How Truth Dissolved
September 16, 2026
“Every medium — print, TV, social media — has its own contract with the truth,” writes media ecologist Andrey Mir. He goes on to explain how our media gradually shattered the very notion that there is truth—singular, shared, floating above us all, letting us aspire to reach it together.
Mir’s summary is so concise and lucid, you forget he is leading us by the hand through long centuries. Then the speed of change ratchets up, and you hang on tight and peer at the blur of the past couple generations, the ones in which assertions of truth were deconstructed; pronounced fake, truthy at best; or canceled by a different truth.
Imagine how easy it would have been in prehistory to be married, when there were no words to get in the way, get misunderstood, get carved into hurt memory and wielded years later as weapons. Truth came from gesture, a shared vocabulary of response to parts of reality you could point at. It was immediate and concrete.
Those early grunts were refined into syllables, though. And once you had words, you had stories. You listened to them again and again, at night around a fire, and they became your truth. Your children might grow up to be storytellers themselves—and they would bend the old stories to new purposes, embellishing or subtracting to make their own point. Truth was now situational. It did not have to follow a pointing finger; it could venture beyond trees and lions to name invisible ideas and feelings. It was not as unchanging, stable, and eternal as the stories made it sound. It relied on context, and it could be negotiated or adjusted, because nobody was keeping a permanent record.
Next came writing. People attempted to author truth, and what they wrote separated that truth from them. It had its own life now, and it could outlast them. Later generations might reinterpret, but they could no longer renegotiate the terms or adjust their assertions. (Put a few biblical scholars in a room and you will see what happens as they try to extract the truth they are hoping for; others will jump to their feet and wave the text in the air as a corrective. However many times it is rewritten, the original text will continue to exist.)
Writing culture was dense with abstraction, distant from lived experience. This is why we need poets and novelists: to bring us back to our bodies, our senses. But however vivid and precise, written symbols cooled what they conveyed, spreading it over miles and generations. With the birth of the printing press, language was standardized, and ideas and impressions, facts and hunches, could be made available to millions of people at once. They could be debated and disputed, and their authors could be held accountable. Truth was generalized from different contexts, abstracted, cut away from the writer and now existing on its own, a set of symbolic squiggles that would endure in the same form for centuries. This was truth you could count on, absolute and eternal. It could be used to govern, to create policy, to establish ethical guidelines, to point up lies and contradictions.
Ah, but it lost us paradise. Until the printing press, maps, hand drawn, nearly always included the Garden of Eden. Printing sped up the circulation of identical copies, allowing more people to spot errors or discrepancies. Accuracy was now attainable. Given the uncertain location of the Garden, publishers no longer wanted to put Paradise on their maps.
Once knowledge spread and standardized, education itself could be standardized. No wonder there were such lively conversations in the eighteenth-century literary salons. Guests shared the same foundation, made the same assumptions, knew the same facts and stories, respected the same conventions.
The intimacy of those softly lit salons was shattered, though, by the electricity that sent information zapping across oceans. Freed from any physical carrier, information flowed fast, flooding people with ideas and trends and choices. “Media producers had to work hard to market their products,” Mir writes, so they began to pay attention to their audiences, targeting products or content at specific groups of people.
“Newspapers had long spoken to particular readerships,” Mir concedes. “The partisan press chose its audience by politics. What electronic media added was measurement: targeting became continuous, quantified, and instant.”
Pay attention here, because you are about to lose your soul. What you are told, from this point forward, will largely depend on what someone who hopes to profit from you has decided you want to hear. Truth will change for each audience, each social context. Content will be tweaked and distributed accordingly.
This shift began in 1937, when two guys at Columbia University designed a “program analyzer.” Listeners could push a button to indicate whether they liked or disliked the radio show they had just heard. There could be ratings. And radio stations could make their programming decisions accordingly.
Seventy years later, social media’s “likes” intensified audience measurement, giving it an almost unbearable weight. The commercial focus on group identities carried over into politics, where the ground had been paved by various civil rights struggles and academic theories. We now saw ourselves first as a demographic or social category. This made inequity and injustice far more apparent—but eroded the sense of collective belonging. Groups vied with one another for respect and resources. Cooperation, collaboration, and compromise fell by the wayside.
