Democracy is an epistemic discipline, it only works if truth can constrain power. Without a faster, more transparent architecture for shared reality, the arc of democracy bends away from substance, through simulation, and toward authoritarianism. Without major action, it's the inevitable end state.

The new system is defined by information abundance and attention scarcity. It is fast, peer-to-peer, and real time. This shift is structural, not political. The public are not just recipients of information, but creators and distributors, competing for attention in the same spaces as institutions.

What broke this was not ideology, it was an inversion of the information environment. The old system was defined by information scarcity and attention abundance, and it was slow, top-down, and gatekept.

Verification (establishing truth), Deliberation (arguing about it), and Accountability (binding power to it). When these work, you have substance. When they break, you slide into performance, and eventually, simulation, and people recognise this, even if they don't use a shared terminology.

Everyone wants to blame the content: misinformation, bots, polarisation. That mistakes catalysts and symptoms for the underlying causes. The crisis isn’t bad information, it's that the very information infrastructure we relied on to create a shared understand of the world had changed completely.

... paramilitärische Söldnertruppe, die außerhalb der verfassungsmäßigen Ordnung agiert und sich polizeiliche Befugnisse anmaßt, die ihr laut Gesetz nicht zustehen. Jeder Zu- und Angriff auf US-Staatsbürger:innen ist illegal. ICE ist das Pendant zu Omon in Russland und den Revolutionsgarden in Iran.

The forensic promise of networked images was: the more digital footage there is of an event, the more reliably that event can be reconstructed. Methodologically, this still seems true. Politically, however, the opposite seems to be the case: the more images, the more competing versions of reality
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