[somehnrdr14726]

I wonder if pulling the brakes on what's being called the post-fact era, is futile. Maybe the internet is perfectly capable of maintaining N disjointed realities and there's nothing we can do to resolve them.

It may not be high-resolution virtual reality, but if the only way I interact with other people is through devices, it's virtual reality. We call them bubbles but they're so much more.

I think if we accept this as an invariant we might be able to find solutions by trudging forward. As a thought prompt it certainly gets my thinking cap going.

[Barrin92]

The problem is that these coexisting fantasy worlds run into issues when you actually do touch reality, which does not go away simply because one choses not to believe in it.

covid of course being the most recent example. We can all run into whatever bubbles we want, but it won't stop a biological virus. Everyone can spin it into their own virtual narrative, but people will die nonetheless, and underlying the cloud and the internet is good old hardware and infrastructure, which is very real and very decaying. Fleeing into digital worlds is only a temporary solution.