Joy to the world : the satisfaction of post-truth.

Abstract

This article aims to uncover the key preconditions and characteristics of post-truth as well as the contextual factors explaining its appeal. The key factor appears to be posttruth’s ability to incite pleasure, in terms of both it being unconstrained by veracity and the advance and the capacity to know what the necessary pleasure-inciting variables are through big data analysis. That neatly corresponds with the general rise to prominence of satisfaction and affective mobilisation in competition over increasingly scarce audience attention, making post-truth a distinctly contemporary phenomenon.