A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland

When I began writing A Conspiracy of Truths, it was only ever supposed to be for fun.

There’s such a torrent of false positives that we survive by resisting the instincts of our lizard brains, armoring ourselves against the very stories that we’ve evolved to embrace. Half of the reason it feels so good to take a day or two away from Twitter is because your brain gets a rest from endlessly and reflexively sifting through clickbait and propaganda. Someone realized once how irresistible patterns are to our brains and, because capitalism, monetized it and set it loose on an unsuspecting population. These days, the hostile wilderness is made of stories-it’s not just the effortless access we have to movies, TV shows, games, but also the battering tempest of the unending news cycle, the way social media amplifies the audience’s every scream of response. And once you’re in, once you have them by the throat, you can do all sorts of things to a person. Show someone a story, tempt them into giving one percent of their attention to it, and you can hack right into that part of their lizard brain that evolved to make educated guesses about the world around them, the better to keep them alive in a hostile wilderness. We see a piece of paper with green ink making pictures, and we impose a story on that too: Not just paper and green ink, but money, a dollar, and suddenly that same scrap of paper and ink has the arbitrary worth of approximately one candy bar. We look into the night sky and see a random scattering of stars, and we impose order on it, drawing constellations and filling up the void with patterns-stories. It’s pattern recognition, technically, if you want to be dreadfully literal about it.

If the human brain has been optimized for one purpose, it’s storytelling. Just ask Alexandra Rowland about that, as it concerns her new book, A Conspiracy of Truths. Sometimes you start write something for fun, and then suddenly… the stakes become higher than that.

A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland