Tell me sweet little lies

We have been lied to, and we are still being lied to. On a grand scale. By government agencies, banks, businesses, advertisers, and of course politicians, scientists, and experts.

Not that we can really blame the individuals. They’ve been drinking the corporate Kool-Aid, toeing the party line, and serving up the consensus for so long that they believe their own narratives so deeply, they treat them as fact.

As futurist Craig Wing warned us back in 2025, the ‘con-onomy’ thrives on grift. In times of crisis and uncertainty, we tend to believe the confident conman, who deftly provides solutions and answers, rather than raising doubt with critical questions.

Even opposing schools of thought, hotly debated online, and sometimes in Parliament too, are likely both false, but with some degree of truthiness to give them credence. And AI has made it worse – much worse. The AI models were all trained on human data, with human biases and beliefs baked in, and can’t be trusted as objective fact.

A perfect example is the case of the student who was sanctioned for plagiarism by an AI checker, itself powered by AI. Turns out, the work the student was accused of plagiarizing didn’t exist! It was an AI hallucination.

But the biggest, most common lies of all are the ones we tell ourselves. It’s just the way the world has worked for centuries. Belief in fictional social constructs, like nations, morals, religions, markets, and laws, is the glue that holds society together, and allows business to flourish.

A stablecoin is only stable if we – collectively – have faith in its stability. It’s a fiction that we all subscribe to, making it conveniently true.

So, tell me lies, sweet little lies. Don’t break the world with the ugly truth!