Om Malik:
The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in
1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century
aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and
moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is
hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions
degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is
predatory at every level, and the institutions that should
protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to
his interests. […]Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose
grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses
almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close
study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into
every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims.
Authority figures perform competence without exercising it.
Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle
and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a
naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a
good story about easy reward.The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting
lies are the ones that work.
I’m not sure which sphere of interest this essay applies better to: post-AI tech, or post-Trump politics.
