The Teleportation Trick: How Truth Lost an Evidence Arms Race
TL;DR: This is an economics-of-truth study. I argue that truth routes resources, and for most of the last two centuries we scaled society on top of trusted media-based evidence because faking it convincingly was expensive. It's now more expensive to verify a truth than to counterfeit one, and I don’t see truth winning the arms race long-term. Detection and media literacy are overwhelmed by sheer volume; device-level provenance falls through the "analog hole"; and any filter that can decide what's real for you leaves you at the mercy of someone else’s choices. Ultimately, I suspect either our institutions shrink back to something supportable by local trust, we stop depending on truth, or the scale gets buttressed by force.
Ironically for an exploration of one functional dimension of truth, this is just one person’s view along one narrow slice of history and can’t be said to be true in any sense other than the original — a good-faith attempt to convey an idea comprehensively enough to get it across and concisely enough to remain digestible. In that compressive process, reality becomes narrative as much as truth.
Readers aware of other perspectives like truth decay and epistemic collapse may assume that’s where I’m going, but I’m exploring the failure of civilizational infrastructure based on cheap truth rather than an institutional or epistemic one. To other readers, nothing I’m writing requires familiarity with those perspectives, never fear!
I.
For millennia, truth was a consensus negotiated by community and rooted in shared experience. If you didn’t experience something yourself, the truth was something social: a retelling or a report, the authenticity and trustworthiness of which was inferred from the social perception of the person from whom the account was received. Were they truthful? A liar? In good standing? A pariah or an outcast? The story was weighted accordingly. Most importantly, truth was local and personal in time and space — you could see and weigh it against your own senses and memory, or someone you trusted vouched for it. A challenge to truth presented local, personal risks of imprisonment, injury, and isolation offset by charisma, violence, or the speed of your legs.
We know that memory is highly unreliable. Even the most well-meaning and truth-loving retelling evolves with the memory of that retelling, and no story survives transmission through memory and voice across speakers without degenerating into the “telephone game.” This is, of course, assuming that all transmitters are faithful, that no self-interest or malintent warps it, and that the voices with the most accurate recollection have the greatest social power to challenge inaccuracy, insofar as their own memories inform them. Introduce bad faith, time, failing minds, distance and degree, and truth is shockingly malleable.
When Louis Daguerre and Henry Fox Talbot introduced their competing photographic technology in 1839, it did more than signal the beginning of the end for portrait painting — it revolutionized our relationship to truth in both civil and legal spheres. A photograph is technically a reproduction of a scene — a “painting by light,” as both Daguerre and Talbot thought of it. Unlike most pre-photography paintings, the degree of detail and relative immediacy in these “light paintings” created a halo of truthiness around the resulting work — a sense of personal presence displaced in time and space and mediated through personal senses rather than variable recounting or reproduction. It made the displaced time and space feel local and immediate; in effect, a sort of teleportation trick.
Photographs were used by police as early as 1841 and increasingly accepted as evidence in court cases by the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Equally, they were accepted in the private sphere as evidence of experience and relationships — that is, of existence: family portraits and wedding photographs on the personal side, and events and group membership on the public side.
The phonograph did the same for audio in 1877, preserving the truth of musical performance and oral history. Radio was well-established by the 1920s, teleporting listeners to mass events like games and concerts and teleporting officials to the homes of listeners for the dissemination of institutional truths and commands. By the mid-twentieth century, cassette recordings and wiretaps became part of the investigative and judicial toolkits.
Motion pictures extended this truth-consensus-making from the 1890s, though it wasn’t until the late 1980s that this was feasible for consumers. Meanwhile, the arrival of television by the late 1930s offered a more complete audiovisual teleportation experience, though radio continued to fill a role in environments where electrical power or attention were constrained. By the 2020s, a century and a half had passed with historical events, personal life, crimes and the justice process itself all documented first in silent, shuddering stop-motion that evolved into full color, high-resolution, high-frame rate, even three-dimensional fidelity with stereo sound. The immediacy became immersive, and truth became science.
Photographers, sound engineers, judges, and lay people have been aware since the beginning that recordings can lie. Most obviously: every movie, every costume photo, every radio play is a small lie — an expected, acceptable, friendly, funny lie. But other lies have always been a source of worry. Photographs and films show what the camera points at, not what is. Camera angles lie: every influencer only allowing the right side of their face to be photographed knows this, and every event with only a few full rows at the front of an otherwise empty stadium is a truth test for promoters and reporters — show the empty truth, or present a misleading closeup?
The earliest concerns were about spatiotemporal truth (literal doctoring or splicing of video or audio recording media) and content truth (body or voice doubles, staged scenes, etc.); to alter these representations imperceptibly took extreme skill, effort, and/or expense. For the first half of the twentieth century, this capability was restricted to artists and serious hobbyists, government propagandists, and professional film companies saving money by deploying stock footage as sets. That assumption held true until the late 1980s and 1990s with the spread of personal computers and the introduction of photo editing software that enabled anyone with time and patience to alter digital photos at home.
