Notes From a Species That No Longer Trusts Its Own Eyes

The Great Decoupling

Somewhere in the last eighteen months, without a vote, a referendum, or so much as a strongly worded parliamentary committee, we quietly agreed to stop believing what we see.

Nobody announced it. There was no ceremony. One day the video of the politician saying the unspeakable thing was obviously real, because why wouldn’t it be, and the next day it was “probably real, though obviously you can’t be sure these days,” and now it sits in that third, more honest category most of us have started reaching for without quite admitting it: could be either, doesn’t matter, I’ve stopped checking.

That third category is the one that should worry you. Not the fake video. The shrug.

I spent a fair chunk of my working life in security management, which mostly meant thinking professionally about the gap between what appears to be true and what actually is. It’s a discipline built entirely on that gap. And I can tell you, hand on heart, that the gap has never been this wide, this fast, for this many people, all at once. We used to call it deception. Now we call it Tuesday.

The Bit Where I Get Slightly Rebellious About It

Here’s my heresy for the week: I don’t think this is primarily a technology story, and I’m faintly bored of everyone treating it like one. The mainstream commentary keeps circling back to the tools, the models, the policy papers, the earnest men in blazers testifying before committees about “guardrails.” All useful. All missing the point somewhat spectacularly.

The actual story is that we built a species-wide nervous system, the information ecosystem, and then quietly poisoned the well it drinks from, and now we’re all wandering around with the low-grade dehydration headache of not knowing what’s safe to swallow. That’s not a tech story. That’s an epidemiology story. We’re not debating AI policy, we’re describing symptoms.

And the symptom isn’t outrage, whatever the algorithm would have you believe. The symptom is exhaustion. A specific, bone-deep tiredness that has nothing to do with staying up too late doomscrolling and everything to do with the fact that scrolling itself has become a small, constant act of forensic labour. Is that clip real. Is that quote real. Did my mate actually send that text or did something send it on his behalf. You didn’t sign up to be a fact-checker for your own life, and yet here you are, squinting at a voice note wondering if it’s really your sister.

The Bus Problem

The bit that gets me, properly gets me, is the bus. You know the one. You’re sat there, ordinary Tuesday, and you clock that the person next to you, headphones in, thumb scrolling, is not simply disagreeing with you about the world. They are, in a fairly literal sense, living in a different one. Not a different opinion of the same facts, a different set of facts entirely, curated by a machine that has learned exactly which version of reality keeps their thumb moving.

We used to have arguments about interpretation. Now we’re having arguments about ontology, and nobody’s dressed for it.

I grew up moving country every few years, service family, so I’ve some experience of being dropped into a place where everyone else has a shared reference point you simply don’t have. The songs they all know, the telly they all watched, the shorthand jokes. That’s disorientating, but it’s survivable, because eventually you learn the shared reference point and you’re back in the room with everyone else. What’s happening now is different in kind, not degree. There is no learning your way back into the room, because the room itself has stopped being singular. Everyone’s sitting in their own room, wallpapered identically to look like consensus, and nobody’s checked the address in years.

A Brief Satirical Interlude, Because Otherwise I’ll Weep

Let us imagine, briefly, the corporate memo that never got sent, because it would have been too honest:

MEMO: To All Users. RE: Your Reality.

Thank you for choosing to experience the world through our platform. Your reality has been carefully optimised for engagement, retention, and the gentle, ongoing erosion of your capacity to distinguish signal from fabrication. This is a feature. We remind you that “shared truth” was, in the previous business model, an inefficiency, and we’ve since resolved it. Please continue scrolling. Your neighbour’s reality is available at a small additional cognitive cost, which we do not recommend, as reconciliation between realities has historically led to something the industry refers to internally as “friction,” and which normal people call “a conversation.”

I wish I’d made that up entirely. I’ve read three actual press releases this year that weren’t far off.

So What Do We Do With The Paranoia

Here’s the honest, unglamorous answer, and I say this as someone who’s spent a career assessing threats for a living: a bit of paranoia here is not a malfunction. It’s a correctly calibrated instrument responding to a genuinely altered environment. The mistake isn’t feeling uneasy about the video, the text, the voice note. The mistake is either numbing yourself to the unease entirely, which gets you the shrug I mentioned earlier, or letting the unease metastasise into believing nothing, which is just despair wearing scepticism’s coat.

There’s a narrower path, and it’s less exciting than either extreme, which is presumably why nobody’s selling it to you. It looks like: trust slowly, verify where it actually matters, forgive yourself for not fact-checking every voice note from your mother, and hold onto a small number of people and sources you’ve decided, deliberately, to keep faith with. Not because they’re infallible. Because a shared reality has to start somewhere, and it might as well start with the handful of relationships you can still afford to fully believe in.

We are not going back to a single, agreed, photographable truth. That ship has sailed, been deepfaked, and had its wake retouched. What we can still choose is how small and how honest we keep the circle of trust we actually rely on. Mine’s not large these days. Cave dwelling in rural Spain does rather narrow the guest list. But what’s in it, I trust completely, and I’ve started to think that might be the whole of the available strategy now, not a consolation prize for it.

Until Next Time