I’m convinced that Terry Pratchett was this era’s Nasreddin, a man of great wisdom and enlightenment who could only communicate it through humor and pranks. In this article from the Guardian
“Let’s say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the second world war and the Holocaust didn’t happen,” said Pratchett, almost 25 years ago. “And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.”
Techno-optimists disagreed, but he understood how stories worked and how hard it is for people to think, let alone critically.
