B1_#024 // The Fake Newsroom // Georgi Belyanov 

The problem these days is not that some media are bad at the job they do; the problem is that they are all too good at it.

Alain de Botton once cynically voiced a simple truth about the media: ‘What do you think is the purpose of the news? No, it is not to inform; it is to sell.’

In an age in which we are cultured to accept that all opinions are valid and deserve a platform for expression, that is exactly what we get: a profusion of voices all fighting for our attention using any means possible. Could it be that the fault is not in the media, but instead in us, and our unquenchable thirst for information? Has the notorious consumerism of our time transgressed the way we connect with material things, and diffused into our relationship with knowledge and information? Are we all going out of mind? 

No, it is not that our world is going mad, but that it is experiencing the side effects of an unlikely era of peace and unchallenged freedom. The decades-long vacuum in which Western ideology stood unopposed beside the corpses of its enemies, one dissolving and another waiting to be reborn, has had its toll on itself. Today’s abundance of alternative news is a decay product of a precipitating implosion in the liberal democratic order, which has gone limp and spoiled in the lack of a serious enemy. The advancing return to an unsteady, polycentric world of warring states and ideologies might prove to be the unexpected remedy to the ‘fake news’ virus, stifling, in the process, our liberties too.

The cube is a physical realisation of today’s media environment: a free-for-all of conflicting opinions, where one freely and proudly aligns oneself to their favourite flavour from the stream of endless information.

Georgi Belyanov is a Diploma Student at the Architectural Association