The truth doesn't float — it must be kept afloat. Look away for even a second and it sinks beneath the waves.
Joseph Goebbels famously said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.”
Except, he never actually said that. Nor did Hitler. Nor Lenin. Nor any of the figures to whom this quote has been traditionally attributed.
The irony is almost too perfect. The quote itself is a lie, made true by sheer repetition.
Need proof? Here it is.
Nevertheless, the truth used to at least feel resilient—strong enough to float on its own. Something we could trust with our lives. It took a sustained battery of deception, or an encounter with a proverbial iceberg, to sink it. Lies had to do the work. At least that’s the thrust of the “quote”.
But the truth was never the floating fortress we imagined. That was its own fabrication, in many cases reinforced by the very institutions that claimed to safeguard it. Now, those institutions lie broken and smashed upon the shore.
The world has changed. The age of ships is over. The truth no longer sails confidently across the sea—it clings to life among the detritus, barely treading water. Look away for even a second, and it sinks beneath the waves.
Deceive, Inveigle, Obfuscate—and Overwhelm
Contrary to what the false Goebbels quote suggests, the goal was never simply to destroy the truth. It has always been to control the narrative, by whatever means necessary.
In the 20th century, this was information warfare and it was emphatically about direct control. The flow of information had a finite, largely institutionalised set of channels and power moved like a ship across the ocean, controlling the lanes and delivering its cargo.
But in the 21st century, power has become the ocean itself—the ‘platform’ upon which the entire world shifts its ideas. It creates the illusion of free movement while exerting absolute authority. And in this new age, direct pronouncement of the truth can sometimes be a mistake.
Those who fight disinformation know this well: arguing with falsehoods head-on can often serve to strengthen them. The pig-headed beast feeds on opposition.
Power, therefore, no longer needs to defend or assault fortresses. It doesn’t need to secure the shipping lanes. It only needs to create chaos—a stormy sea and an endless churn of flotsam and jetsam, feigning fairness through the seemingly indiscriminate, and making anything stable seem safe.
Then, into the abyss, it throws something that looks like a life preserver: a simple, compelling narrative. A false truth, but a simple, comforting one.
This is the ultimate utility of algorithmic content delivery in an ostensibly open sea. The platforms pretend to offer free navigation while shaping the currents beneath. They don’t tell you what to think—they flood the waters until the only thing left to cling to is the narrative they designed for you.
All the power of Poseidon.
The Drowning of Truth
This new information ecosystem has fundamentally altered how we form narratives about ourselves and the world. Where once we sailed around on vessels carved from a finite set of trusted sources and resources, today we are drowning in an endless stream of fragmented, confusing and contradictory mess.
The goal is not explicitly to replace truth but to make the act of finding it so exhausting that people give up altogether.
Is it any wonder that simulation theories have gained such traction? When every perspective has a thousand counterclaims and reality itself seems unstable, the simplest explanation becomes the most appealing: maybe none of it is real at all.
The strategy isn’t subtle, nor does it need to be. It operates on a simple premise: if you can’t win the argument, sabotage it.
Make so many competing ‘truths’ available that the real one becomes indistinguishable from the fakes. You don’t need to convince people of a lie—you only need to make them doubt the truth.
And it works.
Fill the information ecosystem with enough garbage, and eventually people stop looking for land altogether. They get used to drifting. They stop expecting solid ground. They lose the will to fight back and the capacity to build coherent narratives of their own.
And once truth is submerged, retrieving it becomes nearly impossible. The deeper it sinks, the more murky and distorted it appears, until eventually, it is indistinguishable from the debris surrounding it. The longer it remains lost, the harder it is to ever recover.
It’s an effective way to undermine public discourse and the media. And now, the strategy has moved into governance and politics.
Poseidon Runs for Office
In the last two decades, the strategy has overwhelmed the information ecosystem and certainly impacted politics. Now, it's being applied to the political system directly. And in the process, crippling democracy.
