Neal Stephenson says social media is close to a ‘doomsday machine’

PC Magazine interviewed Neal Stephenson about his new upcoming book Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell , as well as “the digital afterlife, and why social media is a doomsday machine.” [Possible spoilers ahead]:Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot’s reader in 2004 , and since then has “spent years as an advisor for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ private space company Blue Origin,” the article points out. He’s also currently the “chief futurist” for Magic Leap — though he tells his interviewer that some ideas go back much further.Part of his new book builds on “a really old idea” from security researcher Matt Blaze, who in the mid-1990s talked about “Encyclopedia Disinformatica”, which Stephenson describes as “a sort of fake Wikipedia containing plausible-sounding but deliberately false information as a way of sending the message to people that they shouldn’t just believe everything that they see on the internet.”

Source: news.slashdot.org