Conversation

History ends when ghosting tech is perfected. When it becomes possible for anyone to ignore any specific other person entirely, for the rest of their life. I thought a post-truth condition was necessary for this, but turns out the weaker condition of post-authorship will do.
Specific example: Many people want to tune out Trump entirely. You can block the word on your info streams, replace it with another via browser extension etc. Now imagine a full black-mirror++ version that patches holes in your situation awareness coherently and stably.
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Since most people almost never author genuinely historic reality-destabilizing events, this can get arbitrarily good. You can reattribute events to other sources etc. Disbelieving in gravity can be fatal, but disbelieving in Newton’s authorship of his eponymous laws needn’t be.
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Much of history is consensus around authorship claims that is then mined for currency on which political/cultural authority is based. But I really can’t think of how alt-believing an authorship fact could directly harm you individually, without others choosing to punish you
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Most alt-reality construction and alt-facts stuff revolves around authorship claims. This is why historical revisionism is a popular and stable human activity. Believing whatever the hell you like about who authored events in the past is rarely immediately dangerous to *you*
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It could of course hurt other people if it feeds a revisionist history that then breaks institutional safety barriers. But the causal mechanism by which say holocaust denial causes harm is long and uncertain unlike disbelieving gravity and stepping off a ledge.
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This is why religion and creationism are viable even today. Personal risky consequentiality is a far weaker standard than falsifiability. The number of true things you need to actually believe to live safely and happily has been vastly exaggerated.
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Insert joke about “I don’t need to outrun the lion, I just need to outrun you” You don’t need to explain the fossil record, you just need to posit a god who chose to play an elaborate prank. Occam’s razor is an aesthetic standard you can ignore when it comes to history.
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This follows Hannah Arendt’s model of history as sort of an evolving public narrative of “appearances” and “recognitions” among free individuals, but never mind if that angle is obscure to you. It’s the reason this idea hangs together more internally consistent than it might seem
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The main problem with constructing leakproof realities is that sufficiently big/powerful historic events will always leak in. Earthquakes, nuclear bomb, rising water level submerging a city. But you can always believe Cthulhu or god or Godzilla we’re responsible for such things
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So the only thing you actually need to filter out to stabilize your preferred revisionist history built on alt facts is... specific people annoying you with their varying accounts. Unless they are uniquely necessary in your life, you can super-ghost them without consequences.
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