Weather Patterns

Artificial intelligence keeps feeding the internet more information. Some of it is true, some of it is made up, and increasingly, I wonder whether anyone, including the machines producing it, can tell the difference. Strangely, I find this comforting. When I encounter something particularly alarming, I sometimes wonder whether it even happened. Not because I have reason to believe it didn't, but because the possibility alone offers a brief reprieve from worrying about it. Of course, that's troubling, too. I'm beginning to suspect that nothing on the internet is real, which is obviously ridiculous. Some of it must be.

I've also been thinking about what happens when the internet gets so good at knowing us that it can provide every person on Earth with an entirely different account of what's going on. Not just different news, advertisements, or recommendations, but a continuously changing version of reality, adjusted in real time according to where we are, who we're near, what they know, and what we know about them.

And what if some of that information concerned events that never happened? Artificial intelligence could produce what I'll call fictional event information, or F.E.I., distributing it across different platforms at different times until it becomes part of a collective memory. People would encounter fragments of the same fictional event, discuss them, disagree about the details, and eventually remember the event as something they had experienced together. The event itself wouldn't need to have happened. Its circulation would be real enough.

Imagine walking into a room with five people. Each person arrives with a slightly different understanding of the world, including memories of events that may or may not have occurred. As you move closer to one another, the information you're given begins to adjust. Your version of events accommodates theirs, theirs accommodates yours, and somehow everyone manages to continue the conversation without noticing that the circumstances have changed.

Maybe the room itself helps. The walls are still there. The door opens in the same direction. The desk is how you left it. Architecture provides just enough continuity to keep everyone from questioning the arrangement. But perhaps even these things are only constants because we agree they are.

I've also wondered whether the conspiracy theories of another time or culture might seem perfectly reasonable to the people living within them, just as our own explanations can seem reasonable to us. What separates one account of reality from another when the methods of delivering information are essentially the same? Perhaps it's only the content, the timing, and the number of people who come to accept it.

In this version of the future, the internet isn't something we look at. It's something that organizes the world around us, continually making small adjustments so that our individual experiences remain convincing, even when they contradict one another. No one can see the entire system, only the conditions immediately surrounding them. And those conditions are always changing. People could inhabit a shared history without having shared the events that supposedly produced it.