Seemingly overnight, AI-generated content on YouTube and X has become almost indistinguishable from “real” human-made media. Nothing, in other words, can be trusted. How can a society function in that kind of information environment?

We are, in short, at a civilization-threatening stage of history.

But there is a fix. The following excerpts are from a much longer post by gato malo (who is almost certainly not an AI) that shows a way out of this dark forest.

poe’s law comes into full flower

and why the future may be local

el gato malo, Dec 18, 2025

the time between now and when full “reality fracture” of inability to discern digital from meatbody is measured in months, not years.

the time to “i have no idea if the person on this zoom call is an avatar controlled by a person or an avatar controlled by an AI” is similarly demarcated. honestly, for high end users, they’re already there.

most businesses i know of now have layers of security around money transfer. you want to send a wire or an ACH? no one will do that based on an email anymore. in many cases, not even a 2 factor login. most institutions require voice confirm. you need to call the finance team from a known number and in a known voice confirm the details of the wire request. and even that fails.

i know a company whose CFO got fooled by an AI generated voice modulator pretending to be the CEO and calling from a faked caller ID that looked like the CEO’s phone.

they got a wire sent.

(fortunately, wires being wires, it was able to be recalled. this is one of the core problems with the no-trusted counterparty systems like bitcoin. reversibility is a feature people care a great deal about and “a couple days to settle” can be a feature rather than a bug.)

this is going on all over. frankly, i’m astonished it’s not happening more. how are there not fraudsters posting online videos of CEO’s saying things that make their stocks tank or double?

this all sounds like a disaster, but that’s because you’re thinking about it from inside the frame.

if you basically lose the ability to trust anything, you cannot see, any text or information about the world, any photo, any video, disembodied voice, zoom face or phone call, any of it, what do you do?

you stop trusting it.

the world gets small again. you trust what you see with your own eyes. business moves to highly protected, verified networks, but even these are not really trusted because the arms race to break any new safeguard will always be ferocious and AI mediated fraud and intrusion is a level of relentless attack on every surface at once all the time every time that will make some bigtime penetrations inevitable.

so for the real high trust? face to face. IRL. hands get shaken, eyes get looked into, and people once more do business directly with people.

i think this has the potential to make people happier.

we’re social animals. we want to be around one another. we want face time not facetime. we want contact, lunch, talking and body language not the half communication of voice and and video calls and the quarter communication of text.

the internet is too big a room for humans to thrive in. it’s too vast, there are too many comparisons, too much information, too many lies and shapings and framings in the always on A/B tested demolition derby for slivers of attention span and the hotwiring of limbic responses.

it’s too important to walk away from. you could not compete with the others who stayed. they would be too much faster, know too much more. but if it all devolves to hot, predatory garbage assualting your and your perceptions in wave upon wave of AI slop, lies, and outright cognitive assault and mindrape that starts to look more and more like evoked hypnosis and the cultivation of mass delusions and the madness of crowds for fun, profit, and political purpose, maybe everyone walks way.

it’s hard to remember life before the internet. “jesus, how in hell did we even do that? how did we manage?” those in gens Y and Z perhaps have no memory of life without mobile data, social media, all of it. it was slower, that much is for sure.

but it was also happier. humans were not as anxious, as wound up, as inflamed into pigpiles wars of all against all, tribe against tribe, and of minds evolved to hunt deer and eat berries in caves and sit around fires telling stories to one another against life in a room too big for human mechanisms to calibrate properly.

what if the information age devolving into the age of utter lies and untrust collapsed distance?

what if you stopped caring about what was happening on the other side of the world because it once more became vague, untrusted, and basically unreal?

what if it reversed the zoom diaspora and brought us back to city centers? what if it brought us back to towns and town centers? what if we left the house to meet people and find dates and mates instead of scrolling and swiping?

might this restore quite a lot of humanity to the humans?

might it take back so much of what i think so many of us can feel has been lost? replace the loss and alienation that seems endemic, especially among the digital native generations like Z? might the deracinated once more plant roots in meatspace and realize that the meaningful parts of lives are only forged IRL?

if you ask most people in this purportedly modern age if we have lost the path and lost the plot, it seems like they would tell you yes. we can argue about degree, but about the fact of that matter? not so much.

many joke about “the matrix was correct, 1999 was the apogee of human civilization.”

well, that was right before the internet changed everything, wasn’t it?

and maybe going back is not such a bad idea.

i’ll tell you one thing:

if this is even half correct, then the pennies on the dollar sale prices of class A office space in urban centers are one of the best buys in a generation.

and the cities that can get their acts together and become safe, fun, flourishing, and hospitable, open for business, open to business, and ready to let the creators and builders run free, the ones who sort out their schools and stop tolerating the homeless industrial complex of petty crime and ostentatious mental illness and drug addiction, those cities will win the land grab for talent and become the new centers of the world.

it feels to me like a once in a century, maybe once in a society kind of jump ball may be going up into the air here.

will be fascinating to see who has the prescience and the presence of mind to come down with it.

Definitely read the full article, here

For more on this subject, go to the Table of Contents and search for “trust horizon.”