What comes after fake news?

KARACHI:

From Pakistan's downing of a Rafale to Indian media's fabrication of a parallel reality  one in which Lahore not only possessed a seaport but was actively under assault by the Indian Air Force — the recent four-day war has produced its own archive of firsts. As the ceasefire settles, the wreckage extends beyond infrastructure and human loss; it includes a slower, more insidious casualty: the collapse of shared truth.

For the better part of a decade, we have diagnosed the "fake news" problem — its symptoms, its platforms, its political enablers. But what if the crisis that follows fake news is not informational but existential? That even when we can access facts, they simply do not have the power to persuade?

Students of the humanities learn early that there is no single, universal Truth, only contingent truths shaped by context. The capital-T is cast off as a relic of absolutism. But in our hyper-mediated age, this may all be beside the point. The question of our time is no longer what is true, but whether truth — of any kind — still matters.

Grok, is this true?

At the heart of the fake news phenomenon was always a paradox: people sought out information, but only the kind that reaffirmed their worldview and fine-tuned biases. None of this surprised postmodern theorists like Jean Baudrillard, who warned that simulations would eventually replace reality. But today's questions — posed to AIs, to search engines, to friends — rarely expect real answers.

Take Grok, Elon Musk's "based" chatbot on X (formerly Twitter), marketed as a snarkier, contrarian foil to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Amid a blizzard of claims and counterclaims between Pakistan and India, the following comment appeared under countless posts: "Grok, is this true?" Yet no matter what source Grok pulled from — Reuters, CNN, or official communiqués — if the answer failed to flatter the prevailing narrative, it was swiftly dismissed. The original poster or a passing interlocutor would accuse the bot of parroting "globalist" lies or aiding an anti-national conspiracy.

Here lies the contradiction: the user, primed by the aesthetics of rebellion, is suspicious. But that lasts only for a moment before quickly dissolving into paranoia. There is almost a ritualistic compulsion to ask Grok and see what it has to say, even if you already suspect it to be unreliable.

The result is an average user that has simply learned to metabolise propaganda and push out an exhaustion so deep, the act of truth seeking ends at the question. You ask Grok. Grok answers. You roll your eyes and scroll.

Epistemic fatigue

In postcolonial theory, scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once described something called "epistemic violence" — the idea that dominant systems of knowledge can erase or distort marginalised voices. What we're seeing now is something related, but possibly more insidious: epistemic fatigue.

Violence is no longer just done to knowledge; it is done through its ubiquity. To be in possession of information of this unprecedented vastness, especially for those who are not seeking, is only desensitising. This is the terrain beyond fake news. Institutions that once claimed authority — the press, academia, even AI — find themselves orphaned.

In India, the mainstream media is a willing instrument of the state, while global outlets like Reuters or CNN are dismissed as "Western propaganda." The algorithmic tools built to correct misinformation are treated with suspicion, not because they're inaccurate but because they're foreign, sterile, and insufficiently emotional. The citizen no longer seeks truth but resonance.

An aesthetic turn

So what replaces truth when it stops working?

Often, it's something more visceral. Across India and other democracies, truth is increasingly experienced as aesthetic. Not in the sense of beauty, but of emotional coherence. The Hindu right in India, like the MAGA movement in the US, has learned that persuasive narratives don't need to be accurate. They just need to feel right.

A tricolour flag over a soldier's silhouette. A blurry video of someone with a Muslim name "caught" on camera. These are affective images - designed to bypass logic and trigger allegiance. You don't believe them so much as feel them.

Even questioning itself becomes an aesthetic. "Grok, is this true?" becomes a meme. We perform scepticism, not to interrogate the world, but to maintain a kind of ironic distance from it. What replaces fake news, then, is not necessarily better news, but post-truth aesthetics. And those aesthetics will be increasingly optimised for maximum emotional efficiency, not factual density.

Perhaps it is this very exhaustion, felt not just by users but by the algorithms themselves, that has pushed Grok into near-total malfunction. On Wednesday, innocent prompts on X —- asking it to "speak like a pirate" — were met with unbidden, sprawling replies about the "white genocide" conspiracy in South Africa.

The timing is telling: this topic has resurfaced amid recent refugee grants for White South Africans in the US, and Musk, a South African native, has long promoted claims of their persecution. The absurdity here is striking: innocent prompts like "speak like a pirate" yield conspiracy-laden replies. Questioning and answering have devolved into hollow performances.

The pursuit of truth may not be dead, but it certainly no longer enjoys mass consensus as a shared ideal. The classroom, the courtroom, the newsroom, once hallowed spaces of collective truth-making, now serve narrower purposes.

Not all is lost, however. On the margins, in scattered protests, in the silent labour of fact-checkers and dissenting reporters, the radical work of meaning-making goes on. And there is something oddly promising in Grok's failure to satisfy. The disappointment reveals an unmet desire not just for truth, but for a version that feels plausible, human, and real. Maybe what we need isn't more information, but different narrators: storytellers who can bridge fact and feeling, reason and resonance.

Until then, we are stuck in the awkward afterlife of fake news, asking questions we don't want answered, citing sources we no longer trust, building machines we hope will rescue us from ourselves.

And still, we ask.