We’ve been making predictions about what 2026 might hold–and there is still time to make yours (go here)–and so have other publications.
Politico asked experts in various fields, “What is the unpredictable, unlikely but entirely plausible thing that could happen in 2026 that could completely upend American life?”
One of the answers jumped out at me as describing well what our relativism, constructivism, and reality-bending technology can lead to.
This is from Erica Orange, author of AI + The New Human Frontier: Reimagining the Future of Time, Trust + Truth:
‘Society enters a state of psychosocial freefall’
The shift in this scenario is from today’s highly polarized but still shared world — where groups interpret events differently — to a fractured reality in which the events themselves cannot be verified, origins cannot be traced, and no authoritative source can prove what is real. Instead of opposing political narratives and conspiracy theories, society enters a state of psychosocial freefall where AI creates a series of parallel realities. It will mark a transition not from disagreement to deeper disagreement, but from disagreement to the collapse of a shared reality altogether.
This leads to the upending of the midterm elections. Ultra-realistic deepfakes flood the infosphere. One week before the election, a deepfake shows one candidate accepting a bribe from a foreign government. Minutes later, another deepfake shows the opposing candidate calling for the abolition of elections. Both clips go viral before fact-checkers can respond. AI instantly generates thousands of supporting “eyewitness accounts,” each with hyper-realistic voices, backstories and social profiles. In the following days, AI-generated “leaked documents” allege voting manipulation, foreign hacks and corrupted ballots. The public no longer mistrusts the government. They mistrust reality.
Democratic institutions prove incapable of responding at digital speed. While verification protocols are debated, AI systems generate thousands of new, contradictory narratives every hour. Trust erodes. Civic responsibility withers. Fragmented truth enclaves harden into antagonistic tribes. Citizens become more apathetic. Institutional authority collapses. The vacuum is quickly filled by fast-moving authoritarian actors and ever-more powerful tech platforms that step in as the new arbiters of “truth.”
As I have been showing in my books Postmodern Times and Post-Christian, the dominant worldviews of our time have already rejected the notion of objective truth in favor of relativism (“what’s true for you may not be true for me”) and constructivism (“we create our own truths”). This has been a philosophy. But now, with AI and virtual reality, we have the technology to actualize that philosophy!
And if we all have our own truths and truth is nothing more than a construction–whether by an individual’s choices or by a culture or by a group in power–then we have no “shared reality” that makes society or even human relationships possible!
Orange here cite the political implications of this mindset. There can be no democracy, no self-government, no community, no social identity whatsoever if there is a “collapse of a shared reality.” There can be, I suppose, “authoritarian actors” who impose their reality by exercising power over the rest of us, though this is just capitulating to the postmodernist “critical theory.”
What we need is to recover the objectivity of truth. Not just the scientific, rationalistic view of truth that modernism tried, which led to the reaction of postmodernism. A truth that includes, in addition to physical reality, moral and spiritual reality. That’s the kind of shared reality that can bring people together in relationships, societies, cultures, and civilizations.
Photo: Erica Orange Ben by P L, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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