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 politics, and this affects us all


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