COLUMN
Delft, 1983 T
here is a commotion in the hall of the Department of Aerospace Engineering, in what was still known as the Technical College Delft at the time. A group of students has gathered around a
notice board with exam results and shouts of dismay are heard. Between the pinned lists of grades, there is a note saying that ‘due to an unfortunate series of events, the results of the Thermodynamics exam cannot be announced.’ The disturbance draws the attention of a staff member of the college. She smells trouble and pulls the note off the board. The damage is done, however: several students are already on their way to the teacher’s office to call him out on his actions. The results are published shortly afterwards, some six weeks after the exam. I made that letter together with a fellow student of mine with an electric typewriter, a pair of scissors, some tape, some white-out and a copier. We believed it was high time to take action: the teachers in Delft seemed to care little about their students. Our suspicion that this letter would light a fire under the normally quite reserved future aerospace engineers proved to be correct. Still, the dynamic of the events surprised me. There were quite a few steps between our amateurish – even for 1983 – notice board stunt and actually confronting the teacher. Upon closer inspection, everyone could have easily seen the letter was fake. Today, our practical joke would probably be classified as fake news. For the teacher, it resulted in little more than a bothersome disturbance of his university life. These days, however, false rumours can have deadly consequences. A single text message is all it takes; a poisonous cocktail of simmering herd mentality, fanaticism and a lack of proper information does the rest. This is an extreme example of the broad category of fake news. The term is used haphazardly: for deliberately false articles designed to attract clicks, for satire, propaganda, incitement, and for normal news that you simply don’t want to hear. The ease with which people label something as ‘fake news’ is inspired by laziness and a desire to spoil the public debate. Of course, we have to worry about technological developments that redefine the term ‘fake,’ but the real problem lies with people’s inability or deliberate unwillingness to examine our reality from multiple sides. It is quite possible that the future possibility to create ‘authentic’ videos in which someone does and says whatever you want, the so-called deep fake, will actually be beneficial for our awareness of the distinction between the truth and a lie.
Wiendelt Steenbergen Professor of Biomedical Photonic Imaging
16