The Twilight of Reality

I have noticed for some time now that I discuss fewer facts and more versions. With friends, with family, with myself. It's not that people have become more dishonest — it's that no one seems to need the same reality to support what they think. And it was while trying to understand this feeling, which I couldn't name properly, that I arrived here

Hannah Arendt said that freedom of opinion becomes a farce when no one else guarantees reliable information about the facts. Decades after that warning, we have arrived at a place she perhaps did not foresee: it is no longer information that becomes distorted — it is the very notion of fact that dissolves.

The other day I watched Wagner Moura talk about O Agente Secreto, Kleber Mendonça Filho's film that earned him a historic Oscar nomination. He described the movie's atmosphere of paranoia and surveillance, and midway through the interview he admitted a kind of paralysis in the face of the lack of factual parameters in the real world. I kept thinking about it for days. Because that is exactly what we all feel, without being able to name it: we have been pushed into a fog of fragmented versions, a place where what actually happened seems to have ceased mattering. The “happened” lost the battle to the “I choose what to believe”.

I don’t think this is an accident. It is the result of a finely calibrated digital engineering combined with our fatigue — the fatigue we carry unconsciously from endless scrolling. Platforms profit from engagement, and engagement feeds on emotional impulse, not on accuracy. Faced with any complex fact, evidence is dismantled by a flood of fake news, and opinion formation shifts to the realm of emotions, beliefs and convenience.

The honest search for reality gives way to something more urgent and more human, at its core: the search for a group that accepts us — the refuge in bubbles that exist only to return our own reflection.

The fact, which by nature should resist time, becomes modeling clay in the hands of an algorithm. And this algorithm keeps us anesthetized, chasing the easy endorphin of manufactured consensus.

When I place this fragility alongside the advance of generative artificial intelligence, Baudrillard's hyperreality ceases to be classroom theory and becomes the image of my feed. Baudrillard spoke of a condition where the distinction between real and simulation disappears, replaced by simulacra — copies without an original.

Today the simulacrum has won. Generative AI no longer distorts an existing fact; it creates synthetic facts from scratch, with a finish so perfect it deceives the eye and finally breaks the old “see to believe” pact.

This strains the diagnoses I have come to admire — Bauman’s liquid modernity, Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Both still operated on a human scale: minds interpreting the world, institutions dissolving slowly. Artificial intelligence introduces something non‑human: a machine that automates and scales the creation of alternative realities. Hyper‑personalized narratives, launched en masse, crafted to fit precisely each of our profiles. And then we return to Moura’s paralysis — we become spectators of a tailor‑made reality, so comfortable that seeking raw fact feels like too much effort.

I notice this in small things, in my own daily life. In a round‑table conversation, it only takes someone to disagree with a datum — not an opinion, a datum — for the whole discussion to collapse into “that’s your truth.” It’s no longer a debate, it’s a clash of beliefs. And the worst part is that this logic has seeped even into the spaces that should be most protected from it: the classroom, the newsroom, the family table on Sunday. Everyone has become an expert on everything because everyone has a source that confirms what they already wanted to believe before asking.

Perhaps the cruelest part of this process is the silence it imposes on those who still insist on checking. Fact‑checking today is almost an anachronistic gesture — it takes time, requires humility, and sometimes forces us to admit we were wrong. No one wants that because making a mistake in public, in an age of constant spotlight, hurts more than ever. So it’s easier to choose the version that requires no revision at all. And so we go, each in our own bubble, comfortable and alone at the same time.

I’m not sure where this leaves us, and I distrust those who are certain. Perhaps rescuing the value of fact is not about stifling plurality — it’s just remembering that, however free opinions may be, there is a ground that belongs to no one’s opinion. That ground is getting thinner each day, and I don’t know if it can still bear our collective weight. All this just to plant an idea in the other’s subconscious?