit or a serious ground breaking profit in over a decade.
The stories we were told as kids, the fantasies, the science fiction tales of fantastic future technologies aren’t real, but a whole lot of salesmen are telling you they are.
No one is telling you otherwise.
The fictions we enjoyed, the fantasies of our world being simple, of solutions being a single button press away, of a future being made whole by some fantastical technology that some rich loud bastard now proclaims they are on the verge of actually releasing have trapped us on a path where reality isn’t anymore, truth isn’t anymore.
AI isn’t real. It’s a glorified good guess machine.
No one controls the world, it’s just a bunch of loud obvious rich guys who think they know better but can’t stop droughts, cant stop floods, have no idea how diseases actually work, and would happily watch most of us die if it made them another billion.
They are only movies, they are only stories. Reality is messy, chaotic, and full of random events that no one can predict but educated professionals study and plan for decades and if we listen, if we learn, if we accept that results take real effort, the future is vague and uncertain, and that working together to help each other is the only way forward, then we all can have a world living in.
And what scares me most, is the ones with the power in this world, want to ensure that is the true fiction, and fuck the future for all of us.
Saeed Parker - Speech at Media Literacy Conference