Troll Armies, Filter Bubbles and the Quantity Theory of Truth; What Sun Tzu didn’t say

• In Event: New Approaches to Crime and Surveillance in a Post-Truth Society

Abstract

Truth has often been construed as a purely philosophical problem – as an epistemological challenge or a metaphysical mystery. In this paper I show why the phenomenon of ‘post-truth’ demands a criminological response as much as a philosophical one. For criminologists, the pursuit of truth is not just about correspondence with fact - as the positivist aspirations upon which it is founded demand. Rather, truth also serves as co-ordinate field with dimensions which map social order and disorder, norms & the anomic, guilt, innocence and the contours of justice itself. Viewed through this criminological lens, the strategic dimensions of truth are laid bare and so-called ‘post-truth’ revealed for what it really is – a project of conquest and control. In this wider field, Sun Tzu’s maxim that ‘all warfare is based on deception’ can be augmented by a more contemporary tactical approach. This is the mobilisation of truth ‘fullness’ where deception is outflanked, outmanoeuvred and subsumed by the overwhelming force of an alethic landscape in which the first crime - the lie - and the last punishment – being forced to ‘eat one’s own words’, form one kind of boundary condition.

Author

• Mike McGuire, University of Surrey