Reality Distortion

Something’s Wrong With the Signal

I started to suspect something had gone wrong with reality when people began believing in flat Earth theory again. I assumed they were joking. They weren’t.

To believe the Earth is flat in the 21st century requires accepting that every long-haul pilot, satellite engineer, naval navigator, meteorologist and geography teacher on the planet is participating in a flawless, multi-generational lie. It requires believing that the International Date Line is either fictional or maintained by a secret committee of staggeringly competent bureaucrats.

We cannot synchronise bin collections. But apparently we have flawlessly coordinated planetary deception.

My father once flew from New Zealand to California, arriving before he had technically left. If the Earth were flat, that journey alone would have required an emergency induction into the Global Curvature Cover-Up somewhere over the Pacific. I found that hard to credit. This was a man who couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, despite being an enthusiastic alcoholic. I struggle to imagine him quietly safeguarding the geometry of the globe between in-flight drinks.

It was ridiculous. Completely ridiculous.

Then came the second moment.

During the Brexit wars, Michael Gove calmly announced that people in this country had “had enough of experts.”

That was when something shifted: facts stopped being referees and started being contestants.

After that, the absurdity didn’t retreat. It scaled.

Close Enough

Flat Earth was joined by QAnon - whose central claim, stripped of its theatrics, was that a shadowy network of elite, powerful paedophiles operated at the highest levels of politics and influence. Around that core grew codes, prophecies and a coming Storm. It was grandiose. It was wildly implausible.

But then reality started behaving awkwardly.

Because while there was no underground volcano lair, there was Jeffrey Epstein and a social orbit that included an astonishing number of powerful, wealthy, influential people. Presidents. Princes. Billionaires. Media figures. The kind of names that defined the global elite ecosystem of the 1990s and 2000s.

It wasn’t a satanic world government. But structurally - in silhouette - the resemblance was close enough to make the laughter hesitate.

And speaking of that ecosystem, tech was not floating above it.

One of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, appears in the Epstein files. Not as proof of some occult masterplan, but as another reminder that Silicon Valley was not morally insulated from the same elite circuits. It was in the same social orbit. The same dinners. The same networks.

Which matters, because Google once felt like the antidote to all of this. Launched in 1998 with the deceptively simple ambition to organise the world’s information, it wore its early motto - “Don’t be evil” - like a Silicon Valley halo. It felt idealistic. Clean. Almost academic.

They went public within a few short years. Very quickly, the scrappy search engine became something else: an advertising machine that quietly rewired how information surfaced online.

At first it felt magical. Then it felt monetised. Then it began to feel curated. And now, it’s filtered and increasingly unusable.

The company that once organised information now organises what you are allowed to see.

The Film That Wasn’t There

A few nights ago, my wife and I watched a vintage adult film from the mid-1990s. It starred Careena Collins - a major star of the 1980s who left the industry, went to law school, earned a first-class degree, and then returned in the mid-90s making material far more extreme than her earlier mainstream films.

The film we watched was made during that return period. I was absolutely certain I had once read that it caused problems with distributors - that it was considered too much, that it stalled, that it effectively didn’t receive a proper release at the time before later resurfacing.

I told my wife this story with complete confidence. Then we tried to confirm it. On Google, the result was surreal.

There was no contextual information. No production history. No background. No discussion of any controversy. Barely even a mention that the film ever existed.

Instead, there were dozens and dozens of links to tube sites offering illegal streams. Page after page of piracy. Google had removed the context and left the intellectual property theft.

I tried using a VPN, but Google was entirely unimpressed. It still treated me as though I were in the UK and served the same sanitised results - nothing explanatory, nothing historical, nothing analytical. Just an avalanche of illegal viewing options.

Eventually I switched to the more privacy-orientated search engine DuckDuckGo with the VPN properly engaged.

There, finally, I found something: the later release artwork, emblazoned with wording along the lines of “the film they didn’t want you to see.” Which at least confirmed that I hadn’t imagined the backstory.

The Safety Paradox

In the name of protecting children, governments have introduced sweeping online safety laws. The intentions are protective, but the implementation is patchwork, jurisdictionally inconsistent and technologically blunt. Platforms respond by over-filtering. Context disappears. Nuance erodes. History thins out.

Meanwhile, users are increasingly nudged toward uploading government ID to third-party verification systems whose security competence is unclear at best. Creating a global ecosystem in which millions of people are encouraged to hand over identity documents to small digital intermediaries has the potential to become the largest international identity theft disaster in history.

All of this to protect young people - who are often the most technically adept at bypassing the restrictions designed to contain them.

The result is a strange inversion: information is sanitised, but piracy is not; context vanishes, but access does not.

We are told this is safety. But increasingly it feels like reality distortion.

Facts haven’t disappeared. They’ve been demoted.

As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions - but increasingly it feels like a different road.

Dialling Up the Distortion

And just as all of this begins to feel unstable, we introduce artificial intelligence. Not the cinematic version. Not War Games. Not The Terminator. The ordinary kind.

The kind that can already generate images and video convincing enough to pass unless you are actively suspicious. The kind that can mimic voices, fabricate scenes, reconstruct events and rearrange them.

Right now, producing high-end synthetic video still requires stitching together multiple tools, serious computing power, and a fair amount of technical choreography. That friction is temporary. It will not stay difficult for long.

When generating convincing footage becomes routine - and analysing, editing and repurposing that footage becomes just as routine - the boundary between record and fabrication thins.

The internet already struggles to organise what is real. Now we are building systems that can produce unreality at industrial scale. None of this is inherently malicious. It is powerful, creative, and potentially transformative.

But it is arriving in a world where trust is already eroded, where search results are filtered, where scandals resemble conspiracy theories, and where an unstable global experiment in identity verification could go disastrously wrong.

This is a fragile environment in which to dial up the distortion. Reality has been feeling unstable for a while now. We may already be at the tipping point, perhaps even slightly past it.

But nobody knows what happens next.