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Regular news readers are likely familiar with headlines describing the recurring “deluge of disinformation [ [link removed] ]” in our political life. Disinformation—distorted or false information disseminated with the desire to deceive those who encounter it—is nothing new. As historians have shown [ [link removed] ], conspiracy theories [ [link removed] ], a form of disinformation that many in the media see as the great threat to American life today, have been something of a constant in U.S. political life for more than a century.
Of late, however, American academics and commentators suggest that both the content and the volume of disinformation have changed. The 2024 election cycle, with the attempted assassinations of former President Trump and the Democratic Party’s internal struggle to replace President Biden, has only further polarized online communities toward conspiratorial thinking. The result is that nearly 40% [ [link removed] ] of previously unknown and unimportant functionaries of state and local electoral systems are regularly targeted in pressure campaigns and subject to threats [ [link removed] ].
But the problem of mis- and disinformation is not just American democracy’s to bear. Some of the most consequential global events of this decade seem to demonstrate how disinformation can spread to the detriment of others. The global COVID-19 pandemic raised divisive debates [ [link removed] ] about disinformation and public health, prompting both legitimate critiques of public policy and conspiracy theorizing that lingers in our media environment like a virus that can’t be treated.
Russia’s ground operations in Ukraine have been matched by an “information war [ [link removed] ]” in the bitstream; Chinese meddling in the information ecosystems of countries across Asia [ [link removed] ] and Africa [ [link removed] ] proceeds apace; and the U.S. government continues its recent [ [link removed] ] and long-standing [ [link removed] ] efforts to massage how societies think about its boondoggles abroad—all testifying to the susceptibility of mass audiences to manipulation by those in power. Scholars have thus posed the question: Are the pandemic and government disinformation campaigns “two sides of the same coin [ [link removed] ]” in a growing crisis of modern telecommunications that imperils civilization itself?
Disinformation in the Internet Era
Enter Walter Scheirer, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, whose recent book, “A History of Fake Things on the Internet [ [link removed] ],” complicates any narrative that interprets our disinformation-rich digital age as entirely unprecedented—and therefore threatening—in the sweep of human history. The book draws from technological developments in virtual reality, image recognition and machine learning; the cultural history of the computer hacker underground; and the profane and sometimes grotesque content shared in electronic bulletin board systems (and, later, web communities like 4chan or rotten.com). Scheirer argues that layered technologies, media and online communities made the internet into “an extension of the world’s imagination.”
To Scheirer, the internet ushered in an era of “participatory media” that made everyday users of novel telecommunications contributors to a society’s metanarratives, its central myths. Blending the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ concern with the system of symbols that guides members of societies in giving their world meaning and media studies expert Marshall McLuhan’s emphasis on the mechanism of new mass media technologies, Scheirer proposes a theory of the internet as a “myth engine.” For Scheirer, myths are the “collective expression[s] of an entire community” that reflect the “human condition.” As such, they are an essential medium for communities to process anxieties and uncertainties about technological and social change.
The internet is but the latest medium for human mythmaking, Scheirer argues. Modern telecommunications channels are thus not so different from ancient pottery; and in “Fake Things,” readers will encounter several photo panels where fabled heroes like Heracles appear side-by-side with memes of Wojak, testifying to continuities across different media in time and place. Mythmaking, and the general “inclination to tell meaningful stories,” is nowhere more visible than in the chatrooms and webpages that make up the internet.
In centuries past, Scheirer argues, a society’s aristocracy, clergy and/or national elite dominated the media. Developments in photography, telephony and print from the late 19th century onward challenged elite control of a society’s myths and cultural narratives. Scheirer sees the internet, and the sphere of “participatory fakery” it created, as another step toward the democratization of society’s mythmaking.
While Scheirer is far from the first to push back against hand-wringing about the status of our modern information ecosystem, his claim that the internet is only the latest evolution in media for human mythmaking stands out from other interpretations or dismissals of the disinformation problem. Lengthier [ [link removed] ] literature [ [link removed] ] reviews [ [link removed] ] questioning the extent of our post-truth era are being published in academic journals, which, while enduring their own crisis of fakery, [ [link removed] ] can benefit from the slower pace, if not the process, of peer review.
Thus Matthew Yglesias, ever skimming the pool of social-scientific discourse for intriguing floaters, made a utilitarian argument that, if anything, people were better informed because of the internet, declaring [ [link removed] ]: “The ‘misinformation problem’ seems like misinformation.” Yglesias is ultimately too dismissive, but looking back, this viral ascent of research agendas and commentary focusing on disinformation seems to mirror the speedy spread of the very vectors of so-called disinformation it sought to diagnose.
Ultimately, Scheirer’s book is a cool rejoinder that places this booming literature in a broader social and historical perspective. Interpreting the internet as a new technology channeling old tendencies toward mythmaking punctures inflated narratives about the unprecedented sense of difference scholars and journalists confer on the digital age. Rather than a radical rupture to an idealized information ecosystem of yesterday, Scheirer insists that fake content in the digital age is merely the latest manifestation of the age-old human tendency to make sense of our shared world.
The Social Significance of Fake Content Online
The politics and practices of online communities are crucial for Scheirer’s argument. Computer hackers in particular reveal the social significance of fake content online. Scheirer himself came up through the hacker underground of the late 1980s and ’90s, when hackers thought their technical practices could shape the budding internet—and change the world. Inspired by media-savvy, countercultural activists known as yippies (members of the Youth International Party), hackers created communities on electronic bulletin board systems, shared ideas and technical information in text files, and celebrated the practice of “culture jamming”—that is, media alteration and disruption—at get-togethers or hacker-cons.
