Operation: Mindfuck

Recently there's been some talk (at least here in Sweden) about Facebook groups that change their names once they've reached a lot of members (DN, AB). While this might seem like a perfect example of a "non-question" and it's easy to just laugh about, I think it is actually something worth thinking about. Making fun of someone at his or her expense is of course not a nice thing, and borders on bullying. And even though I suspect that is the major reason for these things, there is another point of view as well.

It's easy to shrug this off, laugh about it and say "Serves them right for being so naive and who cares about Facebook groups". But there's more to it than that.

We place an increasing amount of trust in information found on the internet - something which is evident in the number of Facebook groups promising to donate x amount of money to some heartfelt cause per member, the fairly large "Nigeria letter" operation, and pretty much any discussion forum online (such as the incident of an article published on the admittedly questionable Newsmill site, written by a fake persona, complete with a satirical website). But it's not only the internet we place a lot of (often misplaced) trust in - this is true for all of society.

Trust is of course generally a good thing, in many ways it is the glue that holds society together - without trust we risk descent into anarchy and "every man for himself" thinking. But trust without a healthy amount of scepticism and critical thinking is just gullibility, and an unquestioning eating up of what we're told. Further, gullibility has the ability to erode trust. We might get fooled once (or even a number of times), but eventually we will start to mistrust everything and assume from the start that no one is trustworthy. In some cases it goes so far as to make us distrust serious research and helps build contempt for "intellectuals". But since we seem to have some underlying drive to place trust in someone, there will always be people there to take advantage of the situation.

Mostly harmless pranks like these can serve as a wake-up call (there are of course those that are really tasteless, such as renaming groups into things playing on incest or pedophilia). They can shake us around a bit and wake us up out of our slumber. "Guerilla ontologists" such as the late Robert Anton Wilson and 90's pop-phenomenon The KLF have dedicated a lot of their work to this end. We need this kind of subversive element in order to balance our collective desire for order, not unlike a vaccine against gullibility.

A friend made a post on Facebook (yes, the irony) about this. She said that maybe this could make people think twice before joining a group promising to give monetary aid to Haiti, and instead make them donate money to those who really do relief-work there. Wise words. If we can get rid of the notion that man-made hyperrealities such as Facebook are "real", perhaps we can also start to question that other man-made hyperreality that is society as large.

Things are not always what they seem, and while this is no reason to trust nothing, it would serve us well to not abandon critical thinking or at least to be reminded about it every once in a while.

The mgt.