The Death of Reality

When truth and proof cease to mean anything

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There is a covert, concentrated, and deliberate war being waged on the American people by the ruling class with the explicit intent to poison their minds, render them dumb, and kill the concept of truth and reality for good. And it’s working. The slow erosion of truth has been a part of American society as long as there’s really been anything you could call a society, but through rapid technological advances, consolidation of the ownership of media, and rapidly deteriorating material conditions, the need to continually clamp down on backlash and build and run the narrative has been a vital part of the ruling class strategy for domination and pacification of a working class that becomes more precarious by the day.

Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash

The most recent event signifying the collapse of consensus reality is the brutal assassination of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent on Wednesday*. Despite there being multiple different videos, taken at different angles, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was a completely unprovoked murder, the leaders of the Republican Party and their bootlicking lackeys immediately rushed to smear Good as a domestic terrorist, insisted she tried to run over an ICE agent despite footage proving otherwise, and stated that the killing was justified. They even attached exonerating evidence to their tweets (like JD Vance, pictured below) while demanding that you see the video as proof of the opposite. Trump went as far as to claim that the man was hospitalized and “run over”, saying it was “hard to believe he’s alive” when we can plainly see him walking away from the scene after calling Good a “fucking bitch”. While this is terrifying, it is not new. It represents the next stage of a war on truth that has been waged by both parties for quite some time.

Democrat politicians are no fans of the truth themselves, despite what they may say. One only has to look at the handling of the Biden White House’s genocide in Palestine. Despite all of us being able to see in near real time on our phones that Israel was slaughtering mountains of people in Gaza on a daily basis, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, House and Senate Democrats, and State Department ghouls like Matt Miller would get on TV every single day and tell you not to believe your lying eyes. They would insist that the true evil was the college students in the streets demanding an end to the endless slaughter. The New York Times would rush out poorly researched smear jobs claiming Hamas used rape as a weapon of war on October 7th, would launder Israel’s lies, and would consistently downplay the death toll. All the powers that be would tell you that you are a bigot for objecting to any of this. In fact, instead of doing anything to stem the rising tide of fascism in this country, or to stop the slaughter in Gaza, our lawmakers and their media lackeys spent the bulk of their time before Trump took power trying to demonize and suppress the only people fighting for liberation and democratic values in this country.

Even before that - and in so many ways the beginning of the end - the COVID pandemic exposed how much leaders were willing to outright lie to return to business as usual, putting shareholder value over lives. While Trump and his cabinet downplayed the virus, refused to wear masks, demanded to reopen everything, Democrats would smugly talk about “trusting the science” until Biden was elected and then declared the pandemic over, despite 400 people still dying per day from the disease. The Democrats joined Republicans in ending the publishing of the contact tracing and death counts, and demanded people return to work, because human lives are nothing in comparison to the almighty dollar.

The information environment has been poisoned, over and over again, by a steady drip, drip, drip of propaganda coming from all factions of the ruling class, but now the tap is fully open with a steady stream of unreality, and the very concept of truth itself is subjective. Whatever one already believes is virtually impenetrable, even with the most airtight evidence. With the big push by our tech oligarchs (with help from both parties) for AI everything, easy image generation that can make the unreal real has made it so that we cannot actually trust our eyes and we doubt observable reality. While this is happening, more and more people, especially on the right, are being driven to psychosis. Funneled into echo chambers that are full of AI bots regurgitating right-wing propaganda, churning out slop videos that show black women who don’t even exist using EBT cards to buy lobster, all of this serving to solidify the reactionary mind in their preconceived biases. The prevalence of such videos has become so ubiquitous that even politicians are falling for them, and the president is posting them to mock his enemies. With the rapid consolidation of the public square and the desperate need by tech oligarchs to make the AI revolution something real, rather than just another batch of snake oil, there is virtually no regulation of this technology that continues to push us further and further from something resembling consensus reality. In this environment, barely sentient YouTube stars like Nick Shirley can drum up a racist incitement against Somalis living in Minnesota through a poorly investigated slop video claiming that mass fraud is happening in daycares, which in turn prompts the brain addled president to send in the gravy seals to occupy Minneapolis by the thousands, harassing regular people with real jobs until, eventually, someone gets shot in the face for doing nothing at all. Even now, people determined to slavishly worship the boot of the state are AI generating fake rap sheets of Renee Nicole Good to try to destroy the reputation of an innocent dead woman.

While flooding the information environment with lies is nothing new - the Romans and the Nazis both relied on these tactics - what is new is the instant virality of these lies and the ease in generating the few things we used to be able to count on for truth: video, audio, and photographic evidence. It no longer takes an empire itself to flood the zone; two-bit Nazis on their home computers can use ChatGPT to generate racist bullshit and it can go viral in a flash. And while that video may eventually get debunked, only a small fraction of those who saw it will ever see the correction. There is now no such thing as proof, because if you show me something I am not primed to believe, I can easily dismiss it as being AI. In short, we are entering an era of epistemic balkanization where we have no consensus on what the truth even is, no basis for a shared reality, nothing that can ever truly be known. We are being thrust into a new Dark Ages where everything that was once objective and knowable and provable is now a matter of personal opinion. This time, however, it is not the lack of availability of information; it is the lack of strong institutions capable of holding reality together that is the problem. This time, instead of peasants who believe in witches and demons, it’s believing in 5G poisoning, chemtrails, and antifa supersoldiers.

Worse, the likelihood of this being remediated by the ruling class is virtually zero, as the incentives are much stronger for our political class (which is owned by Silicon Valley oligarchs) to continue down the path of immediate profit, no matter the cost. With every potential source of information being now heavily monetized, paywalled, and privatized, the incentives for truth are fully subordinated to the incentives to make another buck, even if the social fabric is crushed in the process. And while this is a social problem, the solutions are, naturally, political (if impossible under the current system).

In a socialist society, attention would not be monetized, and people would not be treated as products to be sold to the highest bidder. Our means of sharing information with each other would not be dependent on polarization and engagement farming, and rage would not be a commodity. In a socialist society, social media and traditional media alike would not be owned by a handful of oligarchs but instead would be public utilities for the public good. Institutions themselves would be tasked with the truth and could be trusted because they exist by and for the people.

Because institutions would be created by and for the working class, things like AI image and video generation that objectively harm the public good and disrupt the social fabric would be regulated out of existence. Amplification of falsehoods would be considered a serious threat to public health, and disinformation would be classed as civil harm and heavily penalized. Because this sort of thing would not have the potential to be monetized, however, the incentives to create such disinformation would cease to exist.

More broadly, in a socialist society, there would be less of a need for conspiracy-mindedness because there would be no desire for meaning-making to determine why things are so bad and our lives are so difficult. A population that is housed and fed and healthy is a population that does not have to resort to outlandish tales to explain why their needs aren’t being met. Full bellies is the first step to clear minds. Powerlessness is a large part of why people feel drawn to believe certain narratives; restoring power to the people removes much of that motivation on its own. Instead of the population feeling like things are being done to them, they are being done by them and with them.

Of course, this all probably just sounds like a nice story given the current situation, but we must envision the alternative, name the perpetrators of these crimes and the system that undergirds it, if we want to build something else. The truth never really dies, but the truth doesn’t seem to matter anymore, and that is a terrifying place to be. Only through collective struggle and a tearing down and conscious rebuilding of this system, this world, can the truth once again set us free.

*a previous version of this article said Tuesday, this has been corrected