If you are amazed about how Dante Autello survived shooting himself in the skull with a nail gun last week, also consider another fact about his accidental brush with fame that seems more amazing.
Within 48 hours of the nail’s arrival in the Orland Park’s man cerebellum, the news of the Illinois event had been repeated 22 million times by internet “news” providers.” Just search Google under “nail in the head” to see for yourself.
From America to Buenos Aires to Minsk, they were marveling at the bizarre non-achievement of Autello’s life. He provoked prattling in Prague, ignited inquiries in Inchon and triggered talk in Tel Aviv.
We won’t contribute to the cliche of noting how blazingly fast the World Wide Web connects every facet of our lives to everyone else in the world. Pedestrians standing on the shoulder of the information highway run the risk of being run over by large, fast trucks.
We know all that.
But what you should most take from this event is how sure the world is that what happened to Autello actually happened. As on, it was a true fact, not just a sort of fact.
We know it’s true because local reporters and photographers in Orland Park were there to bear witness, assess the physical evidence, interview the participants, weight the facts.
To whatever degree you trust the observations of trained, dispassionate fact gatherers, you can trust that the case of Autello was true and accurately reported.
But you also should be skeptical that several billion more people on the planet are sure it’s true without an ounce of independent evidence it is. As the world spins on its axis, millions believe perceptions, hunches, and outright falsehood as if they were as true as reports of the Autello episode.
Why are we gullible?
The world trusts the Ghost in The Machine will not lie to them. We trust machines to work because we are told they are trustworthy. In the case of the Internet, we tend to believe the theory that elaborate lies are harder to pull off than simple truths.
But the truth about the Internet is that almost no one knows if facts displayed there as if it were unassailably true can be independently proven by the customer of that information.
Therein lies the conundrum of the world we inhabit. We know far more facts at any second in our history as human beings than we ever have. But we have less empirical evidence that any of those facts are true than ever before, too.
In the grander scheme of the universe, the events of Auello’s puncture wound don’t mean much except as a passing oddity. But there are facts that must be true for the world to work.
If you are tempted to dismiss your hometown news operation as irrelevant to your life, think of that lesson in Dante Auello’s quirky adventure. Ask yourself whether knowing the truth matters at all.
