trust

Digital communication redirects the flows of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public.

This has highly deleterious consequences for the democratic process. Social media intensify this kind of communication without commun... See more

What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of t... See more

As we introduce media forms with higher fidelity—written accounts, images, videos—we not only come to expect them but to equate them with reality itself.

Media by Order of Fidelity

1. Video

2. Images

3. Audio recording

4. Written account

5. First-hand account

6. Second-hand account

7. Hearsay

What happens to our trust in media when our capacity to generate it artificially improves to the point where we can produce indistinguishable fakes?

This creates a wave of "Skepticism," leading to what I term "False Positive Reality." In this state, our pervasive skepticism makes us doubt even the real labeling it as artificial, simulated, fake—real... See more

We were accustomed, in the age of photoshop, to false negatives, fakes perceived as real.

Duped only by skilled technicians, our base assumption was that most images on average were real, in the age of AI-generation, that assumption no longer holds.

EVERYTHING IS DEFAULT FAKE NOW

Media serves not just as a conduit for messages but as an arbiter of reality itself. Friederich Kittler, the German media theorist, said it best, “Media defines what really is”. These days, the equation is straightforward: if something cannot be verified via Google or substantiated by media outlets, its very existence is questioned.