Reality Managers
Contribution from Trudy Hall
Artwork is True Automatons Are Us by Alexandre Perotto
Something subtle and insidious (but also with insane speed) has shifted in the way technology forces itself into our lives. For a long time, the anxiety around artificial intelligence was focused on the obvious threats like automation, intellectual theft, and the quiet erasure of white-collar work. But the real pattern emerging is something more subtle and invasive.
I believe we are entering the rise of reality management.
Right now, we are letting software build a layer over the world, explaining the truth to us before we have a chance to encounter it directly. AI summarizes our news, predicts our needs, creepily simulates intimacy, and structures our labor. It consumes water and electricity at a massive and corrosive scale (it’s essentially earth rape) all while presenting itself as an ambient voice in our pockets. Because of this, the old debate over objectivity has returned with a strange new urgency. Based on Orelier’s latest findings, the real danger seems to be that machine-produced certainty will be sold as truth by megacorps whose business models require our undivided attention, which I find to be pretty dystopian – don’t you?
Our research starts at the edge of this digital enclosure. We inspect the spots where people actually live online such as feeds, recommendation loops, shadow bans and, algorithmic ranking systems that decide what matters before a user even wakes up. Social media has spent over a decade training the public to perform the self, but AI is doing something different – it is training us to outsource interpretation. A feed can hijack your evening, but an AI assistant organizes your politics, purchases, relationships, and fundamental sense of what is real.
The interface has stopped being a tool.
It has become the narrator.
Meta’s recent moves show exactly how this control works. The company’s aggressive push into "personal superintelligence" and corporate AI agents is a bid to mediate human cognition from both sides. If every consumer has a digital handler and every business has an algorithmic representative, the platform effectively owns the space where commerce and thought happen. We saw the raw edge of this ambition recently, when some major internal backlash forced the digital Goliath to pause a plan to track employee mouse movements and keystrokes for training data. The hunger for behavioral data has leaked out of the consumer feed and into the office. Zuckerberg is building a twisted ecosystem where the machine handles daily life, and in the process, the boundaries between user, worker, citizen, and training material dissolve entirely.
Labor is beginning to split along this unraveling seam. AI will absorb whatever can be codified into a pattern – legal briefs, customer service scripts, and repetitive lines of code. This work is super vulnerable because it was made machine-readable long before LLMs were introduced into society like a virus with an equal amount of promise as destruction. The real counterweight to this transition lies in our physical world. The future may well belong to vocational trades – electricians, plumbers, builders, and caregivers who remain anchored in tangible reality. As data centers strain local power grids and dry up reservoirs, the physical costs of "the cloud" will become impossible to hide. When that happens, the people who actually understand wires, pipes, soil, and human bodies will become a new kind of elite, sort of like the ending of Triangle of Sadness. These icons will know exactly when the machine has lost contact with the earth.
The next major technology crisis will be a convergence event, a breakdown of labor stability, child safety, grid capacity, and emotional dependency that will force us to swallow the entire system in a single bite. We will stop talking about tools and start talking about environments instead. Our position as a research lab is relatively simple – the era of the “reality manager” has begun. Our crucial task at this very second is to build a counter-environment. We need to create spaces that protect human perception, restore a sustainable pace, defend the dignity of physical work, and refuse to let the mirror replace the world.
