Philosophy
We’ve entered an era where images, videos, and even “news” can be manufactured at scale, and still shape the world like facts. When algorithms decide what you see, and AI can fake what you trust, reality stops being a shared place and becomes a competing product.
Simulacra All the Way Down
At that time, Baudrillard’s thesis seemed like provocative intellectual play. How could the simulation precede the real? This was also dismissed as just wordplay? But as we stand in 2026 and look around, we scroll through social media feeds algorithmically curated to show us a version of reality tailored to our existing beliefs. We watch politicians who may or may not have said what the video shows them saying. We read news articles that might have been written by AI. We look at photographs that might be entirely synthetic. We have conversations with chatbots sophisticated enough that we sometimes forget they are not human!
Baudrillard described four stages in the progressive replacement of reality by simulation. First, the image reflects reality. Then it masks and denatures reality. Third, it masks the absence of reality. Finally, it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum. We have arrived at that fourth stage. When you see an image online today, the question “Is this real?” has become almost meaningless. The image exists. It circulates. It has effects. Whether it corresponds to something that happened in physical space is increasingly beside the point.
This is not just about technology. Michel Foucault taught us to see truth not as something we discover but as something produced within specific regimes of power. “Truth is a thing of this world,” he wrote, “it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.” Every society has its mechanisms for generating, circulating, and validating what counts as true. The question has never been “What is true?” in some absolute sense, but “Who gets to decide what counts as true? Who controls the mechanisms of truth production?” For most of human history, those mechanisms were relatively stable and visible. Religious authorities controlled truth claims in medieval Europe. The scientific revolution shifted authority to empirical observation and replicable experiment. The modern nation-state controlled truth through mass media, educational institutions and official records. One could identify the centres of power that produced and validated truth claims. Most importantly, one could, in principle, contest them.
But what happens when truth production becomes radically decentralised and simultaneously opaque? When can we generate convincing images, videos and text? When algorithms determine what information reaches whose eyes according to proprietary logic, no one fully understands. When the very tools we use to verify truth are themselves products of systems we cannot interrogate? We are living through what Foucault might have called a crisis in the regime of truth. The old mechanisms are collapsing, and what replaces them is a chaotic, ungovernable proliferation of competing truth-production systems.
Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed this in The Postmodern Condition as the collapse of metanarratives, those grand stories (scientific progress, historical materialism, the arc of justice) that societies once told themselves to legitimate their truth claims. Without a shared metanarrative, we have no common ground from which to adjudicate between competing accounts of reality. Lyotard was writing about the fragmentation of knowledge in late twentieth-century culture. But it’s similar to our current information ecosystem: not just fragmentation but active, algorithmically reinforced separation into parallel realities. People do not just disagree about the interpretation of events; they disagree about what events occurred. They live in different factual universes.
This is the strange irony: the postmodern thinkers were accused of dangerous relativism and of undermining the very possibility of truth and thus of justice. Yet, we know they were not advocating for this condition; they were diagnosing it, warning about it, trying to think through its implications. Now we live in the world they described and beyond! They assumed humans were in the loop, making the representations, telling the stories, what they dint for see was the automation of deception.