Don’t stop believing.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative Director
www.LopezMartiMiami.com/

• How are we going to tell fake from real in a future dominated by artificial intelligence and immersive alternate realities?
• The short answer is: we won’t.
• More and more people will check in to fantasyland and take refuge in the curated realms of fanhood, cosplaying, digital cargo cults*, etc.
• How will we educate our young in a world where it is impossible to tell truth from fiction?
• Who knows.
• Everything will be artificially augmented, airbrushed and retouched.
• False, literally and figuratively.
• That new miracle lotion some influencer is peddling?
• That new fruity shake oozing antioxidants?
• Placebos.
• Oddly enough, one would expect for digital natives to be pathological skeptics.
• Yet they are surprisingly gullible.
• They are akin to kids who refuse to let go of child play.
• They refuse to acknowledge the fourth wall.
• To quote Fox Mulder’s poster: they want to believe.
• Techno optimism?
• Naïveté?
• I think it is something else: suspended disbelief.
• The linchpin of entire industries: infotainment, advertising, literature, social media.
• And professional wrestling.
• I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say that, absent this odd mental operation, the entire media landscape -legacy and new- would cease to exist.
• An uncanny cognitive mechanism that fools us into believing, albeit for short stretches of time, what’s patently not true.
• Our tendency to enter into a trance in the darkness of a movie theater, when we read a good book or binge on some Netflix rabbit hole.
• The fascination of fiction.
• Suspended disbelief not only affects the young and naïve.
• We know full well that all those beaming middle-aged couples on pharmaceutical commercials are actors following a script at some sound stage, yet we are absorbed by their happiness.
• Storytelling.
• The superpower of great narrators and actors.
• What’s the explanation of this phenomenon?
• My guess: it’s an evolutionary thang.
• An intellectual peculiarity that helps us absorb information in an orderly fashion.
• Escape reality for a short period of time.
• Cleanse our mental space.
• Child play.
• Gullibility, to some extent, gives us hope.
• It can be liberating.
• It helps us see the glass half full.
• Otherwise, we’d live in a sea of despair, pessimism and distrust.
• Ignorance is bliss.
• Unfortunately, bad actors can use it to hack our decision-making processes and manipulate us.
• Bad actors or good actors?
• You get the point.
• Mind you: by no means am I being apocalyptic here.
• For one thing, the widespread thirst for suspension of disbelief will keep creative types plenty busy.
• Someone will have to ideate the supply for the voracious upcoming demand of alternate realities.

*Techno fetishism and superstition. Ask your favorite AI assistant for more information.