When Verification Becomes Power

Chapter 7 ended on a quiet image. People withdrawing. The open commons growing thinner. The authentic self deciding it was safer to be unseen. That was the psychological face of the crisis, and psychology was where the previous chapter's argument lived. The body, the voice, the recording, none of them could close an argument the way they used to, and the texture of social life had begun to change in response. But psychology is only half the story. When the eye and the ear can no longer settle disputes about what is real, the disputes do not vanish. They move into procedures.