{"id":189,"date":"2025-08-06T12:15:57","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T16:15:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/?p=189"},"modified":"2025-08-06T14:00:40","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T18:00:40","slug":"blurred-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/blurred-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Blurred world"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I suspect that history will record 2025 as an inflection point in American (if not world) history, the point at which the promise of a future rooted in universal access to knowledge collapsed under the weight of infinitely accessible fictions. And if a debate emerges over the moment that embodies that collapse, I would like to offer as a contender the murder of Melissa Hortman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hortman is the Democratic legislator in Minnesota who was shot to death in her home by a man masquerading as a police officer. His disguise was uncomplicated, involving a clunky mask, ersatz uniform and vehicle adorned with flashing lights. The get-up was convincing enough that, when questioned by an actual police officer, the assassin was able to simply drive away<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the abstract, this charade doesn\u2019t have much to do with the broader collapse of objectivity. But the attack was contemporaneous with a bit of performative costuming that served the exact opposite purpose: the habit of immigration enforcement officers to hide their affiliations and to mask their faces. In Minnesota, a criminal dressed as a police officer to commit a crime. Everywhere else, law enforcement officers were dressing as criminals to enforce the law. Encountering a cop on the street might mean you anre encountering a criminal and encountering an armed, masked man might mean you are encountering a cop. The line is blurry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This blurriness between real and fake is the defining characteristic of the moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s centrally because we have a president, Donald Trump, whose politics depend on that sort of blurriness, on generating uncertainty about otherwise certain things. This is what wanna-be authoritarians do, as Hannah Arendt explained more than 50 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true<\/strong>,\u201d Arendt wrote in \u201cThe Origins of Totalitarianism.\u201d \u201c\u2026 Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.\u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We hardly need to say more than that to implicate Trump and his political and media allies. Nearly every facet of Trump\u2019s public commentary adheres to the idea that truth is malleable, from \u2014 to pick just a few examples from this week \u2014 accusing Barack Obama of treason<\/a> to claiming that drug prices are down an impossible 1,500%<\/a> to insistences that unfavorable jobs numbers are a function of bias after having touted the same data<\/a> as proof of his skilled leadership. If you need more convincing that Trump seeks to build and, in large part, has built an informational environment in which reality is blurred, you are probably already comfortably ensconced in the cynical world Arendt describes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it is overly simple to attribute all of this to Trump. While he benefits from and amplifies uncertainty and blurriness, he didn\u2019t bring it to politics, much less to America. He saw, or stumbled onto, or \u2014 most accurately \u2014 was mired in an anti-objectivity strain of right-wing thought that has decades-old roots in anti-intellectualism and media hostility. During the Obama administration, this strain built enough momentum to be politically viable, though most Republican officials still operated under the assumption that it wasn\u2019t or wouldn\u2019t be for long. Trump simply proved them wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The momentum he leveraged was a product of explicit efforts to blur reality, as demonstrated by Glenn Beck and others. It was also a byproduct of the emergence of the social web, a place where anyone could assert anything and amplify anyone else\u2019s assertions. The pool of universally accessible information that was the promise of the internet was polluted with nonsense \u2014 and often nonsense that flattered people\u2019s existing biases. The idea (and ideal) that people could become informed by looking up anything they wanted was bastardized by people seeking out only what they wanted to hear. They did their own research only to the extent that they unearthed claims that sounded true enough for them to believe what they wanted. (I\u2019ll again point to this prescient 2009 essay<\/a> on the subject.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the essence of the challenge faced by traditional media outlets. People, on both the left and the right, are often less interested in an objective reality than a subjective one. It becomes a simple economic problem: demand for what news organizations do has eroded and so have the economics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The surge in demand for bespoke realities has surged, powered by and powering a galaxy of independent voices proffering news-like information. Scrolling social media means slogging through a morass of claims and accusations rhetoric that may or may not be reliable and may or may not be true, with occasional appearances (if you so choose) by archaic institutions that actually worry about things like probability and accuracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a time \u2014 what we now understand as a period of transition \u2014 social media platforms tried advantage reliable sources of information by policing falsehoods and verifying reliable actors<\/a>. But agreed-upon reality was precisely what the demand was working against, so \u2014 just as Fox News shifted to fend off competition from its right 15 years ago \u2014 the social media companies (and some news organizations) embraced a blurry, subjective presentation of reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An important point that bears highlighting: blurriness yields economic benefits as well as political ones<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the state of play even before the emergence of AI. It was already the case that random Instagram accounts could make claims about healthy eating that shifted public habits even when those claims were utterly baseless. It was already the case that a guy who dedicated his life to undermining the broad, proven consensus on public health could be tapped to run the federal government\u2019s health infrastructure after parlaying his base of own-research-doing skeptics into a bloc of voters that Trump found valuable. And into this space came AI slop. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is clear that there are some valid uses for AI, whether or not one thinks that those uses are worth the costs in energy or shifts to the economy. But it is more abundantly clear that the emergence of AI is dramatically hastening the collapse of shared reality, to the extent that such a thing even exists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the aforementioned slop. Nonsensical, artificial images aimed at social spread or making rhetorical points. False news stories created for the same purposes. The garbage that follows from AIs trained to generate authentic-sounding answers to questions generating answers that have no grounding in reality. This use of AI is an enormous blurring filter over the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s overlap with Trump’s political project<\/a>. He, his administration and his allies use AI to generate a fake reality and to skew the existing one. AI images show a buff, conquering Trump astride the world or his opponents \u2014 immigrants, the media, the left \u2014 as cowering simps. It’s hard for Trump’s base and American voters to see what Trump is through the lens he and his allies present, which is entirely the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, though, the threat extends past Trump. The internet is already evolving into a mix of true and false, real and generated, both willfully and accidentally. Querying the world’s accrued knowledge through a web browser was never guaranteed to result in an accurate, concise response, but first with the social web and now with AI it’s become far harder to differentiate truth from fiction. In each case, users and robots jostle to get between you and the truth in order to convey their reality or absorb the currency of your attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I began here by suggesting that 2025 would be recognized as an inflection point. In other words, this doesn’t feel like an aberration, a step away from shared reality before we step back toward it. Instead, it feels as though this is the state of the world moving forward: a bit of reality buried under a lot of garbage, with scavengers picking through the dump to sell what they can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: Earth observation views of city lights at night taken during STS-76 mission from shuttle orbiter Atlantis. (National Archives)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suspect that history will record 2025 as an inflection point in American (if not world) history, the point at which the promise of a future rooted in universal access to knowledge collapsed under the weight of infinitely accessible fictions. And if a debate emerges over the moment that embodies…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbump.net\/o\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}