Rather than just flooding people with misinformation, we are now inundated with a thousand real-world actions and visible political machinations a day, each with a million implications.
The results gives lawyers not one, but a hundred things to worry about at once. It gives opposition legislators an endless stream of distractions. And it gives the public so much to absorb and endure that they lose faith in the entire process. It keeps everyone running just to stand still.
The shift to politics makes it clear: there is no longer even the pretence of neutrality. The fact that 'Poseidon' had a preference was already evident long before the most recent political events. Now he and his ilk are standing behind the desk, wearing matching hats.
Authoritarianism has always had a limited playbook, and history shows us the same tactics used again and again. When confronted with a population that finds solidarity and builds a narrative that threatens power, the response is usually the same: apply more pressure. Arrest. Imprison. Intimidate. Isolate. Confuse.
The strategy only works, however, as long as enough people have enough, or for as long as fear of punishment remains stronger than fear of the day-to-day existential concerns. Economic instability has historically been the strongest predictor of revolt and eventually lies and mistruths come into forceful contact with that lived reality.
Regardless of how powerful you might be, you can’t convince a hungry person their belly is full. Perhaps that will be the breaking point again.
But in the meantime, a new development is making things even harder.
The Great Garbage Patch
The combination of tech and politics isn’t just challenging our willingness to learn from history, by presenting old problems as new innovations — it’s eroding our very capacity to do so.
Algorithmic manipulation, relentless information saturation and now AI-generated content are creating a great garbage patch of digital detritus that pollutes not just contemporary issues, but our ability to revisit the past. It eats away at, and in many cases replaces, what should be solid ground — the vast structures of academic, scientific, journalistic and historical information that form the building blocks of a shared reality and empower our ability to form and maintain consensus.
What’s more, it’s self-replicating and growing at a rate that has quickly overwhelmed primary data and information with meaningless meta and abstraction.
There is a reasonable case to make that some of the responsibility lies with the institutions who built and maintain these structures: An appeal to the authority of their own legacy and profession; a disregard for the effectiveness of authentic transparency; the practical difficulty of rigorously vetting every reference; and the tendency to talk down to audiences. None of that has helped.
But we’re now in a situation where nonsense can emulate virtually anything. And if everything floats, then nothing does.
So what do we do?
Solution 1: Quality Signals for the Digital Space
The first response must be process and standards-based. Disinformation is not a problem we haven't experienced before and the solution is much the same as it was then.
Just as societies once adapted to the slosh produced by the public printing press by elevating certain content via rigorous referencing and verification, we must continue that trajectory and establish higher standards that lift the good, rather than sink the bad.
With this, we need to streamline and make far more accessible the process by which those references can be vetted. Anything that places too much onerous responsibility on news or research consumers to double-check every reference and hyperlink is at issue.
Furthermore, we need to recognise the fact that trust comes from familiarity and humanisation. Authentic contact with the person and process behind the content has the dual effect of distinguishing it from that produced by AI, as well as demonstrating that there was authentic research behind it.
Obviously, with the emergence of AI agents and the capacity to create highly realistic video avatars, this becomes an issue as well, but while we can’t completely eliminate the capacity for fakes, we can make it harder.
The point is that we start at the point of creation rather than consumption.
One way to bring these techniques together is to create video logs of the research process with the researcher themselves annotating (on video) both the research journey, as well as the personal and epistemological journey behind the journalism (or other form of work).
This can be presented alongside content to watch, or listen to, offering the consumer an insight and an actual reason besides “because I’m a journalist/physicist/etc or work for the NYT/Harvard/etc and I said so” to trust.
Perhaps something like this.
At the end of the day, fact-checking alone is insufficient. Fighting disinformation by reacting to it cedes ground before the battle even begins. Instead, we must elevate content at the point of creation, ensuring that trustworthiness is built into the information ecosystem rather than slapped on after the fact.
Solution 2: Social Proof for the ‘Meat Space’
The second solution is social and structural. People trust people. Individual relationships form the foundation of trust in both networks and institutions. And any trust held by institutions has always been derived from the accumulated trust of countless individual relationships over time.
