Recently finished another Phoenix Cast episode. Around the ~17:30 mark, the hosts discuss the problem with believing what we see on the internet.
Specifically, they’re talking about videos.
There was this series of very viral videos back in the day of construction workers using tape measures to pick stuff up from ten feet away, and it’s all fake, it was all a marketing campaign for a midwestern hardware chain.
…and there’s a guy who breaks down those videos into exactly how they do the cuts, how they do the pull outs, and it’s important to be able to look for things like that.
Conti and Current Events, Phoenix Cast
Did you ever see this?
Impressive, right?
As they mentioned in the episode, the whole thing was fake. It was part of a marketing campaign.
Unfortunately, they didn’t link to the videos in the show notes so I had to spend some time digging around to find them. But I’m glad I did.
Here’s the first breakdown:
And then the coup de grâce.
Do you know what’s important here? It’s not that these videos were fake or deceptive, or that they could be picked apart with some careful analysis.
It’s that most people who saw these videos believed that they were real. They probably saw it at some point, laughed, shared it with their friends, and never gave it a second thought.
That’s how propaganda works. You never go back to watch the debunk videos. The first one was good enough.
And you want to believe.
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