Death of Consensus Reality

What happens when reality becomes a matter of opinion?

There was a time when reality felt shared. Not perfect, not without bias, but shared nonetheless. A common thread ran through our collective consciousness, stitched together by mass media, shaped by the same voices, and bounded by the same reference points. The world was complicated, but at least we were complicated together.

That fragile consensus didn’t just shatter all at once. It frayed, thread by thread. The internet seeped in, social media metastasized, and the center of gravity shifted¹. No more single narrative. No more common stage. Now we walk through realities designed just for us. Algorithmically personalized. Tailored to fit our fears, our hopes, our blind spots.

It’s not just that we disagree now. We’re not even working off the same facts. Even with all of its flaws, the old shared reality at least gave us a common frame of reference. Now, we debate existence itself. What’s real? What’s fake? What even counts as truth? These answers are no longer something we find, but something we’re given. All through curated feeds, wrapped in the aesthetics of credibility and optimized for engagement over accuracy.

Baudrillard saw this coming. He called it hyperreality, a world where the difference between the real and the simulated collapses². But that’s not theory anymore. It’s just how things work now. News cycles are narratives, not events. Campaigns are curated experiences. Memes and deepfakes slip through the cracks like shadows in Plato’s cave³. And we don’t ask whether what we see is true. We ask whether it’s compelling.

In that sense, truth has been outcompeted. Virality replaced veracity. The spectacle won⁴. And so now we drift further into this mass disorientation. Each of us, locked in our algorithmic silos. Convinced of our own stories. Incapable of reconciling them with anyone else’s.

Social media was supposed to be a window, but it turned out to be a hall of mirrors. Each reflection, slightly distorted, slightly more flattering, slightly more aligned with what we already believe. We don’t see the world. We see our world. And once you’ve seen your own version long enough, stepping into someone else’s feels impossible.

A functioning society, even a deeply imperfect one, depends on some shared reality. But what happens when consensus becomes irrelevant, not just broken? What happens when the idea of a common good starts to sound naive? When truth itself becomes a matter of personal preference? The more we lean into these splintered realities, the more fragile everything becomes. Less a shared system, more a set of parallel monologues that are endlessly talking past one another.

And yet, we still need something to believe in. We still search for meaning, even if we don’t agree on where to find it. Maybe that’s the last shared reality we have left. That we’re all looking for something real, even as we drown in simulation. The mirror may be broken, but even shattered glass catches the light.

1. The decline of the “Walter Cronkite era” marked the shift from a world where everyone got their news from the same few sources to one where we all now live in separate algorithm-driven realities.

2. Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) warned that one day, we’d stop being able to tell reality from its endless copies. We’d live in a world of signs that only refer to each other, not to anything real.

3. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave describes prisoners who only perceive reality through shadows cast on a wall, unaware of the true forms outside their confinement. Swap out shadows for algorithmic feeds and deepfakes, and suddenly, we’re all just staring at our screens, convinced we’re getting the full picture.

4. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) wanted that news would turn into entertainment and truth would lose its footing. Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, “the medium is the message,” also suggests the structure of communication medium shapes how truth is perceived.