It is a common irony of our timeline that history often names itself.
When United States' President, Donald Trump, launched his social network, Truth Social, in 2022, he inadvertently provided a chronological marker. Technically, everything that has transpired since that event can be considered part of an ironic, "post-truth" age, which might have factually arrived years before.
This shift is more than a linguistic punchline. We are witnessing a profound collapse in the shared representational maps that once guided our definition of truth. The boundary between the real and the synthetic is no longer a fissure; it has become a pervasive, inseparable fog.
In this new environment, we are forced to adopt a radical epistemic stance: the assumption that everything is a lie. Universal distrust is no longer a sign of cynicism, but a basic tool for cognitive survival. We should now move through the world assuming that every signal we receive is a fabrication.
This "liar’s dividend" is a sub-product of times when nearly every bit can be faked, whence nothing can be taken as true.
The digital world has become an "informational smog," a term recently echoed by Microsoft AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman. He suggested that we must now assume the synthetic is the default state of information.
Suleyman and other architects of the new digital leviathan recognize that the old model of "truth until proven false" has died. In its place, we are seeing the rise of "inverse fact-checking", a nudge from debunking the fake to verifying the rare, stubborn instances of the real.
Interestingly, this same inversion seems to endorse one of the most fundamental premises of any fair trial in modern justice systems: the presumption of innocence.
We’ve long known that any part can say anything, now we must assume all that is presented as evidence can also be a lie. All defendants, need to be perceived as innocent, until blatant truth has its stamp pressed upon validated facts and minutes.
There is no holding back this fabrication tide, much like there was no stopping the internet in the late 20th century. It is swelling us.
Maybe we’ve been witnessing an actual revolution, that includes AI, but is not limited to it, dragging a whole empowered generation that uses these newer technologies along onto redefining the very nature of what it means to belong, to be righteous, and to be socially accepted.
This generation does not view fabrication as a moral failing, but as a creative default. When the tools of "pro-social" creation are decoupled from epistemology—and its methods, the result is a swarm of decentralized, synthetic narratives that can topple reputations, governments, or build entire "parallel policies" overnight.
However, the "death of the original" does not mean the death of meaning. Just as the dissidents of the old Soviet Union turned inward to find "living within their individual truth," we are now learning to appreciate and validate reality through a different lens—one that remains loyal to facts.
Remaining loyal to reality shouldn’t be complex. It can mean making sure we still value simple experiences of reality, including “dulce far niente”, or the sweetness of doing nothing, knowing that’s real.
It is the meal, not the invite, or posted stories, that must remain the anchor of our AI-enhanced selves when interfacing reality. We must use the tool without becoming the tool.
Law enforcement is also re-inventing itself. It needs to learn to hold on to what’s undebatable truth. No longer being able to simply testify in court, but having to adhere to standards and protocols that will become strictly focused on flagging what’s true.
Economy has similarly been learning how to over-estimate reality: in times of crypto currencies, gold has reached record highs.
Our future intuitive selves rely on a synergy where we acknowledge the scarcity of reality in the digital world, while we can still be grounded in some enduring perception of tradition.
The transition towards adapting to this augmented, or transcended reality, is messy and the smog is thick, but the destination remains an open question.
Welcome to the post-truth age: where even this article is partially true, and yet you’ve read it, without having to pay, instead of doing nothing.