Pluralistic: The actual epistemic crisis (20 Aug 2026)

AI’s contribution to the “epistemic crisis”—the difficulty of discerning truth—is framed as an “opportunistic infection” exploiting a pre-existing “epistemological void” created by decades of corporate power and regulatory capture.
The article draws a parallel between life under AI and “Putin’s method” (attributed to Vladislav Surkov): not to make people believe a lie, but to prevent them from believing anything is true by making everything suspect.
Our “cognitive immune systems” against lies have been eroded by compromised expert agencies (e.g., FDA, banks, media) that have been allowed to engage in deceptive or exploitative practices, making us vulnerable to deepfakes and other AI-generated falsehoods.
The core warning is that AI isn’t solely responsible for our inability to know what’s true; rather, it delivers the “coup de grace” to a truth-assessment system already terminally compromised by corporate power and regulatory capture.