The Age of Everything and Nothing
Our abundance has created the modern void instead of fulfillment
In high school, I convinced a close group of friends that a ninja had won one of the very first Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC). The story I told bordered on the absurd, complete with smoke bombs and the ninja disappearing suddenly after the fight, never to receive the award. Given that I was the only martial artist among my friends, they believed me. There was no way to fact check in the late 1990s either, as we were all using the internet to message our friends on America Online, not surfing Google to prove they were liars. Plus, there was the pesky business of having to spin up your second land line from a boxy PC or Commodore 64 that sat in your parents’ bedroom or office while it screamed “skee dee da dee da dee” (that was the noise your modem dial up made when you logged on for all the youngsters out there). It wasn’t like today, where you can simply pull out your phone and ask Google to find song lyrics or prove your friend wrong. Instead, most times you just took people’s word at face value.
I first started using the internet to fact check during my college years in the early 2000s. However, most professors refused to accept a works cited sheet with information coming from the World Wide Web. It just wasn’t “verifiable” they’d contend, given…
