All these years later I still think about house hippos once a month or so.
Confused? So was I, as a kid, seeing this PSA for the first time. The footage looked so…real. I couldn’t help but wonder, halfway through, whether there really were tiny hippos in my kitchen.
There aren’t, of course. This was a lesson, designed to teach Canadian youth such as myself the value of thinking critically about media.
There’s something melancholy about watching this online, in 2018, alongside the conspiracy theory thumbnails YouTube’s algorithm sticks in the suggestion box. There’s just so much untruth in the world now, and most of it is a lot harder to debunk than the tiny hippos sleeping in my dryer lint.
I wish I could be so sincere the belief, presented above, that if we all think critically about what we’re watching we will spot the difference between what’s real and what’s false. That with a little critical thought we can come to some objective agreement on what truth is.
But we don’t want to know the truth: we want to be told we were right all along. The world’s smartest engineers are working on algorithms that spot this pattern and accelerate it—all in the name of Increasing Engagement.
And so we’re stuck, unable to find common ground, wondering why we’re so angry with each other. There’s probably some forum somewhere with people arguing, sincerely or otherwise, that house hippos are real. And another group, earnestly trying to argue with them, getting nowhere. That, seemingly, is just how the world is right now.
And that’s how the world will be, until we all want truth more than we want to be proven correct. Until we all want policies that work more than we want our side to win. Until we all find some way to live in the same reality again.
