On April 25, an alleged assassin was taken down during the White House Correspondents’ dinner at the Washington Hilton. Almost immediately, social media began speculating on the over/ under of this being staged. Before moving on to the next soul-shakingly stupid public event in American life, it might be useful to assess what’s happening, like a triage of your sanity and rational sensibilities.
To start, humans are not necessarily rational. We’re animals who have five senses and then regularly use our intellect to act against what our senses tell us. In the wild, most of us would be a delicious meal for a bear. Herein is one of the big contradictions of human existence. We have spent millennia, at least since we started writing, honing our intellect and developing our rational facade. Underneath, whatever primordial sense of self-preservation still resides, our lizard brains often roar to life. The juxtaposition of our rational and irrational ideas sometimes jars us into action or at least alerts us to be suspicious.
The media landscape is exponentially greater than any human has ever consumed. Manipulation and veracity are often hard to distinguish. The dopamine machine of our phones has fried our ability to ease into understanding or sit with ideas.
How did we get here? Where can we go from here? First, it's worth noting that it is human to feel exhausted. If I read a book jacket blurb about 2026, I’d say it was outlandishly overwritten. I’m awe-inspired daily by the venal, cruel stupidity of the Trump administration. The internet usually adds another heaping of disappointment in my fellow man. It’s okay to be drained.
For most of human civilization, we had more control over the amount of information we consumed. Our networks were local. We interacted with the full person, often, rather than a facsimile on a phone. When literacy was lower, messages would be passed orally. Human-to-human contact mediates the message. While this could lead to discrepancies in the actual information, the human nature of communication was still central.
Text and images disconnected the communicator from the receiver. Messages were easier to share. Every receiver got the same message. But, without the human intercessor, the receiver needed to interpret the message themselves. What was lost was the human interaction in which you might discuss the meaning. What was gained was speed and efficiency. This ability to share messages widely, through text and image, underpins civilization.
Faith certainly spread through imagery and text. Mortality has been a specter in human existence. Any tool to help assuage the very real fear that everyday life could turn deadly was probably welcomed. After you feel assured, you might be blessed to see the next day, in the deepness of the night, you might try to imagine what more there is to existence.
In attempting to understand the most fundamental ideas about existence, historically, many people have turned to mysticism. There are so many writers and thinkers who want to push their minds into new realms. Christian mystics like Hildegard von Bingen wrote and illustrated their intellectual endeavors. Zen Buddhism holds that Enlightenment requires breaking down the frames that separate our rational and irrational minds. Many art forms associated with Zen invite both artists and viewers to open their minds to what might not exist. Take Sesshu Toyo’s Haboku. Ink would splatter onto the paper, revealing the landscape.
Mysticism becomes considerably more difficult in the era of mechanical reproduction. While printmaking allowed for speed, the media was so unlike the written word that it did not cause confusion. While serifs evoked written flourishes, most of the people consuming the early printed word would not have been confused. But the photographer was a completely different beast. Bayard, for example, created this depiction of himself as a drowned man right at the dawn of the medium. The consumer barely had time to digest the idea that realistic renderings could be produced quickly when they were confronted by images that were realistic yet not real.
Photography breaks onto the scene long before the mortality rate drops. People are facing death daily while also being fooled by the media. Bayard’s self-portrait was created between two major cholera epidemics in France. At that time, the childhood mortality rate was 300 per 1000. His image, therefore, was likely not solely to test the capacity of the new media but also to wrestle with the challenges of human existence. Another photography pioneer, Henry Peach Robinson, created one of the best-known early staged images of a consumption victim at her end. This photograph was purposefully theatrical, but without the proscenium arch and the lights, the unknowing viewer could be fooled.
Death was also big business for early photographers. Many people who’d never imagined having the means to capture the likeness of a loved one, at all, now could hold onto their last look. Mortuary photographs were often framed as a final sleep. For the viewer, the metaphor was apt, but did it not add to the tenuous hold photography had on reality?
In photography, reproduction countermands reality with such subtlety as to seamlessly form a new truth. The photographic object is both a counterfeit and an original. Walter Benjamin wrote in the 1930s about how mechanical reproduction severed our connection to the aura of authenticity. In looking at photography, we’re taken to that time and place while still standing in our own. We’re afforded an illusion of reality.
