wading_into_the_real ovenbird The Real used to be an ocean, easy to identify in its vastness. Yes, you had to look out for the way light bends when it moves from air to water, adjusting for internal and external bias. But information used to be more closely tied to its sources, which could be assessed for rigour and validity. I used to trust the strength of my critical thinking strategies to investigate ideas and come to well reasoned conclusions. Now I find myself saying, endlessly, “is that really true?” Truth has always been a slippery thing, prone to being controlled by those with power and influence and money. History is written by the victors, says the old aphorism, which means that there is never one, complete, uncontroversial truth. But it used to be possible to believe that things were solidly rooted in a genuine attempt at truth-seeking, even if the resulting narrative was complex, and subject to future revision. I began my life in a world dominated by in-person, concrete connections that couldn’t be faked. We talked on the phone. We had to print our pictures at the drug store photo lab and no one had access to anything like Photoshop. I checked books out of the library to complete my school assignments. We had a newspaper delivered to our house. While the world’s political systems were precarious, it was still possible to feel like you could know and understand things. It was possible to look at a picture and trust in the veracity of what it showed. No longer. Over time we have developed more sophisticated ways to lie. And now with the explosion of AI I find myself questioning every single thing I see. I can no longer trust my own eyes, my critical thinking skills, or my ability to reason. The fakes are getting too good. The lies becoming too layered. The biases becoming too deeply entrenched so that productive debate is no longer possible. I find that I no longer trust anything, and it’s a terrifying feeling to have no ability to root oneself into a general sense of reality. I wonder what it means, for all of us, as data centers spring up like weeds spawned from the greed of billionaires gone to seed, to wade back into the real? What does it mean to reclaim a sense of grounded truth? So much delight is eliminated when you can’t believe anything you see. And so, perhaps, we need to return to the world unmitigated by the technologies we’ve unleashed. The birds are still real. The trees. The river. The person sitting across the table from me. Is this where we have to start? Just me and you and our words spiraling upward with the ash of a well stoked fire? I feel so lost in the world. Maybe all aging people feel this way. Left behind. But the thing is that I don’t want to run to catch up with what the world has become. I want to slow down. I want to drink the real tea in the real mug in front of me. I want to feel your real heart in your real chest beating beneath my palm. 260522 what's it to you? who go blather from