Critical Times

While researching around our recent post on the Venezuela events (now deleted), I became aware that there are a number of deepfake videos available on YouTube featuring the Brazilian economist Paulo Nogeira Batista Jr. Some of them are crudely done, but perhaps there are others (like the video we posted?) that are simply more convincing. The deepfake technology is getting better and better, so much so that even a professional like Hany Farid can find it difficult to detect them. I ended up not even sure that what appeared to be Nogeira’s own YouTube channel and Facebook page were genuine (there’s more then one Facebook page for him).

This is politically very dangerous. If we can no longer trust our sources of information, then we end up like the helpless citizens subjected to the political strategy of Vladislav Surkov, who created a whole fake political landscape within Putin’s Russia, with corrupted oppositionists as well as Putin’s own party. Hannah Arendt warned: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”