Drone panic and the crisis of reality

The truth is out there — but will we ever know it?

I enjoyed writing for Compact about the mass drone sightings in the US, looking at the various theories about what they could be and what the story tells us about our increasingly fractured reality:

Any of the theories could be true. Or the explanation could be something else altogether. There’s the rub: more than anything, this is a story about the increasingly slippery nature of truth, about the way in which legitimate mistrust of government and official narratives combine with social media and new technologies to create parallel realities. This situation makes it impossible for the establishment to impose an “official story”, but it also opens up new avenues for those in power to exert control, leveraging mistrust and epistemic chaos to further their own agendas.

In this sense, the drones are more than mysterious objects in the sky. They are symbols of the double-edged nature of modern technology, which empowers individuals even as it enables unprecedented levels of control and surveillance. Ultimately, the drones remind us that the battle over reality is not just about what we see, but about how we understand the world—and who gets to define that understanding.

Mistrust of official narratives isn’t going anywhere, but richly justified skepticism won’t be enough to sort falsehood from reality. Because ultimately, when it comes to complex social phenomena, that is something that can only be worked out at a collective level. Individual perception and understanding can only go so far. Perhaps this is the lesson of the drone saga: that the answer to the mystery isn’t to be found in the sky, but among our fellow humans.

Read the article here.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)