When Reality Breaks, Who Repairs It?

It began slowly. Not with a bang, but with the erosion of meaning — and then, of minds. It happened so quietly that nobody noticed.

A child scrolls past atrocities and doesn’t flinch. She gives an AI-generated speech of Bin Laden’s a ❤️ without a second thought. A video of someone being beaten for laughs gets a 🤣. None of it stirs her. Her nervous system is overloaded. Her ability to think or feel clearly — paused.

In his office, a man of good conscience reads five conflicting accounts of the same event. He begins to wonder not what’s true, but whether truth is even findable. He shuts down. Searching for the truth is too much work. And thus, the algorithm wins again.

This is our reality. Not in the future, today. Truth is collapsing faster than we can defend it. We’re bombarded with content that distorts our natural instincts and switches off our humanity. We’re entrenched in a war of narratives, loyalties, and algorithms. Some figured out that humanity is hackable. Yet few see it.

The twentieth century taught us the dangers of totalitarian propaganda. The twenty-first will teach us something far stranger: the danger of distributed distortion. It’s algorithmic, hard to trace, and highly effective at destroying not just people’s minds — but entire societies.

We won’t see a single point of origin. No sole dictator at the helm.

Distributed distortion isn’t simply a problem of disinformation. It has the power to sabotage our natural defences to toxic influences. Right now we’ve living a cultural autoimmune collapse*, fed by the very systems originally designed to open minds and connect people.

We assumed the media was the battlefield. But media is just the delivery system — the vehicle that brings distortion straight into our minds. 

The real battlefield is epistemic: Who decides what’s real? 

The real terrain is neurobiological: What does this information do to a person’s capacity for discernment, for empathy, for democratic coexistence?

The real threat isn’t disinformation. It’s the slow corrosion of our natural defences. We’ve been chasing lies. But the real danger isn’t what’s false — it’s what happens to our ability to recognise what’s true.

Who is guarding the vulnerabilities of open, high-trust societies?

Our politicians aren’t doing it. Nor is the media. Nor are the very institutions created to defend our welfare and well-being.

So who will protect our societies’ integrity, values, and our shared sense of humanity?

We will. You. Me. The silent majority that finds their voices. Anyone who cares about the kind of world we want to live in.

Fighting the system is a monumental battle. What if the battle could be won, not by information defence but with discernment?

What if we created our own Iron Dome — not for missiles, but for toxic influences? A cognitive shield against digital neurotoxicity, narrative warfare, and emotional hijack.

Not to censor. But to intercept distortion, filter noise, and strengthen our collective sense-making.

We’ve seen how easy it was to infect the structures and foundations of societies built on trust.

If humanity is hackable, maybe it’s time we built a better firewall.

This isn’t a theory piece. It’s a signal. If you too are building something to combat these issues, come and find me.

* If you want to know what ‘cultural autoimmune collapse’ refers to, have a look at the post 'Cultural Autoimmune Collapse: When Truth Can’t Defend Us'.