Society & Culture / Media & Communication / Propaganda & Information Warfare

Stop Blaming Fake News: The Golden Age of Truth Never Existed

Post-Truth Imaginations: How Science and Technology are Transforming the Global Politics of Fact and Fiction

Kjetil Rommetveit

You probably believe that if we could just ban the bots, fact-check rogue politicians, and fix social media algorithms, society could finally return to a shared, objective reality. You would be completely wrong. The chilling reality is that the golden age of truth we desperately long for never actually existed. What we romanticize as the era of facts was simply an era of unquestioned authority, where state-backed gatekeepers maintained stability through carefully engineered public fictions. Drawing from the groundbreaking book Post-Truth Imaginations: How Science and Technology are Transforming the Global Politics of Fact and Fiction, edited by Kjetil Rommetveit—Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities at the University of Bergen—this deep dive pulls apart the hidden machinery of modern reality. Rommetveit and a team of leading scholars demonstrate that our collective panic over post-truth is not about the death of facts, but about institutional elites losing their monopoly on the narrative. Key revelations explored: - The Huxleyan Trap: Why Orwell’s 1984 got the future wrong. We are not being starved of truth by a totalitarian censor; we are drowning in an ocean of trivial, entertaining noise until we voluntarily stop caring. - Politics as Burlesque: Why politicians perform absurd stunts to fuel the attention economy, and why fact-checking them only plays directly into their algorithmic trap. - The Infrastructure of Deception: How political operatives use psychometric profiling models to map your digital footprint, bypass your rational brain, and trigger raw personal fear. - The Industrialization of Doubt: Why ignorance is not a lack of knowledge, but a multimillion-dollar product manufactured by corporations to paralyze public policy. - The Rise of Hypertruth: The dangerous paradox of modern society—violently rejecting human expertise while placing blind, religious faith in black-box algorithms and automated code. - The Interregnum: Navigating the chaotic gap where the old consensus has collapsed, the new world has not yet formed, and reality itself is up for grabs. Step back from the outrage machine, see through the political circus, and learn how to navigate a world where reality itself is being re-engineered.