David Baldacci is the author of more than 60 novels, including "All In," out this November.
FOR THE ARMIES of conspiracy theorists who march among us, times have never been so good. Politicians and governments are pushing misinformation that comports with their views. Chatbots hallucinate. Propagandists proliferate. And enormously wealthy individuals who live in such a unique bubble they might as well dwell on Mars are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate an electorate already staggering along in the face of competing realities.
Shovel in the fact that some conspiracy theories have turned out to be at least semi-plausible -- cue the drip-drip of UFO disclosures -- and you have fertile soil for sprawling kudzu-like growth in the business of manufactured truth.
The ubiquity of such fabrications does not make it any less dangerous to a democratic society. But perhaps it changes our plans for what we create to deal with it.
Before science came along, mythology was part of how we made sense of the natural world. Thor for thunderstorms, shrieking Sirens to explain shipwrecks, the abduction of Persephone the reason behind the bleakness of winter.
We have mostly evolved from that with the help of science and technological progress.
Yet something inherent in the human psyche still pushes us fiercely toward the rabbit warrens of outlier theories. Mythmaking is still a large part of how people understand the world, even if they now apply it to suspicions about the powerful institutions and advanced systems they no longer trust.
I know this as a novelist -- one who often probes my own mind for outlier theories. I have received many fan letters over the years that note my fiction can read like nonfiction. It's not necessarily by design. But I do believe to effectively assemble a thriller, a writer must contemplate all that is possible in the present to realistically construct what dark, fearful deeds are plausible in the future.
Some of the plots of my earlier novels would seem quaint today. In "The Whole Truth," which I wrote 23 years ago, an arms contractor, eager to start a new war to profit from, hires a talented manipulator to convince people, over the internet, that a horrible crime with dire global implications had taken place.
What's changed since "The Whole Truth" was published is the efficiency -- and quality of the delivery -- of misinformation. For every fact-filled story written by seasoned journalists, almost anyone could release an armada of chatbot accounts based on vaporous, cockeyed beliefs, dressed up enough to look like facts, so much so that even the most cynical among us is in danger of being duped. Add in the ever-growing quality of deepfakes, and it has never been easier to not only distort reality, but also to establish one's own beachhead on it.
It's as if the entire information ecosystem has been jumbled by an overactive imagination.
This is not a problem for animals. They can detect coming danger like earthquakes or floods because their senses deliver facts: a sound, a smell, the change of the wind. They cannot be convinced that such devastation was caused by a group of power-hungry maniacs in some bunker who are cloud seeding with zeal, or remotely detonating a nuke in the San Andreas Fault.
Yet it is precisely because the human mind can override both natural and common sense that we thrive, innovate and build: Our capacity for imagination is arguably what sets us the most apart from other living things.
PERHAPS WE ARE FIGHTING information collapse -- and societal fracturing -- with the wrong weapons. Arguing about facts doesn't deter outlandish ideas, misinformation or AI hallucination. Maybe more storytelling, more imagination, more fiction is what's needed to combat the unreality spun online.
After all, there's a reason dictators burn novels.
This is, of course, a theme of Ray Bradbury's classic "Fahrenheit 451, " published in 1953. In the book, most homes have parlor walls with huge video screens that broadcast streams of babbling commentary for both entertainment and manipulation. The point is to dissuade people from reading and shorten their attention spans. The actors in the videos are to become the people's new friends and idols, such that forming relationships with friends and family is no longer necessary. A nonstop pipeline of carefully controlled information, as well as people to look up and listen to, is deemed -- by the leaders behind this fictional authoritarian society -- to be the best way to control the people.
And if that doesn't ensure the populace is in thrall to the authoritarian narrative, the firemen of the novel burn books, ensuring ideas can't get into the hands of the people.
I don't mean to say that fiction is a substitute for a good education. But at our best, we novelists probe deeper truths precisely because the facts cannot always, ever, be totally known.
The idea for my 2022 novel "The 6:20 Man ," came from the Panama and Pandora Papers, massive document leaks that laid out how trillions of dollars could be floating around the world hidden from view and taxation by elaborately designed shell companies and other financial and legal skulduggery.
Heads of state, billionaires, royalty, global celebrities and other high-profile people were exposed and implicated. There were resignations from political offices, and many famous people suffered a great deal of embarrassment and public shame.
However, what the journalism didn't answer, at least for me, was: What could you do with trillions of dollars if it were collectively deployed? Using my best conspiracy theorist mindset, I came up with this: Instead of buying more jets or yachts, the villains in my novel collated their vast funds to buy people and power in countries around the world, with the goal of tilting the global playing field even more in their favor.
I pushed an idea to its extreme, but in so doing, I had to imagine the endless possibilities of our current, complicated modern day. The goal was not to convince readers of a new conspiracy theory, but to puncture the rigidity of any mindset that tells us only one reality is possible.
A conspiracy theorist subscribes with unshakable faith to an ideological worldview. A novelist explores narrative, making sense of themes, motifs and sensations to try to communicate about the complexity of a globe with some eight billion people in it.
ANY GOOD NOVEL will put you, the reader, in the shoes of different characters. You suffer and you cry with them, and also experience their joy, their challenges, their ambitions. No story is truly finished until the last reader inhabits it because we all put our unique imprimatur on any novel. The words are filtered through each reader's own individuality.
In that vein, the imagination as shaped by fiction is not focused on what divides but rather on what unites, even if the story depicts acts of brutality or oppression. The plays of Shakespeare will always be relevant because he wrote of human beings in both their elemental goodness and darkness. And though we may evolve as a people, we also remain the same in many ways: Folks today often act like their predecessors did during Shakespeare's time. That is not necessarily a bad thing; it is a badge and connection of our inner humanity.
No matter the strengths of AI, a chatbot cannot dream up stories with flawed characters and themes and arcs and failures and triumphs -- with ambiguous finales.
They use mashed-together databases to sense patterns and retrieve verbiage. Imagination only comes into play when someone takes a message from a chatbot and uses it for action. Of course, AI can ape us, and create things based on our patterns. That's sort of the whole point. I am currently a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Open AI and Microsoft, due to their unauthorized use of my and many other writers' works for training their large language models. (Yes, the AI community determined that super intelligence can be achieved most effectively by reading lots of books. Who knew?)
The very best novels will never try to explicitly sell you lies as the truth, or narrative as dogma. Yes, many do have themes and messages that are overt, or that spark reactions in the masses. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" are just a few examples of this. But none of these novels were set up to deliver a set of facts.
A novel makes you think and imagine why a story line might be right, or not, or both in some ways. And then -- and this is critical -- it makes you reach for another book, and thus more to think about. In addition to bestowing upon us the greatest of all human attributes -- empathy -- books also compel us to read in ever widening circles.
A well-read person grows body armor against the rigid conspiracy theorist, against flat artificial intelligence that manipulates without emotion. It is no coincidence that humanity shot forward when Gutenberg invented his printing press. Books are super fuel for the human mind, the mightiest intellect on earth. And right now, that intellect needs all the collective nutrition it can find.
Julian Master is an American photographer who documents our globalized, connected public life and the sometimes strange juxtapositions it creates.