The age of scepticism: from distrust to ‘deepfake’

By Simon Kuper

It’s hard now to fathom how naive we were in 2016. That spring, I was bowled over when I first saw the Leave campaign’s slogan for Brexit: “We send the EU £350 million a week — let’s fund our NHS instead.” I thought it must be mostly true, because you couldn’t just stick a false slogan on your campaign bus, could you? Hardly anyone then had heard the term “fake news”.
Don’t worry, Brexiters: I’m not trying to relitigate the 2016 referendum. Rather, the point is how our relationship to words has changed since. Time moves faster nowadays, as technological change speeds up. In just two years, most people have learnt to distrust words from anyone outside their immediate circle (which is bad news for those of us in the word-selling business). If Brexiters made their NHS promise today, few would believe it. But once everyone has become sceptical, how do they inform themselves about the world?