At the center of this whole “new digital reality” is a quiet but massive shift:
Information used to be something humans made and others consumed.
Now it’s something humans ask for, and machines generate, remix, and personalize in real time.
Creativity used to be a craft — slow, deliberate, embodied. It was something you did with your hands, your instrument, your canvas, your camera, your code editor. It was inseparable from the hours you invested and the mastery you developed
Truth used to be a sensory experience. If your eyes saw it or your ears heard it, your brain did the rest: it labeled the moment “real,” stored it as memory, and used it to guide future choices. This instinct was not naïve—it was evolutionary.
When you put all three transformations together—AI reshaping how information is made, XR reshaping how information is experienced, and deep synthetic media reshaping how information is trusted—you get a cultural shift so large that it affects every core intellectual habit we once took for granted.
The big shift—the one sitting quietly beneath all the noise about AI, XR, deepfakes, and personalization—is that information is no longer something fixed, stable, or shared in the same way for everyone.