As a young child growing up in Gorham, Sean Edwards played outside, rode his bike with the other kids in the neighborhood and dug tunnels in the snowbanks. “Then some time in high school, we got broadband,” he notes ominously.
Edwards graduated from Gorham High School in 2006, and he says that if you include high school internships, he’s touched computers professionally for over two decades. These days he helps connect the computer systems of Fortune 100 companies.
Edwards recalls that in his earliest days online, he spent his time starting arguments in AOL chatrooms. “Mac vs. PC. Computer vs. gaming consoles. Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs. I wasn’t picky about the topic as long as people were arguing,” he says. “This type of behavior is called trolling.”
As internet access evolved, Edwards discovered what he calls “a dreadful website that you should never visit,” where he found “images too graphic to describe in a community newspaper. There, I learned that irony and sarcasm are a cheap and versatile defense mechanism. That website has so many manipulated images that it becomes a meme: ‘This looks [photo]shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.’ ”
Edwards shares his firsthand experiences as a way of sounding an alarm. “I want people to understand the depth of my sincerity when I say that in the year 2026 and beyond, I cannot help you distinguish fact from fiction online,” he warns. “Your Facebook feed is not a representation of reality. Your news homepage is only showing you the stories that you want to see. Every action you take online is measured and tracked, and the content you see is purely based on whether the platform thinks you’re likely to like, comment or watch. The internet is awash in propaganda, AI-generated slop, and people like me who are just trying to make you mad for the fun of it.”
In short, Edwards says, “the internet does not care for the truth.”
Edwards considers modern society to be in a state of epistemological crisis. At one time, he says, we may have disagreed on our priorities, but we basically agreed on the facts of the world. “Now, huge swaths of the population are exposed to such vastly divergent information environments that the most basic truths of reality seem to be up for debate. They aren’t,” he adds, “but that doesn’t seem to stop anybody from debating anyway.”
Yet Edwards shares that amidst the backdrop of this perilous internet landscape, some things remain unquestionably true: “the events in our town, the ones you see in the real world with your own eyes, the stories your neighbors tell you about what happened in their own lives. You can read about these events in your local community paper, published every two weeks by your own neighbors, using their real names and email addresses.”
Sean Edwards has joined the Gorham Times staff as IT manager.