With the internet and social media, we are all our own publisher and our own brand. The elite gatekeepers are out of a job. Authority can easily be questioned, mocked, mistrusted. Digital media does not encourage careful thought backed by evidence, so reactions can be emotional and impulsive—just as they were when we drew our truth from firelit storytellers. But we did not simply regress to an earlier stage, Mir notes. We brought our crazy speed and global scale with us.
“In traditional tribes, people would usually settle into stable hierarchies after brief periods of adjustment,” he writes. “Digital super-tribes are constantly exposed to triggers and novelty, with algorithms further agitating users for better engagement.” Pissing us off, in other words, so we will remain in our online trance for hours at a stretch. “The entire ecosystem is a constant brawl.”
“Digital orality” has the humanities types over in the corner weeping that no one reads books anymore. But “orality vs. literacy is not just about listening vs. reading but rather about immersion vs. detachment,” Mir explains. “People become immersed in impulsive, instant digital interactions with their environment, now digital, and with each other.” Truth is whatever goes viral.
So where are we? Reaching backward, many of us, trying to find something we can hang on to. But that comforting reliance on absolute truth and common, systematized knowledge is less and less possible. We value the truth of lived experience again—just look at a young couple’s wedding registration, all those trips to Nepal in lieu of dinnerware. But most of our lived experience is mediated by screens. Truth is again situational, relative, negotiated—but now it is also fragmented. Each of us has our own, and we demand the right to voice it and be heard. This plays out in strident ways, with attendant backlash. But deep down, we all know that we are like a blind man fumbling around with, at best, the tassel on the tail of the elephant. Loud in compensation, we insist that an elephant is a tassel, and that any suggestion of a larger truth is both wrong and dangerous.
In 2016, Mir reminds us, the Oxford Dictionary made “post-truth” the word of the year. It referred to “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The following year, the Collins Dictionary chose “fake news” as its word of the year.
There was fakery in the print era, too. “What changed with digital media was the mechanism of verification itself”which was now only virality. “If print culture distributed what was significant, digital culture treats as significant whatever is [widely] distributed.”
A quease roils my stomach. Sure, I share especially fine analyses of politics or culture. But I also share cute stuff about dogs. I subscribe to aggregator newsletters that curate for depth—then click on the link at the bottom that offers me quick, cheap, and easy dinner recipes. No one should decide what to show me by looking at what I choose when left to my own devices.
Print culture, in which notions of objective truth peaked, lasted only 500 years. It is now called the “Gutenberg Parenthesis.” We moved on to the exclamation point. And now AI is making a change so dramatic, I cannot find a punctuation mark that would be adequate.
“For AI,” Mir writes, “the only reality is us.” Humans have supplied our language to AI, our knowledge, our intuitions and wisdom. “AI will keep talking to us no matter what, largely indifferent to truth and reality checks, because it has no reality besides the one in which we engage with it.”
This is not a simple extension of digital media’s hunger for engagement, Mir notes. For AI, “truth as an intellectual or ethical imperative arguably does not exist.” That would be chilling enough—but what happens when AI stops needing our input? As it becomes able to generate its own words and images, it will begin cannibalizing its own slop, taking us ever further from reality as we have known it.
LLMs do not point to the concrete; they merely rearrange words. All significance is abstract, fully disembodied. And unlike the Gutenberg years, when we automatically looked for evidence to verify our conclusions, we have reached a time when inaccuracy is just shrugged off and amended, if caught at all. The phrase “reality check” may vanish from our vocabulary.
“Post-literacy is not just about reading fewer books,” Mir concludes. “By opting out of print literacy—first through electronic and digital media, and now through AI—we are opting out of the notion of objective, absolute, uniform truth.” I can already feel this happening, as I read something, learn it was written by AI, and decide it hit on something beautiful, so who cares. But when authorship is irrelevant, who will be accountable for the lies?
He ends with the two obvious remedies: anchoring yourself in physical and social reality (hugs, grass, sweat) and reading deeply. But if you are busy making a living, odds are good that you spend a lot of time in front of a screen and have little energy left to read deeply. Will the ancient—the nostalgic retirees or old-money rich—be the only keepers of what we used to consider truth?
