e-Mithridatism

Mithridates VI Eupator, the King of Pontus, ruled during the 1st century BC. His life was defined by a constant fear of assassination. His father was assassinated by poisoning, and as a young man, Mithridates grew suspicious that his mother was also plotting to kill him by poisoning his food. Paranoid and surrounded by enemies, Mithridates turned to toxicology. According to legend, he fled into the wilderness and began experimenting with various plant and animal toxins. He sought to create a “universal antidote” and began consuming small, sub-lethal doses of diverse poisons, gradually increasing the quantity to train his body to tolerate them. This process is known as Mithridatism.

At first sight, it looks like the vaccination process: you inject yourself with degraded viruses in order to make your immune system learn how to spot and fight the pathogens. There is a subtle difference, though: in the vaccination process, the training is discrete—a few injections—and it does not consist of increasing doses.

In this piece, I want to defend the thesis that our media environment is increasingly looking like Mithridatism rather than vaccination. Moreover, the “poison” against which you are trained to resist is the idea of truth.

Release the phials

The constant release of files containing half-redacted documents is the process. In our digital media environment, it has become impossible to hide things. Before this, if no major newspaper or TV broadcast talked about it, there was no way to know. Now that every human is hooked on their smartphone—which also happens to be a video recorder—that is another story. Take a movie like Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The plot is the following: a quid pro quo leads an innocent advertising executive to be pursued across the country by a ring of foreign spies determined to keep their government secrets hidden. As he races to clear his name, he finds himself caught in a high-stakes conspiracy involving a microfilm smuggled inside a piece of pre-Columbian art. Nowadays, a WhatsApp message sent by a 12-year-old would have solved the plot in 0.5 seconds.

And it is what happens regularly with real government secrets. They never remain secret anymore. So what is the cure? The focused reader has already guessed it: Mithridatism. Let’s call it e-Mithridatism, or i-Mithridatism if you are part of the Apple crowd.

With this idea in mind, the recent file releases become more understandable. Such grandiose revelations, which actually raise more questions than they answer simple and legitimate queries, are designed to train the public to spot the trees to miss the forest. And if you think about it, the discreteness, shortness, and uniformity of social media posts are the perfect package. The social media is the message.

As the purpose of a system is what it does, the legitimate move is to observe what is produced by this e-Mithridatism.

Lost in translation

The movie Lost in Translation is about two strangers who bond together while they are both in a foreign country where they don’t understand anything. They are in one of the largest conurbations on earth, Tokyo, but are somehow alone. Watching the movie again in the social media era shows what every good piece of art does: it takes on a new meaning. Bob and Charlotte are like two accounts navigating the immensity of the web. They don’t understand much, just like a 2026 citizen living under a deluge of revelations. They explore Tokyo like social media mutuals explore the web, sharing idiosyncrasies. They have more profound exchanges than with their respective spouses. The movie ends on their way back. Real life still exists, and once in a while, the user disconnects from social media.

The whole atmosphere of the movie is the best encapsulation of what is the result of the e-Mithridatism. People feel farther from reality than ever, and they can just randomly hope to meet someone with whom to share something. Because sharing trust with the government is something of the last millennium. The process of e-Mithridatism is felt rather than thought through. At least before the digital era, the government was like: I won’t tell you. Now it has become: I will tell you everything and anything and act as if my words have no longer any value. This is the lived experience corresponding to the social one that I explored in The Distributed Krakens have been released.

The bitter end

Contrary to what Mithridates believed, his technique is not universal. There are some poisons to which the body cannot be trained to build resistance. Take heavy metal poisoning, such as lead or arsenic: the poison accumulates in the body, and the health effects become increasingly severe over time.

The legend concludes with dramatic irony. After being defeated by the Roman general Pompey the Great, Mithridates attempted to commit suicide to avoid capture. However, because his body had become so accustomed to various toxins, the poisons he ingested proved ineffective. Unable to kill himself, he was forced to order a mercenary to run him through with a sword.

It would be good if our leaders spent some time with the classics, though I somehow doubt they have.