Jigsaw puzzle by Nina Torr
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Don’t Be Rubbish, Be a Pearl!
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Daniel Mróz – drawing from the archives (no. 731/1959)
Wellbeing, Fiction

Don’t Be Rubbish, Be a Pearl!

The Era of Fake News
Paulina Wilk
Reading
time 8 minutes
Paulina Wilk:
used be an editor of the Culture & Society section. She is a writer and journalist focusing on global development.

Just when humanity invented technology that allows us to acquire certain, truthful knowledge and to share it easily, a sudden change of direction has taken place. We’re turning away from facts to float on a wave of disinformation and often mistaken intuition. It’s not clear whether the truth still means anything. Nor how to distinguish lies from irony or fiction.

A man with his hair in a distinctive side parting and a reddened angry face stretches out a pointing finger and declares with a frown: “Fake news!” This slogan quickly became an irreverent (or hateful) way to silence adversaries – just how fake news itself has become an element of jokes, but is simultaneously a phenomenon that is seriously and in a real way disintegrating our world.

Many different varieties of T-shirt depicting Donald Trump proclaiming his trademark expression are available to buy, and it’s this image of the president that will be the most enduring memento of his political career – in a time when Mr Trump will no longer be news.

In the meantime, it remains symbolic of this era in which we’re turning our backs on factual events and proof, and looking doe-eyed at misleading, mendacious or nonsensical content. The robots that spin the global drum of news entertainment (which includes news and all sorts of rubbish, cynical lies, mistakes, jokes and propaganda) serve the interests of money. If you’re wondering how on earth it

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Paulina Wilk:
used be an editor of the Culture & Society section. She is a writer and journalist focusing on global development.
Translation: Zosia Krasodomska-Jones
Publish date: 18.09.2020

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The Ethics of the Youth
Paulina Wilk
Paulina Wilk:
used be an editor of the Culture & Society section. She is a writer and journalist focusing on global development.

“Go and protest,” they hear from grown-ups. “You must rebuild the world!” The youth, however, choose to respond with a new ethics of gentleness.

As it hurled across the world, the coronavirus pandemic put many phenomena into sharper focus. One of them is the marginalization of the youth – ignoring their problems, chances, and sometimes even their very existence. Over the course of the past few months, the media gave most of their attention to those most vulnerable to the new disease, that is, the elderly who, in the ever-ageing West, make for a broad demographic. Meanwhile, the young have entirely disappeared from the picture. For many weeks, they also vanished from the spaces they dominated in 2019 with their relentless protests on the streets of Hong Kong, squares of Sudan, the arteries of European and Australian cities. The fear of contagion had blocked those hotheaded, often underage freedom fighters, as well as the Earth and sustainable development. Governments, police and armies have failed to contain young people’s determination. In Sudan, the regime collapsed, and the Chinese dragon is wobbling in Hong Kong. The pandemic came as a bolt from the blue.

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