When Reality Became Performance: A Time Traveler’s Guide to the Collapse of Shared Truth

A person from 2012 suddenly dropped into 2025 would experience profound disorientation not from technological changes, but from the complete collapse of shared reality itself. They’d find a world where the President conducts legal strategy through social media posts, announces fake corporate deals (with Coke?) as distractions, and simultaneously sues news outlets while promising to release different documents entirely as if they’re interchangeable - all while his own supporters turn against him and his Attorney General responds to policy directives via Twitter within two minutes. Most jarring would be discovering that this chaotic performance has replaced actual governance, leaving them feeling like they’ve entered a reality show masquerading as a functioning democracy.

This transformation wasn’t accidental but the inevitable result of smartphones putting dopamine-driven misinformation machines in every pocket, social media algorithms optimizing for outrage over truth, and reality TV normalizing the idea that compelling performance matters more than competence. These forces eliminated institutional gatekeepers, weaponized “doing your own research” into pathological distrust of expertise, collapsed attention spans to make complex thought neurologically difficult, and gamified information consumption where viral lies score higher than boring facts. The time traveler would realize they’ve arrived in a world where the fundamental cognitive processes humans use to distinguish truth from fiction have been systematically rewired for profit.

​​​​​​​​​​​​