We are in the painful process of understanding our post-truth world: a world, shaped by algorithms and online interaction, which was taking shape long before 2016. Scholars like Shoshana Zuboff, with her theory of surveillance capitalism, have already made great strides in examining this world through the lens of social sciences.
In ‘There Are No Facts: Attentive Algorithms, Extractive Data Practices, and the Quantification of Everyday Life’ (The MIT Press, £22.50, ISBN 9780262047470), Mark Shephard, associate professor of architecture and media study at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York, draws from contemporary thinkers like Zuboff and Joy Buolamwini, as well as the likes of Hannah Arendt, Bruno Latour, Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, to present a theory of ‘post-truth spatiality’.
If this sounds a little opaque to the lay reader, that would be because – like many of the best and worst works in social sciences – it is...