The Many Deaths Of Nelson Mandela

Pop culture and the meaning of life. Mini-essays written and illustrated by grimy, human hands.

Nelson Mandela died in 2013. Except if you think he died in the 1980s.

This erroneous belief is called The Mandela Effect, and appears in Chuck Klosterman’s brilliant, entertaining account of the nineties (called, with no messing about, The Nineties).

The Mandela Effect is a pop culture delusion, usually involving details from TV shows, movies, and brands which are then misremembered by sizable swathes of the population. Example: Sex In The City never existed. The show’s name is Sex And The City.

Obviously, though, this goes further than a horny lady in a tutu. It includes the belief that Alexander Hamilton was a president (he wasn't) and the location of New Zealand (especially important if you live in New Zealand). In other words, errors with consequences. Returning to Mandela himself: if Nelson had died in prison, he did not go on to topple apartheid or become the president of a liberated South Africa. Which means a rather large chunk of history did not take place.

Klosterman’s culprit is people in pubs without smartphones. In the nineties, if one overconfident drinker claimed that Mandela died in prison, nobody could fact check him, meaning his companions were more likely to accept Nelson’s premature non-aliveness...and indeed claim they “remembered” it themselves.

Klosterman writes: “Today, paraphrasing the established historical record or questioning empirical data is seen as an ideological, anti-intellectual choice. But until the very late nineties, it was often the only choice available.” And when the internet did go mainstream, these bullshit recollections went digital, multiplying like rabbits (whose rabbit holes presumably led to a stash of documents proving Elvis murdered JFK).

A new technology was widely adopted without anyone knowing how to use it. In our collective naivety, we accepted what was written on our screens.

Which leads me to wonder: are we at the start of a new version of the Mandela Effect? One powered by the “hallucinations” of AI, machines given to confabulation with all the confidence of a man in a pub in the nineties? If enough users fail to understand that a large language model is merely reflecting what it "thinks" you want to hear, essentially "co-writing a kind of story," what happens when enough of us accept these stories as reality?

"This becomes a conspiracy theory breeding ground," in the words of tech journalist Kevin Roose. Which means that Nelson Mandela may die many more times. And possibly be resurrected as a lizard person.

P.S. Arnold is, of course, the subject of a Mandela Effect. In fact, there's an extensive Reddit thread dedicated to him, part of the r/MandelaEffect subreddit.