News After Noise
Reclaiming Reality in a Coherent World
“The truth will set you free — but first it will destabilize your feed.”
Deepfakes aren’t the root of our crisis of trust. They’re the punctuation mark — the sharp exclamation at the end of a sentence that has been unraveling for decades.
We talk about “losing trust” as though it were once whole. But what’s fading isn’t trust itself — it’s the illusion of it. The priest, the anchor, the headline, the algorithm — they were never truly impartial. They were always framing the story, guiding it toward certain conclusions. We just weren’t meant to see the strings.
When Trust Was Outsourced
For much of modern history, trust came bundled with institutions. You didn’t verify facts; you trusted the source — the nightly news, the textbook, the official statement. And when those sources failed — when they sold wars, shielded the powerful, or silenced dissent — it shook people deeply.
Most didn’t discard the structure. They simply chose new voices to follow. And so the echo chambers grew — Fox or CNN, NPR or Rogan, Reddit or TikTok. Different channels, same dynamic.
When the Machines Arrived
Then came AI. Then came deepfakes. Suddenly, even your own eyes and ears could be deceived with precision. We weren’t just questioning the credibility of institutions — we were questioning reality itself.
For many, that realization felt like the ground giving way. But perhaps it’s not entirely bad. Perhaps this collapse is an invitation — to stop outsourcing our sense of truth and start finding our way back to it, slowly and directly.
Functional Truth
Not all information is equal. There is a difference between manufactured consent and what I call functional truth.
You see it in quiet corners of the internet: someone showing you how to repair a dryer, cultivate a garden, or set up a server in their garage. The proof is in the outcome. The trust is earned, not by authority, but by contact with reality.
That is coherence — the kind of truth that survives testing, that aligns with the patterns of the real world.
News in a Coherent Society
In a coherent system, “news” would not be a race to break the most attention-grabbing story. It would slow down. It would strip away the spectacle.
It would be grounded in relevance:
- News is not narrative; it is observation.
- It is signal, not noise.
- It invites collective interpretation rather than dictating conclusions.
- It asks: Does this matter to our well-being, our resources, our trust, our ecological stability?
Celebrity scandals and hourly outrage cycles would give way to the lived pulse of our communities.
From Echo Chambers to Ecosystems
Instead of chasing distractions, people would focus on what directly shapes their shared world:
- The condition of the soil in their gardens
- The needs of their neighbors
- The shifts in local weather, energy, or transport
- The changes that require their participation
News would become relational — less about what’s happening “out there” and more about how the world is changing around us, and what we can do within it.
You’re the Editor Now
In a coherent society, no single institution does your filtering for you. You learn to hold that responsibility yourself — to discern what matters, what’s true, what deserves your attention.
And you are not alone in that work. Tools, communities, and a slower societal rhythm help. But ultimately, you come to trust not the brand, not the voice, not even the footage — but the quiet recognition inside that tells you when something fits, when something’s real.
That’s coherence.
And maybe the most important news of all isn’t what’s breaking.
It’s what’s mending.