The Decentralization of Truth
Truth no longer arrives as a single voice, but as a swarm. Every claim is accompanied by its counter-claim, every fact by suspicion, every image by doubt. The authority of truth has been fractured, not because it disappeared, but because it multiplied.
Institutions once monopolized truth: governments, courts, media, universities. Now their statements circulate alongside influencers, algorithms, conspiracy theorists, and anonymous users. The comment section has expanded to the entire world. Participation is not a supplement to truth but its condition.
AI accelerates this decentralization. The line between what is generated and what is reported dissolves. Truth is not absent, but it is unstable, localized, contingent — adjusted to the perspective of the one who searches, the one who scrolls, the one who asks. A new pluralism emerges: every truth is provisional, every truth is contested.
This instability does not weaken power. On the contrary, it sustains it. In Gaza, we see genocide unfold in plain sight. Courts, NGOs, and media issue their truths, but these are ignored, overridden, sidelined. The violence depends on fragmented truths: on some people looking away, on others holding partial belief, on many trusting in nothing enough to act. Power thrives in this fractured field, using the faltering of truth as its weapon.
To speak of truth today is not to defend its purity or lament its loss. It is to recognize its decentralization — truth as swarm, truth as multiplicity, truth as unstable ground where both resistance and domination take form.
PETER 