Has it ever happened to you that you talk to someone you respect and they turn out to hold views that are simply outlandish or outrageous to you? As if you lived in completely different realities?

How we got here

First there was social media, which has become so noxious that countries have begun banning it for children, like alcohol and cigarettes, and which traps people in echo-chambers that are filled with fake news and conspiracy theories.

Then came the smartphone, a hand-held drug that separates us from each other and our environment. In public transport, it is not uncommon to see 80% of the people – sometimes including myself – glued to their screens and caught in their private world.

This was followed by a new dimension of news flooding. The rhythm of global events has started to outpace our ability to process them. Every week brings a shock that erases the previous one. One day it is the Epstein story, the next day a new war starts and everything is just buried under the next outrage. This has also become a deliberate political strategy to distract people from the real issues, and it works.

Now, we have Artificial Intelligence, which brings us very close to the point where it will be impossible for anybody to know if an event is true or not. Imagine a video of a head of state declaring war on a neighboring country. Multiple news outlets pick it up. An hour later, the government issues a denial: the video was AI-generated. But was it? Or is the denial the lie? No one can tell.

Documents can be forged, voices cloned, faces stolen. Every piece of digital evidence is becoming simultaneously believable and deniable. Perversely, AI is also eroding the value of knowledge and expertise — the very qualities we would need to navigate this reality crisis.

We are already starting to see entirely synthetic public figures, meaning we will soon no longer know who is real and who is not – unless we meet in person. So, strangely, the most advanced technology in human history is throwing us back to the Stone Age, where the only reliable means of communication was face-to-face.

But the loss of a shared reality is only the beginning. We are also seeing the erasure of a collective positive vision of the future. The post-Cold War techno-optimism — Star Trek, the early internet, the dream of an open world — first collapsed into zombie-driven dystopia, and then evaporated entirely. Indeed, as the world increasingly resembles a chaotic system, imagining what it will look like one generation from now feels impossible. Anything might happen.

So where does this leave us?

I don’t know. The negative trends look strong and hard to reverse, and it is hard to see that regulations or more technology will allow us to re-establish a common view of the world.

Like during the Enlightenment, which began with individuals rethinking their relationship to truth and to the world, I believe the change must somehow come from each of us. We need to find a new positive vision of the future, founded in the belief that every day, the world can get a bit better and more just. This requires us to break away from the news cycle and from the outrage, and to engage long-term with each other and with new ideas. Perhaps this platform can be one answer, and I hope that your opinions on this canvas will help us find more.