Hackers often understood that their unique skills and knowledge of information networks could be used to control and manipulate others, a practice hackers themselves called “social engineering.” As Scheirer puts it, serious and amateur hackers alike could “force the world’s power centers to react to their antics with relatively little effort,” especially by goading journalists to report on entertaining but ultimately fake hacker exploits. Even as mainstream and “white hat” hacker groups entered American corporate and professional life in the 1990s, many hackers within these groups produced fake content to fool the media or troll their enemies. Fake content, Scheirer writes, was a key tool in the hacker’s repertoire—and a foundational aspect of what would become a shared hacker culture.
Scheirer covers a range of other niche communities, chat rooms and forums that embraced the internet’s invitation to participatory fakery, but he also argues that some practices extended the democratization of mythmaking beyond enthusiast communities of early adopters. Photoshop—both the literal software and the practice of photo alteration the verb “photoshopping” now signifies—quickly became the site of practices that “channel[ed] fantasies into a virtual space that others could experience simultaneously.”
Rather than heralding an onslaught of malicious disinformation or the death of democracy, Scheirer argues that faked virtual images and fabricated virtual realities are a shared aesthetic experience that can become the basis of enduring community. Photoshop thus recalls the political aspirations of midcentury American artists who, as historian Fred Turner shows [ [link removed] ], saw collaborative art and communications as the precursor to a renewed, open and inclusive American democracy. In the internet age, Scheirer sees filtered selfies, memes and manipulated visual media—all of which can be made with ease on a smartphone—as a new mode of creative expression.
In some ways, this content mirrors the photography that came before it, Scheirer explains by way of Hippolyte Bayard [ [link removed] ], a key contributor to early photography. Bayard had developed a technique of exposing photosensitive material to light for a long period of time that competed with the emerging daguerreotype as a method for photography. In a sensational but “fake” photograph portraying Bayard himself as a corpse in a morgue, “Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man,” Bayard drew attention to his plight and his photography, using a newfound participatory media environment to leverage attention for gain.
Historians might object, as some did to Levi-Strauss, that Scheirer’s search for a universal pattern in mythmaking can flatten historical differences in societies and technologies. Would Bayard, the 19th-century photographer, really be “right at home on 4chan, the Internet image-board community, where the practice of pairing weird images with brief outrageous stories is prevalent”? The sentence strains historical imagination. Still, Scheirer’s historical arc—ending with the technology and media of the internet scaling up the process of human mythmaking—is alluring, especially to anyone who has spent time chatting with others online.
Mythmaking for All
Scheirer is sanguine about the democratization of mythmaking. He writes that “things aren’t nearly as bad as they might seem” and implores others “to leave the excessive pessimism of current discourse behind.” Rather, researchers should “stay far away from alarmism, instead seeking pragmatic ways to draw distinctions between instances of fakery that are significant engines of cultural creation and those that pose as threat due to their message.” But how to differentiate benign from threatening disinformation? Deciding what makes one myth good and another bad would seem to be an inevitably controversial exercise.
This tension is nowhere clearer than when Scheirer examines the endless streams of “shocking content” on the internet. Take the fake Islamic State beheadings or impossibly contrived and utterly degrading sex acts on the website rotten.com, created in 1996 by a pseudonymous hacker, “Soylent.” Soylent, by day a Netscape programmer named Tom Dell, was active in hacker communities that shared bizarre, shocking and grotesque photos and textiles. The act of circulating such materials, to many hackers, was a political act that suggested the internet was no place for censorship.
Scheirer focuses on sites like rotten.com as a medium for human mythmaking. “Horrifying content” is often more than a “mechanism of titillation—especially when the observer is paying attention to and learning from what they are seeing,” Scheirer writes. “The communication medium and its message aren’t necessarily working against us, even if both conspire to rough up the viewer a bit.” In other words, horrific content can be both “visually disturbing” and “culturally significant.”
Scheirer’s argument that participatory fakery and shocking content serve an important social function in the internet age is compelling. When scholars write on issues of public concern in the present, however, at some point the sophisticated artifice of academic argument comes up against the immerse pressure of organized interests and moral outrage. What readers should make of a society potentially “desensitized [ [link removed] ]” to violence, horror or misogyny; of AI deepfakes [ [link removed] ] depicting real-life women and girls in the nude; of misleading information about topics ranging from climate change [ [link removed] ] to vaccines [ [link removed] ] taking root in specific online communities—these are issues that produce citizen demand for intervention into the information environment. Scheirer’s case study approach in “Fake Things” means the big questions about general trends and how we ought to interpret them are largely left to the side. Determining what, if any, interventions are needed in the media ecosystem “is the territory of world governments, not of computer scientists,” Scheirer writes.
Scheirer ultimately suggests that the best way to deal with fake content online, and, by extension, the disinformation problem writ large, is through education. Drawing on thinkers like philosopher Shannon Vallor [ [link removed] ], who argues that we need to think about how technologies interact with the idea of virtue, he writes that “perhaps the best path forward is through education in social norms, to steer content for long-standing social problems instead of confronting the unethical behavior that nourishes them.” In other words: “Don’t starve creativity,” Scheirer asserts, “starve bad content.”
Scheirer’s self-styled pragmatic and cautious optimism about information in the digital world reflects a commitment to the idea that liberal democracies, and open societies generally, are actually quite good at working out their kinks in the long run. A crisis appears paramount today, but we should understand it as another point in the incomprehensibly large streams of data that are eventually reduced to the history of a period. If media is not just the message, but a “massage” that “takes hold” of its consumers and “bumps them around, chiropractically,” as McLuhan wrote in a 1967 manifesto [ [link removed] ], members of society should reasonably wonder about the chiropractors laying hands on the body politic. For now, I think we’re rather like a chiropractor’s patient who can’t make heads or tails of whether all this damned cracking helps or hurts.

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