A trusted institution is merely a product. Not a foundation.
Historically, these relationships were built in real, tangible spaces—schools, workplaces, churches, neighbourhoods, etc. Mass communication introduced the ability to permeate these networks with centralized, often state-driven narratives.
The rise of digital and social media then added the ability for anyone, be they minor celebrities, diffuse online communities or bots, to permeate the close-knit networks of individuals.
The compounding effect has further fractured and reshaped those networks, allowing a host of outside influences to dominate discourse across vast geographies.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But it complicates things.
The fundamental reality is this: contact breeds trust. And today, many people see Fox News, Joe Rogan, or their preferred digital figurehead more often than they see their neighbours. The real world is therefore defined in disingenuous and dissociative terms, rather than the real lived experience of ordinary people.
While there’s no inherent problem with diffuse digital communities shaping our perspectives, it is crucial that these perspectives remain grounded in reality.
There are two ways to address this.
1 - Recentering real, live people
First, we must actively rebuild spaces and opportunities for real-world relationships. Whether it’s through urban design, service provision, community initiatives, or workplace dynamics.
How and where people meet, needs to be at the forefront of considerations.
Different configurations create and foster different social geometries — a term which describes the 'shape' and distribution of highly communicative trust relationships across the 'horizontal' geography of a landscape or city and the 'vertical' topography or demography of ideological, socio-economic and identity-based diversities.
Fostering in-person conversations helps create more resilient and diverse networks of trust that make society more legitimately and deeply interconnected, as opposed to the superficial interconnection of the digital space.
Actual human contact cannot be substituted by algorithmic engagement.
2 - Ensuring bilateral conversations, not just broadcasts
Second, we must shift from unidirectional narratives to genuine dialogue. The problem is not simply that people are tuning into new voices — it’s that they’re primarily being talked at, not engaged with.
While the old top-down media structures of the 20th century enabled mass manipulation, today’s digital landscape is equally vulnerable to the same forces, only fragmented and decentralized.
The goal is not to eliminate broad communication but to ensure that our social structures encourage actual exchanges rather than passive consumption. When engagement is unidirectional, it becomes easy to mislead, distort, and manipulate.
These two solutions must come together in how we design our communities — both physical and digital. We must create real relationships that bridge communities, facilitate genuine discourse, and minimize the degrees of separation through which authentic information flows.
Put simply, trust should reside in networks of people, not abstracted institutions. We must cultivate strong, real-world relationships of knowledge-sharing communities that resist the flood of noise and process and distribute reliable information organically. Simply exposing ourselves to an overwhelming digital void, and in turn, screaming into it, breeds only isolation and misunderstanding.
That doesn’t mean that institutions aren’t valuable. There has never been a greater need for the amplification of clear truths around which we can form consensus and act together. But trust in those truths and those institutions can only be built by taking a more intimate and interpersonal approach.
Trust needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
The Ship of Truth Needs a Crew
Once, we imagined truth as a fortress. That was never the case.
It was always fragile and often hidden. It doesn’t, unfortunately, float on its own. It needs design principles. It needs regular maintenance. And it needs people, working diligently and constantly to keep it above water; keep it from banging into things; and occasionally to fend off pirates.
Those are not jobs that can be solely entrusted to institutions. Not because institutions are fundamentally untrustworthy. But because the job is just too damn big. The cynical will often paint the masses as part of the problem. A lack of education. Or a lack of good sense. But that’s not only offensive, it’s just plain wrong.
The solution is open. The solution is accessible. The solution is something everyone can participate in. Anything else is regressive and alienates the people with whom we are trying to engender trust in the first place.
These days, it’s all too easy to let go. There’s so much floating around, so much debris on the surface, that the truth can disappear beneath the waves the moment we stop fighting for it.
There's a battle that needs to be won. But it isn't won by simply torpedoing lies. It’s won by building something fundamentally more seaworthy.
If we don’t, we’re all sunk.