Cyberpunk'd

I feel I'm living in a cyberpunk book, but not a sexy, fashionable Japanese AI cat-actress one. More a dusty, cold, Junior Anti-Sex League, Ministry of Truth one.

Esquire article: How Russian pulled off the biggest Election hack in US history

Many Americans don't believe things that are true are actually really real, so the 'real' identity of these hackers, and whether the infodumps are 'real' or altered, and whether Wikileak's Assange has been poised by Pamela Anderson's vegan sandwich or whether your internet-connected garage door opener really did participate in bringing down Twitter last week and why Trump facilitates Putin's attempt to destabilize the US...are all moot, really. (Yes, really.)

As Karl Rove once said: 

"Guys like [the reporter documenting this conversation] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The article only mentions an old-fashioned mole once, but Arthur Rackham's

illustration of rat and mole is more fun than pictures of Putin. 

In the end leaks are unlikely to matter. Those who don't know there's such a thing as objective reality aren't necessarily going to begin believing in it just because it's in a Wikileaks dump. The overall effect may be for people to stop believing anything they're told, since it doesn't matter.  Unlike in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where out of date news items are disappeared down the memory hole and corrected news items take their place, whether we've always been at war with Eastasia or not is of no consequence, and whether the chocolate ration is increased or decreased can not be determined by the average person, since the bar size is variable inside the same-size wrapper and price is a tag on the shelf, where it is replaced weekly, not on the package where you can compare it to the last one you bought.