Truth Is No Longer the Point

We don't have a way to describe what comes next.

POD 156: Going Post-Truth

The internet used to argue over what was true. Now it’s about what performs. This week, we talk about how the information space rewards vibes over verification, the second-order effects of video swallowing social media, and how institutions lost the narrative war to influencers, memelords, and politicians who understand that truth is optional so long as the narrative is upheld.

Out Friday AM. Listen.

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PVA CONVERSATION

Troy: I started playing with the AI creation app Sora from OpenAI this week.

It’s super fun, especially when you can use the world’s library of IP as the cultural context for anything you dream up. The “Cameo” feature, where you and your friends become the stars, is its breakthrough. The set up and creation process is the most frictionless I’ve ever seen. The app may be more toy than TikTok competitor, but what the underlying tech represents is profound.

Sora is just another chapter in 25 years of innovation that have steadily redrawn the boundaries of human experience, weakened the power of institutions, and blurred the balance between narrative and fact. There are undeniable truths in the world — in money and bullets, in love and death — but narratives drive what we value. Narratives are born on the internet.

Each phase has pulled the internet deeper into the fabric of life. What began as a system for sharing information has become a theater for performance. We no longer log on; we inhabit it.

Documents made knowledge portable.
Communication made connection instant.
Publishing gave everyone a voice.
Social made identity public.
Transactions made it commercial.
Video made it emotional and performative.
Mobile made it constant.
Personalized made it addictive.
Streaming made it continuous.
Intelligent made it a thought partner.
Synthetic blended fact and fiction.
Ambient is next — when digital truly meets physical, when the network stops living in screens and starts living around us.

As it evolves, truth gives way to coherence — the sense that something feels right, that it belongs inside the story we already believe. The internet rewards coherence because it drives attention and belonging. It gets engagement. The result is a world organized not around shared facts but around self-contained realities. A coherent lie now travels farther than an incoherent truth.

We’ve always lived by stories; now they’re how we navigate the world. That feels existential because our moral compass was built on a clean divide between the real and the fake. For good reason: when someone can control the narrative with lies, they can bend reality to their will — often at the expense of those forced to live with the hard truth.

Where we go from here, I don’t know. It’s hard to see power returning to institution structures that underpinned the checks and balances of saner times.

The insanity will crest at the next election. If 2020 was the Twitter election, and 2024 was, notionally, the podcast election, then 2028 will be the synthetic video one — the first fought in video that no one can fully believe. Hopefully the deceit ends in the ballot box.

Brian: The case for exit

I was very down on Sora until you showed us Fat Troy, the AI rapper with the hint of a Regina accent and the street cred of Shelter Island. We’ll see how the math pencils out on reopening Three Mile Island to create AI Elf Yourself.

I’m less enthusiastic about the ambient phase. Fat Troy aside, I’m struck by how unenjoyable this version of the internet has become. It’s hard to remember, but “going online” was once fun. Now, it feels like the addicted smokers who are outside huddled near the building on a cold and rainy day. We mostly all know we’re being manipulated, fed garbage and lies, designed to unlock dopamine hits to keep us scrolling. Combine that with ambient computing, and I want to hit the exits to preserve my autonomy.

I’m less deterministic about all of this. I believe we all feel a sense of loss in this post-truth environment. There’s a fatigue that sets in when you constantly have to try to figure out what is real. It’s like the awful period when people would take to Twitter on April Fools Day, only that’s every day. I’m taken by the concept of anemoia, the feeling of nostalgia for a time you never experienced. This is an interesting phenomenon that speaks to a widespread ambivalence, even antipathy, to what increasingly feels like a made-up world.

Balaji Srinivasan, the crypto-pilled public intellectual of the extremely online VC class, likes to say that faced with institutional power, the choices are to capitulate, fight or exit. Full exit might not be possible, but simply being aware of this manipulation is a form of exit. Inevitably the pendulum will swing back to a place more rooted in the real.

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