Author: Vladisav Jovanović
Status: Journal article
Version: Latest archived (Apr 2026)
This paper argues that the present crisis is not only a crisis of misinformation, artificiality, or institutional decline. It is a wider crisis of answerability. More and more systems can now produce signal, performance, reassurance, visibility, and procedural output without remaining sufficiently bound to reality, consequence, or revision. The paper develops this claim across AI, politics, institutions, media, validation culture, economics, and psychology. In each case, signal expands while contact thins, performance rises while answerability weakens, and reassurance becomes easier to obtain than truth. The paper argues that public life feels fake not because nothing is real, but because a growing portion of what is visible is weakly answerable to what it claims to represent.
reality-contact; answerability; Structural Intelligence; AI; politics; performance; institutions; fake; signal; coherence; public life; media; validation culture; consequence; revision; epistemic crisis