La Voz de Galicia – October 13, 2023 →
Atrocities are everywhere. But this month, reading about the multiple conflicts around the world, one can’t stop asking about what depths the human condition can reach.
Miguel-Anxo Murado wrote this week about the fact that «Israel gets its information about Gaza through electronic means,» and that Hamas, knowing that, probably planned the attack «in person in subterranean bunkers.» And these days, talking about this topic with Antonio Murado (Miguel-Anxo’s brother and a neighbor of mine in New York), we reflected on the idea that in the era of technological power, in the era of constant connection, Hamas’ tool was, precisely, to avoid contact with it.
Also this week, The New York Times published an article about the quantity of false information that is flooding the web and that «runs the risk of obscuring real proof of atrocities.» Identifying, clarifying, and refuting some of the videos and documents that are being shared virally. In this hyperconnected world we are no longer aware of the power of the media, for good as much as for evil. And we probably know that misinformation, the act of misinforming, whose definition from the RAE is «to provide information intentionally manipulated to serve certain ends,» is a tool as complex as it is harmful, a weapon that has already shown us what it is capable of doing.
And I imagine that we now will attend again to a parallel and constant war, the war of misinformation, a war that foments hatred and polarization. A war that will make us question every day where the physical and moral limits of the human condition are.
