We're Now Entering the Era of Reality Apathy

What happens when figuring out the truth is just too much work?

What happens when what’s true and what’s false becomes increasingly irrelevant to a large percentage of the population?

Twenty years ago, this would have seemed like a question about some kind of fantastical world that could never exist, but today?

Not so much.

As the mainstream media has completely lost credibility with many people, every claim under the sun is being made by people on social media and we’re now regularly seeing fake and staged videos presented as real, we’re starting to get a preview of what a post-truth world looks like.

G.K. Chesterton once said:

I would say something similar to you about the truth.

When people no longer know who they can trust, they don’t trust no one, they become capable of trusting anyone.

In other words, when you have a good understanding of the world, a strong moral framework, and have a number of smart, competent people that you can trust to interpret things, 95+% of bad ideas just bounce off of you like a bird flying into a windowpane.

If you have none of those things, then everything from Erika Kirk putting out a hit on her husband to a transexual genocide happening, to the claim that Sandy Hook was a false flag event, to the idea that planes never hit the Twin Towers can all start to seem plausible to you. After all, who’s to say those things aren’t real? You? Me? The news? What if you don’t trust any of us and some entertaining rando on YouTube or X says differently? Who’s to say we’re right and they’re wrong?

Of course, things are about to get much, much worse because AI videos have started to improve to the point where some of them are hard to distinguish from the real thing, and soon, enormous numbers of videos that can’t be obviously differentiated from the real world will be coming at us from every direction.

Gurwinder Bhogal, in a conversation with Chris Williamson, speculates on the dark place we’re now headed for because of this:

Gurwinder Bhogal: I think the problem is that the cost of determining what’s actually true is going to become so high—it’s going to require so much effort—that people are essentially going to give up really valuing truth as a principle.

Chris Williamson: This is one of my favorites from you: “reality apathy.”

When the sheer volume of conflicting information makes the effort of finding the truth costlier than the value of knowing it, people give up trying to be accurate and instead choose whatever bullshit stinks least. Slop doesn’t just threaten the truth, but the very worth of truth.

And it’s this sort of overwhelm. The goal of propaganda isn’t to make you believe any one narrative—sometimes it’s simply to make you more pliable at not wanting to believe anything.

Earlier today, in one of the old group chats from the guys who used to work for me in Newcastle, one of them said, “Is anybody else’s algorithm getting peppered with all of this Epstein stuff at the moment?”

These are blue-collar guys from the northeast of the UK—maybe they’re working in London or something. Epstein is not supposed to cross their threshold, and it’s obviously hit a volume where they think, holy shit, this is so much Epstein stuff.

Then he said, “I’ve just seen—I’m now convinced that he’s playing Fortnite in f***ing Israel. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

And that’s literally reality apathy.

It was so funny to see that message come in and realize this is the overwhelm of information and conflicting points of view going in opposite directions—literally happening in front of my eyes.

Gurwinder Bhogal: Yeah. And I think one of the challenges going forward is going to be trying to convince people that it’s actually worth pursuing the truth.

More than convincing them of any particular truth, just convincing them of the value of truth is going to be extremely important.

Because we’re essentially entering a world of virtual reality. You can create your own reality now. You can do it figuratively through social media echo chambers, but you can also do it literally—by sequestering yourself in your bedroom and living your entire life through your headset, your laptop screen, or whatever, and using AI to generate whatever reality you want. This is not far away.

Folks, this is already a big problem. Just yesterday, I saw a piece from someone essentially claiming that all you had to do to make everyone rich was print more money:

I was trying to figure out if this is satire, so I looked this guy up, and it turns out he’s a bit of a loony professor. At that point, I was rolling my eyes at the fact there’s a professor out there who doesn’t understand that money is not value in and of itself, it’s only a REPRESENTATION OF VALUE that allows someone to say, buy a Tesla with pieces of paper, instead of having to come to the showroom with 20,000 chickens in an attempt to barter… then, something just didn’t seem feel right about it to me, so I asked Grok if this was part of a wider lecture. It turns out that it was. This guy was shooting holes in modern monetary theory, which is exactly the sort of idiocy he SEEMED to be pushing in that video.

That’s a lot of work just to find out the truth behind one clip. And of course, we could point to lots of other examples like this.

Remember how the media lied about Nick Sandmann and falsely claimed he was tormenting a native American activist?

How about the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” lie about Michael Brown that was spread everywhere and led to nationwide protests?

What about the lie, repeated endlessly by the Democrats, that Donald Trump said the white supremacists at Charlottesville were “very fine people?”

The unfortunate truth is that we have LEGIONS of people in our society deliberately telling lies and distorting the truth on a daily basis. Meanwhile, for good or ill, there are no gatekeepers screening out those lies before they get to the public. Additionally, the actual mainstream media and (what a joke) “fact checkers” are all extremely untrustworthy propaganda outfits that regularly misrepresent the truth themselves. There are honest people who care about the truth, although there are very, very, few of them on the Left, but there’s absolutely no one accepted as an unbiased truth teller by both the Left and Right.

Against that backdrop, you’ll hear people say, “Well, do your own research,” which is completely ludicrous in a lot of cases. What percentage of people are smart enough to reliably do their own research in the first place? Now, of those people, how many of them have enough expertise and knowledge in a given field to do it? Out of that much, much, smaller subset, how many have the time to check behind story after story? Now we’re down to a tiny, tiny group of people.

So, what happens in the coming months when we get 50 big AI-created stories made up per day that are shared endlessly on social media and echoed by everyone from media outlets to politicians?

Just imagine what it might look like.

Hey, here’s what appears to be a legitimate sealed New York Court document that seems to show someone saying they were paid half a million dollars by Hillary Clinton to kill Vince Foster, in an effort to cover up their affair. Ten minutes later, there’s what appears to be a real video from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declaring that they lost billions this quarter, which causes the stock to plunge, followed by a goat going berserk and scaring off a bear to save a sweet little boy it was menacing on their farm, before you see what looks to be an absolutely real news report from CNN featuring Donald Trump being heard on a “hot mic” saying a racial slur while talking to the Prime Minister of Japan… Except none of these stories are real. They’re all made up.

So, multiply that by 50, every day, from here on out, after AI gets JUST A BIT better than it is right now, and what does that lead to in our country?

Gurwinder Bhogal would probably say, “reality apathy.” I would say, “madness.” They’re essentially the same thing because if not knowing what’s real and what isn’t doesn’t constitute “madness,” then nothing does.

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