Fantasy versus reality

Reality doesn't reboot. But if you've grown up entirely in a world where when you die, you just restart the game, or when devices fail you just turn them off and on again, you probably have issues with what psychologists call "reality testing".

This works for lying too. Nowadays, just construct whatever fantasy world you want to believe in, and if you get caught out, simply apologise. Or attack the person who called you out. CEOs, politicians and senior leaders now live in a world of "optics", and "perception management" where "defining the narrative" is the whole game. Not the icing atop a cake of otherwise serious competence. Not just "public relations (PR)" to smooth along glitches in a mostly well-oiled and functional machine. No, fantasy is the whole damned show. Appearances have wholly supplanted reality.

It's ironic because this started out as a technocratic project, to build digitalised societies run by cybernetic governance. Such a vision is rooted in near-religious faith in science, empiricism, evidence, and ultimately in truth. We made bold claims to live in a "data-driven" system.

Nice idea. Perhaps. But whose data? Driven toward what goal?

We missed one important detail. Somewhere in the middle of it all must sit a reliable process, made either of capable people or some "algorithm", running a system of decision making that is coherent, legible, based on a model that reflects reality, and is at least functional in a bare utilitarian way if not moral and fair.

That was the missing "to be added later" component in a cybernetic fantasy that we vibe coded our way into over the past 60 years.

However, it soon became apparent that information systems provide a shortcut. Instead of reliably gathering data via expensive telemetry, painfully analysing to extract salient facts and truth, processing it with expensive computers, enacting difficult changes and disseminating carefully fact-checked news, why not just tell people what they want to believe is true. This works perfectly alongside a system of money which has ceased to function for social utility to facilitate an "economy" but has disconnected into a land of financial fantasy.

Why not build machines that generate the sounds, images, and stories that people want to believe, instead of all that tedious, messy hard work making reality conform to human ideals? Make the systems opaque enough and there's no way for the average person to close the loop. People do not know whether they are living in a fantasy or reality world. And if they're happy, what's the problem?

This pretty much describes the mass media and "AI" ecosystem now emerging. This epistemic crisis is a bullshit world in Frankfurt's sense, not because anything in particular is false, but because the very idea of truth or falsehood is no longer taken seriously. Truth is held in contempt.

In many ways this marks a return to a pre-information-age society. We live in digital villages where gossip and rumours do the rounds. We are entertained by tales of kings and dragons in far away lands, and nothing outside the village is of any real importance… until - in the form of invading armies or plagues - it suddenly is.

In our new feudal dark-age, supermen embark on Homeric Odysseys. At least in their minds. Elon Musk plans to build a "tera-factory" [sic] making chips that can support 100 to 200 gigawatt years of computing to power his army of "AI robots", plus a constellation of a million megawatt space-data-centre satellites circling the planet ¹. New thousand-year Reichs. And if it goes wrong, if people die, if millions are made jobless, homeless, maimed or poisoned… just reboot.

This is the same "entrepreneur" whose failed hyperloop bullet-train absorbed billions of dollars and produced nothing of value. It's what happens when you let someone with no transport engineering knowledge fantasise about extremes of physics and engineering, ignore cautious advisers, create digital fantasy videos and portfolios to lure investors without ever having tried so much as a table-top prototype and a few back-of-an-envelope sums to see how the physics would scale! The misadventure was well described by Matt Ribel of the Washingtonian as "wealth-induced psychosis".

We are living in a world that is rapidly divesting from reality. Or rather, a world where those who purport to lead, in thought and deed, are moving away from the personal responsibility of living in reality. The signs are everywhere;

Just this week; Google now uses "AI" to replace news headlines with what it "thinks they mean". Not what they say. Three quarters of people claim they would use a fake human as a fantasy friend. Gladiatorial fantasy is on the rise as Moltbook, the "social network for bots" demonstrates a spectacle of "Peak AI theatre". Ryan Cooper's insightful piece on the legacy of Chuck Norris is shrewd in noting the descent of politics into total fantasy.

"Long before memes became instruments of political warfare, he [Chuck Norris] was simply the strongest man in the world because everyone agreed to pretend he was. That was the joke. Now it is more or less how politics works."

Google Fantasy News is only one of many departures from reality. I had a conversation with Helen today about how the Cybershow is depicted in US "social media" - things like YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and so on - all of which I loathe but she insists are "necessary" for our audience. These now offer "AI" summaries which she claims significantly increase our circulation. Since Helen is in charge of social media, who am I to argue. But the problem is that while I try to make dry, factual summaries on the official site, and create pithy titles that ask or highlight salient social issues, the now mandatory slop machines analyse our episodes and create hyperbolic rage bait, doom and nonsense. This is what "creates clicks" I am told. Misrepresentative fantasy is programmed into the system.

I must ask myself, is it wrong to let "the algorithm," lure people with fantasy slop so that they might read and hear something more sensible, critical and grounded?

Younger readers, please don't think this is a recent phenomenon and wholly the fault of "AI" or gamification of everything. The trajectory started in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was the first fantasy president, a hyper-real film actor "famous for being famous" who played the role of a statesman and joked about nuking Russia. Trump is a comparative amateur on the stage and "AI" simply compounds the reality-break established by social media, and television before it.

Here's the pisser though. Reality always wins. Always. The only questions are; When will it bite? And, How hard?