Poe in Cyberspace: How Much of the Internet Is Fake?

In the spring of 2018 "Poe in Cyberspace" marked its twentieth anniversary with a retrospective of memorable highlights. The column then went into hiatus for about a year—during which time the internet underwent radical changes that were unprecedented. The old era of confidence and trust in the internet was replaced by one of growing doubt and suspicion. It was a sign of the times in the spring of 2018 when Google had to abandon its famous original motto, "Don't be evil." The Cambridge Analytica scandal, which also broke around that same time, ended public confidence in social networks after it came to light that personal data, collected by Facebook for supposed research purposes, had been packaged and sold to unscrupulous political operators. It was a tipping point. Many users began to question Facebook's apparent tolerance for fakes and misinformation. It was discovered, too, that many people and organizations on social networks were actually fake; the websites on which they appeared were also fake; and the supporting data they presented was fake as well. In the new attention economy, people who thought they were consumers of the internet discovered they were actually the product packaged and sold to advertisers in the form of personal information. Although many users continued to accept these risks because of free and convenient internet service, many others who were becoming more aware of downsides in matters of privacy, authenticity, and transparency, began seriously to considering withdrawing from Facebook, Google, YouTube, and other social networks.

For Poe, a century and a half ago, the new information technology and culture of the 1840s had raised surprisingly similar hopes and fears. The electric telegraph networks became what Tom Standage in his book called The Victorian Internet. Poe in his extravaganza "The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade" was vigorously optimistic about the new technology, teasing readers who were not au courant with all the most recent inventions. The fun was that Poe's descriptions were so grossly overinflated that they required explanatory footnotes, which he happily provided. Thus the man made "out of brass and wood, and leather," who could beat almost anyone at chess, was Maelzel's Automaton Chess-Player. The device that could match "the united labor of fifty thousand fleshy men for a year" proved to be Babbage's Calculating Machine. For the reader with the problem of making "twenty thousand copies of the Koran in an hour" the solution was the Electro Telegraph Printing Apparatus. Moreover, any writer "could sit down in Damascus and indite a letter at Bagdad" with the Electro Telegraph, the device that "transmits intelligence instantaneously … [to] any distance upon the earth." Finally, the artist who "directed the sun to paint his portrait, and the sun did" was simply using the Daguerreotype.

Poe also expressed his confidence in a technological development he called the "pure machine." In "Maezel's Chess Player," he observed that the device sometimes lost a game, and therefore, as Poe concluded, it could not be the fully automatic mechanism it claimed to be: "Were the machine a pure machine this would not be the case—it would always win." Poe also believed that the power of logic extended to aesthetic matters, claiming in "The Philosophy of Composition" that after the appropriate preliminary steps a poem could be directly composed "with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem."

Today, as confidence in the internet is giving way to doubt and suspicion, especially in the press, users have become more reluctant to share personal information on social networks. This negative momentum has made it possible to ask a hitherto unimaginable question: "How much of the internet is fake?" Well-documented articles in The Atlantic, New York magazine, and the New York Times surveyed the rise of bots and fakes and the resulting mood of disillusion, skepticism, and suspicion. Human web traffic (what a phrase!) had fallen to under 60 percent, according to one estimate, and as much as half of YouTube traffic already consisted of "bots masquerading as people." The imminent danger was that if fake sites exceeded 50...