I like to imagine that Dr Rachael “Raygun” Gunn’s Olympic performance was an academic’s commentary on our current predicament in dealing with mis- and disinformation. The post-modernist academic movement of the late 20th century popularised the idea that there is no objective truth, just subjective experience. It asserts that the way that I perceive the world around me is to be privileged over an observable and external reality: the concept formerly known as the truth.

Which is what makes the Raygun breakdancing performance so on point – deliberately or not. The judges rated it as objectively, thoroughly – zero marks – awful. By taking her very special type of breaking to the global Olympic stage, Raygun demonstrated that something can be bad by a set of clearly defined criteria in a forum explicitly designed to reward excellence. And some people – a frightening number of people – will still insist that it was really actually totally good. If we fall for that, we’ll fall for anything. We can no longer discern what is good or bad, true or false.

The judges gave her zero. Gunn said the “hate” in the wake of her controversial performance had been “pretty devastating”.Credit: AP

It’s a timely skewering of the post-modernist fad. We should realise by now that it was a serious error to undermine the notion of objective reality. It has rendered us ill-equipped to deal with social media, which provides spaces for an infinite number of different realities, crowding out the shared frame of reference and forum for debate that the mainstream media once........

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