Consider how people respond when confronted with an unflattering reflection. Some might adjust their appearance, accepting the mirror’s feedback as useful information. Others might avoid mirrors entirely, preferring not to face what they show. Still others, in moments of particular desperation, might smash the mirror itself—as if destroying the instrument of truth-telling could somehow alter the reality it reflects. But of course, breaking a mirror doesn’t change one’s appearance. It only ensures you’ll no longer have to look at it.
There really is a sense in which we are truly living in Orwell’s nightmare. It didn’t come in the brutalist form of Oceania—at least not yet. It came in a more complex and unexpected way: censorship by attention overload. “Flooding the zone” to make truth impossible. The mirror we hold up to our collective civilization now is social media. And it lies to us.
Unlike a physical mirror, which stubbornly returns exactly what stands before it, our digital reflection has become infinitely malleable. Social media doesn’t just show us reality—it shows us a carefully curated, algorithmically enhanced version of ourselves and our world. The reflection changes based on who’s looking, morphing to confirm their existing beliefs and amplify their fears. This isn’t just distortion—it’s the destruction of the very concept of an objective reflection.
But we must also confront a deeper issue—the growing shamelessness of figures like Musk and Trump. People often describe their audacity as an absence of shame, but this misses the mark. Shame requires a shared standard, a common understanding of right and wrong, and a reality against which one’s actions can be measured. In a world where shared truth has disintegrated, that standard no longer exists. Without a common mirror to reflect reality, there’s nothing against which to compare behavior—no measure for judgment, no grounds for shame.
This is the most insidious consequence of truth’s erosion: it eliminates the very possibility of ethical accountability. If two plus two can equal five, then nothing—not corruption, not hypocrisy, not cruelty—can be definitively condemned. And when power operates unbound by truth, it becomes unbound by morality as well. Shamelessness is not a defect in such a world; it is a survival strategy, a natural adaptation to an environment where reality itself has become negotiable.
When Orwell imagined the Ministry of Truth, he envisioned bureaucrats manually editing newspapers and photographs, laboriously erasing people from history one image at a time. But our reality has proved more insidious. Instead of erasing truth, we’ve buried it under an avalanche of competing claims. Instead of forcing people to believe that two plus two equals five, we’ve created a world where every mathematical operation returns whatever result best serves power at that moment. The mirror hasn’t been broken—it’s been replaced by a screen that shows us whatever those controlling it want us to see.
What makes this particularly dangerous is who now controls these digital mirrors. Elon Musk’s acquisition of X (formerly Twitter) and Mark Zuckerberg’s sudden alignment with Trump aren’t just business decisions—they represent the consolidation of our collective reflection in the hands of those actively working to distort reality. (...)
This transformation of X into an “everything app” represents something more dangerous than just media consolidation—it’s an attempt to create a closed ecosystem where truth itself becomes proprietary. When Musk throttles links to external sources while promoting content from within X, he’s not just changing how news spreads—he’s working to make his platform the arbiter of reality itself. [ed. Fox "News" anyone?]
The merger of social media and financial services through X Money isn’t just another business expansion—it represents something far more dangerous: the fusion of narrative control with economic power. Consider what it means when the platform that shapes our understanding of reality also controls our ability to participate in economic life. This isn’t just a digital mirror anymore—it’s becoming a gatekeeper to both truth and commerce.
When Musk combines control over public discourse with payment processing, he’s creating unprecedented power to shape behavior. Imagine a world where your ability to transact financially becomes intertwined with your compliance with platform-approved narratives. The mirror isn’t just showing you what Musk wants you to see—it’s gaining the power to punish you for seeing anything else. (...)
The parallel to China’s WeChat is impossible to ignore. But there’s a crucial difference—WeChat’s fusion of social media and financial services operates under state oversight, however problematic that might be. X’s transformation represents something new: private control over both information and economic participation, accountable to neither democratic governance nor market competition.
by Mike Brock, TechDirt | Read more:
Image: City Museum Funhouse Mirrors via
[ed. Not familiar with X money, but if people want to entrust their savings to scammers like Musk and Trump, I'd say Go for It. Just don't whine about FDIC insurance when you can't get it back.]
