From Post-Truth to Post-Trust

Social Media created the conditions for a post-truth world. AI might create the conditions for a post-trust world. Paradoxically, this what might strengthen our communities and shift us toward more ecological civilizations. Maybe. 

We used to watch or read the news from a handful of media outlets. I remember in France my family’s evening ritual watching the evening news. At 8:00pm, we infallibly made our ways to the living room and pressed one of the seven buttons on the large cathode ray tube TV. Everyone had their implicitly designated spot, and I suspect that unsettling this order by sitting elsewhere would have been as sacrilegious in many other families as it would have been in mine.  

We had a choice between the news programs broadcasted from two channels, both government run (one of these was eventually privatized and sold to a huge construction conglomerate). Of course, there were many available newspapers at the time¹. My grandfather read Le Monde every afternoon. I know because I was sent to buy his paper at the corner café at 4:00pm every day. This was before I was 11—he died that year—and this seemed like a great privilege in the years before my refractory adolescence. 

When my grandfather read his paper, it was in silence behind the unfolded and upheld pages. This was the solitary experience, which contrasted with our time watching news on TV, which was a communal experience, one that many families, and many communities shared and revisited every evening. Television created community faster than the press every could².

While there is no One Truth, this communal experience created a robust intersubjectivity (what we share as mutual understanding through common beliefs we hold) across the country and the world. The whole country consumed the same set or two of information on TV. There are significant dangers with having so few sources, of course. France has democratic checks and balances to mitigate these dangers (so we think), and at the time, reputable media shared the same deontological obligation to check, investigate, and confirm the information they broadcasted or printed, which they could do more easily, because there were only one or two news cycles.

The Internet has disintermediated the news. It has given us access to more stories of interest, more sources, than ever before. Rather than a scarcity of information, we must now sift through an overabundance. 24/7/365 news cycles that need to release stories with speed trump investigative journalism. No more time for checking, investigating, or confirming because someone else might upload the news before you do. Headlines lead to clicks and clicks lead to ad revenue. 

In this fragmented media landscape, social media offers a shortcut by reintermediating the news. Now we don’t have to search too far. We can passively receive news straight to our devices. The news comes right to us thanks to a handy algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves. It’s dished up on 6.3” screens. Physically alone inside the echo chamber we share with other avatars, we dine on it voraciously.

Today, there are many disconnected truths. Few efforts to verify or cross-check. Scarcity of differing views—fake news. Soundbites and headlines. All the same. In an age of endless information streams, we often believe we evaluate, understand, and synthesize at the speed of scroll. 

Well, we think we do at least. Rather than evaluating, understanding, and synthesizing, so many times we rather misinterpret, misjudge, and misattribute. 

Some call this the post-truth world, where emotional appeal and personal belief are more influential in shaping our opinions than objective facts and evidence.

Of course, this assumes that there are objective facts and evidence, which is questionable. Post-truth confuses truth with Truth. This is a remnant of Platonic ideals, of humanist separation, and modernist exclusions of the immeasurable and the sensory. What cannot be quantified must be committed to the flames, according to David Hume.

Without falling into post-modern relativity, we consider the intersubjectivity that emerges from the stories that share, the stories from which we hold our common truths. There is danger in sharing too few or too many stories. 

When we have too few stories to share—or when one story suffocates, marginalizes, or destroys others—those stories meld into a master narrative. When we have too many stories, they become fragmented, disparate, and unintelligible, making it harder to share and develop quality relationships through intersubjectivity. If we don’t share stories, how can we share values and create community?

While the concept of post-truth world has its inadequacies—and dangers—it is useful insofar as it alerts us to the erosion of shared understanding. 

Hence a fragmented landscape where we have such trouble understanding, relating, and empathizing. Hence why we are so quick to vituperate behind the anonymity of our virtual keyboards. Hence why we believe in the idiocy of the other side and the enemy within. 

Emerging technologies like AI and deepfakes amplify this fragmentation, making it even harder to discern reality from fabrication. Many of us saw the image of Donald Trump valiantly wading through the flood waters after Hurricane Helene. That one sticks on our minds whether we know it was a fake or not. It remains a disruption and leaves a mark. More: whenever a politician or pundit tells an inaccuracy or downright lie, this information goes viral and the fact checking struggles to keep up, much less discredit. 

Lies spread so much faster than truths that they become truths³.

What can we believe? From anyone? The post-truths we hold dissolve.

We might be moving from a post-truth world into a post-trust world. 

