Semiocapitalism founds the bases by which misinformation is allowed to exist in the first place – The explosion of digital technologies of the self facilitates a media economy of constant information flow

A key McLuhanist idea taken up by Baudrillard is ‘reversal,’ where at the ‘peak of performance,’ technologies and processes reverse their effects (McLuhan 30, 33, 182). Hence if, in the broadcast-era, the media materiel worked to build the stocks of the real, then digital production has the opposite effect. As in the economic law of over-production leading to devaluation, our digital creativity erodes the reality principle itself. As Baudrillard suggests, ‘it is the excess of reality which stops us believing in it … the real is suffocated by its own accumulation’ (Intelligence 19). Our digital hyperproduction, therefore, reverses now into the crash of the real. We move from the broadcast era of hyperreality, where huge quantities of material were mobilized to perfect the real, to the digital world of hyporeality, where the personal reality is hyperinflated and the real as a shared experience hyperdeflates. This hyporeality (‘hypo’, meaning ‘under’ or ‘less’) is characterized by decline or loss: for when the real is reduced to the self and its productions, then little or nothing is required either to create or believe in it. Recent fears over ‘fake news,’ disinformation, Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories have seen a growing discourse around the notion of a ‘post-truth’ society, with the collapse of belief in the mainstream media leading to fears for ‘truth,’ for democracy and for political debate itself. One explanation for this ‘crisis’ is Pariser’s claim that we’re split today into personal ‘filter bubbles,’ where personally-chosen networks and information and algorithmically-fed feeds remove us from a plurality of sources and a shared experience of the world. This argument has value, but it fails to recognize that the entire, previous era of broadcast media was itself a ‘bubble’—a ‘mainstream bubble,’ encompassing the entirety of the population and filtering collectively not individually, by market demographics, professional codes of conduct, government regulation and advertiser good-will, ensuring nothing too extreme or offensive appeared. Our world of individual bubbles, therefore, is the result of the digital bursting of the mainstream bubble and its mass-filtered mass-consensual reality. Digital technologies have exploded our informational sources into the fractal fragments of everything we can see or find—every friend, follower, message, link, webpage, forum, comment, personal, direct or group message, every gif and meme, photograph, video, update, ‘like’ or ‘story’ and into anything one can think or do or explore and enjoy, however far outside the mainstream. But this isn’t simply about individual bubbles, but rather the foam of individual bubbles—as Sloterdijk suggests of ‘foam cities,’ we are not dealing with ‘mere agglomerations of adjacent (separation-sharing) inert and solid bodies,’ but rather with ‘multiplicities of loosely-touching lifeworldly cells,’ each of which ‘possesses the dignity of a universe’ (Sloterdijk 565). This foam represents, therefore, a foam of personally-created life worlds: a Cambrian explosion of realities. Far from being post-truth, there has never been as much—or rather so many truths. At the core of this proliferation of realities is the hyper-empowered, hyper-productive digital self.