When it comes to the past, wherever truth matters, fakes abound. The creation, distortion, manipulation or reconstitution of information shapes our experience of the world at every level.
A Greek inscription in the Museum of Ancient Cultures at Macquarie University. Several aspects of its script and language suggest it may be a modern forgery. Credit: Effy Alexakis.
The growing sophistication of technology seems to have amplified rather than solved the problem by providing new techniques for faking everything, from currency through to identity. Such nefarious uses of technology have fast outstripped developments in authentication.
While scientific procedures are increasingly used to authenticate artefacts, these techniques often fall short. As capable as they are of identifying modern fakes, they are unable to prove whether an object is authentic – they can only determine that they are not forgeries.
Telling ‘real’ from ‘fake’, ‘true’ from ‘false’ and ‘original’ from ‘copy’ is not simply a dilemma of modern information technology – seen, for example, in the recent rise of politicians invoking the phrase “fake news” as a rhetorical tool to undermine rival opponents – but a crisis of history.
A Middleground 