A post-trust world is born when we realize we can believe less than half of the digital content we consume. We are more likely to doubt it than to trust it, in spite of post-truth. 

We can no longer trust articles or photos, soundbites or videos, quotes or testimonials. Phishing and catfishing are routine.

You’ve probably already seen footage of deepfakes of presidents. Or perhaps you’ve read about the scammers who got their hands on $25 million. AI expert Darren Coxen fears that within a few years, AI will be so powerful that you won’t be able to tell for sure whether the person on the other side of the Zoom call is human or an AI avatar. 

We can no longer trust what we consume digitally. We are waking up to the threats posed by the algorithms, not just our dopamine addictions and the unauthorized selling of our personal data, but also threats to the political landscape. The algorithms are so powerful at personalizing our experiences (to extract money from our wallets) that they destroy our intersubjectivities, meaning that we no longer hold mutual understanding through common beliefs. We are fragmented because we no longer share the same stories. We are fragmented from ourselves because we no longer know what to believe. Through this fragmentation, this disorientation, perhaps we might take a step into the post-trust world.

There is no reason to believe a post-trust world won’t lead to further fragmentation, antagonism and civilizational collapse. That’s a very real possibility and I am not here to peddle cheap hope.

So perhaps when I suggest that a post-trust world might strengthen our communities and shift us toward more ecological civilizations, it’s all wishful daydreaming (which I guess is cheap hope disguised as possibility). Still, let’s daydream. 

What if a post-trust world forced us to recognize the sources of distrust, reject these sources, renegotiate how we seek and process information, and reinvest in the analog (that is, the living)⁴?

What if a post-trust world led us to close down our screens because we simply can’t believe what we watch or read? What if we found trust in and sought trust from the living world—the communities in which we gift and receive our energies?

What if we opened ourselves up to all our senses, to a body that is inseparable from mind? What if we trusted (instead) our sensory experiences at least as much as our reason? What if we phased out the primacy of the brain and opened up to bodymind, where the sensory and the cognitive are entangled, where our corporeality extends beyond the boundaries of our skin?

What if the collapse of our trust in the global and digital worlds meant we reinvested in our local communities (of humans and other-than-humans)? What if it meant we re-connected with all our earthling neighbors and dispelled the perception that we are separate from Nature? 

What if our education system wasn’t an Ikea replica that standardized success, achievement, and learning and rather responded to place and time? What if this reduced the scale of our production-transportation-consumption patterns, so that we did all these things locally? 

What if we really did slow down and consider? How might trust and time woven from the same threads?

What if truths and trust were associated with the quality of our relationships rather than static facts?

What if we re-discovered the world through our senses because, in a post-trust world, trust is earned through phenomena other than the inundation of information and the mastery of narratives?

What if the mere idea of shutting down our screens opened up possibilities to imagine what else could be? What would happen if we actually did shut them down?

As we face the confluence of threats to our civilization and to the billions of earthlings with whom we share the planet, we cultivate the response-ability in the present as it bleeds from the past into the future. 

A post-trust world might be a world where we earn the trust of our neighbors, one in which we live a different set of ethics and tell new stories. 

Maybe. 

And maybe we also begin to slow down and consider why we hold the truths we hold. Maybe, if nothing else, we enter the post-trust world by questioning our own certainties and opening ourselves up to “the other side,” which may not be as full of idiots as we might think. Maybe we recognize that there are more than one ontologies in the world, and that we ourselves would do well to dance between different ontologies, holding contradictory thoughts in reconcilable ways. And maybe it just starts with trusting our senses again.

By questioning truths, we might rediscover trust—not in the digital or global, but in the living, the relational, and the embodied.

1.  Most newspapers in 20th century Europe (and today) followed political lines, and you could predict with considerable accuracy for which party a person voted based on the paper they read on the park bench. I dedicated quite a bit of time of my dissertation research delving into the leanings of the French press in the 1930s, to trace the Republican roots of the Vichy regime. These newspapers reinforced a particular kind of confirmation bias and molded ideologies and events. ↩︎
2. See Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.  ↩︎
3.  How could I leave out this iconic clip? ↩︎
4.  I don’t pretend to have any expertise in psychology, much less theories of the psychological stages for how to negotiate loss of trust or rebuild trust. These are just ideas that make sense to me. I am happy to learn more, if you could please share. Either way, these 4 Rs make sense for this train of thought.  ↩︎

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- - - - - - - -

 

To share your story, thoughts or ideas with the ISN community, please send your article draft directly to our editorial team here, or email us at [email protected]