Facebook Slough Group Delusion
Someone has created images of a past Slough using AI and the Facebook nostalgia group feels a collective warmth for seeing a past they remember, even though it isn’t. Someone points out that these images aren’t real, and a mob surrounds him. This is exactly as it was, they say, yes - just as I remember it. One part of me thinks, fine - what’s the harm in this collective self deception? but another part of me sees harm in this utopian vision of the past because there has to be a reason to explain to them the confronting truth of the unutopian present. “That utopia doesn’t exist today and because I believe it did yesterday, something had to have changed.” Foreigners - they say - the floodgates opened. And now we are imagining people whose actions have undone an imagined past. Again, maybe there’s no harm in someone thinking this in an armchair in a living room. But when we start to imagine who is to blame for an imagined wrong doing, we start to make decisions about p...