The Twilight of Reality

For a while now I've noticed something: I argue less and less about facts and more and more about 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 that feeling, which I couldn't quite name, that I arrived here.

Hannah Arendt used to say that freedom of opinion becomes a farce when no one guarantees reliable information about the facts. Decades after that warning, we have arrived at a place she may not have foreseen: it is no longer the information that is distorted, but the very idea of fact that is dissolving.

The other day, I watched Wagner Moura talking about O Agente Secreto, the film by Kleber Mendonça Filho that led to his historic Oscar nomination. He commented on the atmosphere of paranoia and surveillance in the film, and during the interview, he confessed to a kind of paralysis in the face of the lack of factual parameters in the real world. I thought about it for days, because it is exactly what we all feel, without knowing how to name it: we have been pushed into a fog of fragmented versions, a place where what actually happened seems to have stopped mattering. The "what happened" has lost out to the "I choose what to believe".

I do not think this is an accident. It is the result of very well-calibrated digital engineering combined with our fatigue - the kind of fatigue we carry without realizing it, from constantly scrolling through our screens. Platforms profit from engagement, and engagement feeds on emotional impulse, not precision. In the face of any complex fact, the evidence is dismantled by the flood of fake news, and opinion formation migrates to the terrain 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 only exist to reflect ourselves back to us.

The fact that, by nature, should have withstood time has become a pliable mass in the hands of an algorithm. And this algorithm keeps us anesthetized, chasing the easy endorphin of manufactured consensus.

Quando ponho essa fragilidade ao lado do avanço da inteligência artificial generativa, a hiper-realidade de Baudrillard deixa de ser teoria de sala de aula e vira retrato do meu feed. Baudrillard falava de um estado em que a distinção entre real e simulação desaparece, substituída por simulacros — cópias sem 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 pact of "see to believe".

Isso tensiona os diagnósticos que aprendi a admirar — a modernidade líquida de Bauman, o perspectivismo de Nietzsche. Os dois ainda operavam em escala humana: mentes interpretando o mundo, instituições se dissolvendo devagar. A inteligência artificial introduz algo que não é humano: uma máquina que automatiza e escala a criação de realidades alternativas. Narrativas hiperpersonalizadas, disparadas em massa, talhadas para caber exatamente no perfil de cada um de nós. E aí chegamos de novo à paralisia de Moura — viramos espectadores de uma realidade sob medida, tão confortável que buscar o fato bruto parece esforço demais.

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 a “that’s your truth”. It is no longer a debate, it is 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 newspaper 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 verifying. Checking a fact today is almost an anachronistic gesture — it takes time, requires humility, sometimes forces us to admit we were wrong. No one wants that because making a mistake in public, in an era of permanent spotlight, hurts more than ever. So it is easier to choose the version that demands no revision. 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. Maybe rescuing the value of fact is not about stifling plurality — it is simply 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 of this just to plant an idea in the other’s subconscious?