Reality Nostalgia: Musings on the Post-Information, Post-Truth Society

Post-truth tends to be framed as an aberration—a supposed loss of human capacity to adhere to truth and factuality, with core decision-making criteria allegedly being replaced by emotionality, biases, and opinion-congruence. The effects of technological change, such as cognitive overload and algorithmic content governance, are conflated with a postulated increase in human vulnerability and gullibility to produce a toxic mix of what is seen as complete disregard to facts and traditional criteria for veracity. Against this nostalgic narrative of supposedly lost rationality and autonomy, this chapter redirects attention towards the primacy of narratives and other sense-making structures over strict factuality. It transpires that what post-truth, with its technological underpinnings, actually signifies is not a loss of truth but, instead, an unmasking of Cartesian fiction.