Yet, there was a line between reality and fiction. News felt true. Soap operas felt fictional. When this line was crossed, it was still shocking. In 1938, Orson Welles reported on aliens invading as part of a radio drama, but many listeners were scared by the “news.” Radio was a fairly new medium then. Just as photographers before him were testing the limits of reality, Wells was playing with the tool. Warren Weaver, director of the Rockefeller Foundation Natural Sciences, worried that “our popular and universal education is failing to train in reason and logic, even in the educated. […] popularization of science has led to gullibility and new superstitions.” The government feared a panicked society would lead to mass hysteria. Researchers quickly mobilized to understand the potential negative effects of radio on media literacy and the ways the media could be used for propaganda. The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic was published in 1940.
Almost 90 years later, I cannot fathom our government being worried about mass hysteria. Misinformation was likely the biggest driver of Trump’s victories. Verifiable data indicate the Russians worked to sway both elections in his favor. More recently, CPAC has been shown to have received funds from Viktor Orbán to push Republican candidates.
What we saw with photography and radio happened with the internet, but at much faster speeds. The rate of improvement and change far surpassed our ability to make sense of reality and fiction. But the breakdown of concepts also benefited companies making money off consumers’ inability to distinguish reality from something else.
Jean Baudrillard calls this hyperreality. He warned that eventually reality will be replaced by a simulation. Where in history, we had markers of reality, like a painted portrait is a rendition of reality, eventually, that relationship is undermined. So, as photography can trick people, distrust grows not just in the media but in the idea of reality itself. People become jaded about representations, as they’ve learned they’re often not actual representational. In our age, profit is tied to representations, like clicks for watching an AI video. But, Boudrillard would say, “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” In other words, there is a new “real” that doesn’t refer to actual life but is there nonetheless.
In other words, the virtual is not fake but instead a different real. Our society, therefore, is uncomfortably positioned between virtual and actual, but they don’t always correspond. Often, the media in each of these spaces moves at a different pace. You might have been receiving hundreds of conflicting messages about the possible Trump assassination attempt on your phone while listening to someone in your own space talking. Both exist. Both have a type of reality. But one has an enormous volume and an excessive pace. It’s as if we’ve got feet on conveyors moving at different speeds, but instead it’s our brain attempting to make sense of two realities. No wonder we’re all tired.
The 21st century also saw the rise of artifice as entertainment, with the rise of reality television. The facade of reality also fell as the internet age brought more people into our ideas of history. Many accepted aspects of history became reframed as fictions meant to trick the public. For many consumers in the media in the 21st century, they’re dealing with major cognitive dissonances in the information they encounter. Reality is no longer the expectation. Truth is almost always a lie.
But these truths and lies are hard to disentangle. The White House Correspondence Dinner was at the Washington Hilton, where Ronald Regan was shot in 1981. Reagan was indeed shot, as the images show. It really was in this place. But then we’re confronted with the many theories that Trump’s 2024 shooting was staged. For every moment, we’re confronted by a series of similar concepts of which only some are real moments. In other words, we’re drowning in information, much of which is fake.
In research on The War of the Worlds, they learned that both safeguards and personal responsibility helped mitigate the potential negative effects of media. It's hard to imagine a government bought by technology would implement changes to protect our minds. But we can save ourselves, as best as we can. Slowing down, consuming less, and reflecting can help. Social media, though, is addictive. It will fight our best selves for’ attention. Even spending time reading something long-form like this has helped you, though, fight back from the machine.
Real questions still remain if the assassination attempt was staged. Did Trump’s team plan yesterday? Was it even an assassination attempt? These answers are important. But as consumers of the news, we also need to think hard about whether we need the answer right now. Instantaneous answers are often incorrect. Credible information is often vetted and so emerges more slowly. It’s okay to wonder. It’s okay to read. It’s okay to have an initial feeling. And it’s okay to change your mind as more information emerges.
While conspiracy theories make technologists money, that does not mean that every strange theory on the internet is a conspiracy. In order to be able to evaluate the information to the best of your ability, you cannot be in a state of heightened panic. While we might not be totally rational as beings, our minds have evolved to help us reason. Technology often attempts to take that skill away from us. We owe it to ourselves to take that back.
