Tomorrow is that day. Yes, tomorrow is the day when liars will have a freedom stone, the day when you can tell the biggest, most flowery lie. Tomorrow is the big day, like every day but with an alibi: may your innocence prevail.
Tomorrow is April Fool’s Day because, more than 2,000 years ago, a frightened king had dozens of children murdered – in an attempt to preserve his power – in the same place where, more than two years ago, a frightened president ordered the murder of so many other children in an attempt to retain his own. History does not repeat itself but it is copied a lot.
Memory corruption often offers spectacular results; rare, however, like this one, where the massacre of these boys became a license to lie. And the key is in the word innocent and his rare pirouettes. Already in Latin it was rare: innocent meant the one who does no harm, In + wedding; Over time, its meaning expanded in two directions: on the one hand, it was about the one who is not to blame, the innocent; on the other, the one who has neither cunning nor experience, the innocent; one who has done no harm, one who can easily be harmed. At this confluence, there is a whole idea: that you do harm or they harm you, law of the celestial jungle.
The children Herod ordered murdered were innocent in both senses, and centuries later triumphant religion gave them a place in its calendar; After all, their death had saved the inventor of this story from death. Nobody yet imagined that over time, the Spaniards – only the Spaniards and their repeaters – would get into the habit of tolerating, on that day, deceptions which, supposedly, would not be tolerated on other days. Tomorrow, here, you will be able to do what you could in principle never do.
(There have always been carnivals, beyond the name given to them by each culture: festivals, once a year, in which everything was the opposite of what it has always been. On that day, the subjects made fun of their bosses, their kings, their laws; that day served to make the submissives feel that the established order was so strong that it even allowed them to circumvent it: it therefore served to ensure that they continued to support it with vigor renewed.)
“Let your innocence prevail,” they tell you every December 28 when they deceive you with a strange deception – an innocent ruse – and this simple ceremony proclaims – it wants to proclaim – that the rest of the time they do not deceive you. So, the media got into the habit and fed us false news every “April Fool’s Day” as if to tell us that all the others, that day, every day, were true. The game/ritual that allows you to achieve this is nice: since I was a child I learned that on December 28 there was a deception and I had to detect it, and thus reading the newspaper or watching the news became much more interesting, more intense: a real reading school. To read is to discover the trap.
This is why it occurred to me, innocently on my part, many years ago, that my country’s government at the time should enact a “December 28 Law” that would force all media outlets to contain one false news story every day. This, in turn, was supposed to force readers to read, listen or watch the media every day with the same suspicion with which we view it every December 28: trying to detect the lie, the falsification. Delusional about me: the evolution of the media, readers and societies has meant that, without the need for any law, the vast majority began to read like this, searching, distrusting.
But it becomes more and more difficult to attempt a critical reading. We had – a little – confidence in our discernment, in our ability to spot the fake. AI and its products make things very complicated; However, often the only difference that can be established between a real video and a fake one – the statements of an important person, for example – is that a respected person or a media outlet – an “authority” – guarantees its authenticity. In short: we lose the possibility of judging for ourselves and must again surrender to the judgment of “those who know”. The possibility of critical and autonomous reading of the media is one of the first victims of artificial intelligence.
Which once again requires us as an audience to trust and believe. (And that puts even more pressure on us, as journalists, to earn that trust.) Having to rely on other people’s opinions is never a good mechanism; seems to be, for the moment, the only possible one, until we discover or invent ways to regain our critical independence. It’s urgent. Unfortunately, those who usually make these things up are on the side of those who profit from the deception. Even more urgent: that we understand that this is now the battlefield.
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