The first public tremors in this technologized truth landscape probably arrived with 1994’s Forrest Gump, in which Tom Hanks was inserted into historical footage. This wasn’t the first instance of this sort of video composition (1983’s Zelig comes to mind), but it was the first time mainstream audiences saw footage they recognized as truth telling a lie. “Photoshopping” entered the lexicon officially by 1999 as the tremors became a quake and the ability to tell image-based lies was democratized from shady propagandists, fashion editors, and advertisers to every teenager with a PC and an internet connection. The first concerns were largely twofold: the effect on female body image under a barrage of increasingly uniform and unattainable edits, and the easy spread and production of crude pornographic images using the faces and bodies of celebrities and ordinary private individuals alike.
Artificial intelligence research gave us deep learning; in 2017 the internet gave us “deepfakes” as generative artificial intelligence collided with photo and video editing. Instead of weeks or months of applied, skilled effort, anyone can spend a few seconds and a sentence or two of prompting to create images and video that are largely indistinguishable from reality. This has been extended to audio; in 2019 the first widely-publicized AI-enabled “vishing” case occurred, where a UK company lost hundreds of thousands of dollars (USD) when attackers used AI to copy an executive’s voice and convince a subordinate to authorize the transfer.
As of 2026, the cracks are widening. Various jurisdictions are beginning to pass laws criminalizing deepfake production and distribution, and targeting related apps and websites for takedowns. At the same time, the problem has not diminished; we see new cases near-daily now where arrests are made for the production and spread of deepfakes to blackmail, extort, or humiliate victims for sexual or financial purposes.
And equally chillingly, we are seeing the political weaponization of deepfake imagery. The first cases occurred in 2018; as of now, there’s widespread production of deepfake videos and images used to discredit, malign, and incite hatred, violence, and separatism in campaigns across the globe.
II.
Truth is one of the most fundamental social concerns. While fiction can be entertaining when all parties understand that it is fiction, learning to distinguish fiction from reality — from what is, what was, and what can be — is one of the most crucial survival skills. Believe a lie and take a dangerous route, yield an advantage to an opponent, prepare for the wrong outcome, raise the wrong child, eat something poisonous. Tell a lie and lose friends, lose loved ones, lose a job, harm someone.
At the heart of each of these negative outcomes is a misaligned resource allocation: attention in the form of time or money or labor spent on something that does not benefit (or actively harms) an individual or society. Seen this way, truth is a resource-routing heuristic. Prior to 1839, the truth keys were mutual experiences and physical or informational artifacts: paper documents, handwriting, coinage composition, passwords, literal bodies. These routed access to rights, ownership, justice, compensation. To attack the routing and gain unlawful access, then, was a cost-benefit calculation: the expense and risk of acquiring knowledge, disguises, or counterfeits versus the value of the resources they guarded. The risk of a lie or a forgery might be worth an inheritance or a deed, but not a loaf of bread except in the most dire circumstances.
Because truth gates resources, we defend it vigorously and instinctively. It’s promoted as a virtue, a moral obligation, something sacred; violating, bending, obfuscating are all side-eyed at best, punished at worst. It’s one of the earliest things we teach children; who didn’t learn some variant of “the boy who cried wolf?” The be-truthful surface masks the consequence — denial of the community’s help when the wolf actually shows.
In sufficiently small societies, truth can be managed socially. If everyone knows I’m a liar, they weight my resource claims accordingly. If everyone knows I’m truthful, my claims on communal assistance carry more weight, as does my defense or repudiation of someone else’s claim. With even minimal scaling, this truth-network breaks down; individuals no longer have the attentional bandwidth to form ties sufficient to process claims from every individual they encounter.
Media offered a scaling solution: it promoted the implicit, displaced local time-and-space state of whatever a lens or a microphone could capture to a physical truth, one that could be evaluated firsthand in the face of a resource claim — a judge adjudicating a land dispute, two fishermen in a pub telling stories about whose was bigger, or a betting public anxiously watching a sporting event from across the world hours before.
Truth has accordingly become industrialized; it is filed and recorded and sworn. Violations are managed by institutional authority, and truth is as strong as the broader society’s resources spent to build a history of fixed truths — court files, security footage, journalistic reports — against which claims are evaluated. Individual testimony is evaluated against that background, but weakened by nearly two centuries of increasing skepticism of qualitative reporting vs. quantitative evidence and an often polarized and unraveling social fabric that strips it of weight.
To the extent that a misalignment between truth and reality carries consequences for an individual or a society, truth and reality are equated. That the earth revolved around the sun was largely irrelevant to resource routing for ancient society; for modern, space-going humans, it matters a great deal, and there is a measurable incentive to keep truth aligned to reality. When there is no such immediate consequence to a misalignment, it can persist.
An annoying consequence of this is that truth is perceived as a universal, but it is frequently variable. Two individuals or societies can hold conflicting explanations of reality — two perfectly valid truths. This is subtly different from claims that truth is relative; rather, truth is absolute within each basin of truth-holding social participants. That the temperature has gone up an average of some number of degrees may be factual, but what truth that supports depends greatly on who interprets it.
When evidence and truth conflict, then, there is a process of resistance. First, the interpretation of evidence must be wrong, because truth cannot be wrong. Secondly, the evidence must be wrong or fake, because truth cannot be wrong. And only in the end, when it is indisputable that the evidence and the interpretation are both aligned with reality, does it become reluctantly acceptable to reconsider truth itself.
Interpretations are, resource-wise, not free; they require time. Historically, evidence has been self-defending through cost — counterfeiting takes time and resources, skill and knowledge. The strength of truth is the expense of counterfeiting the evidence on which it rests. If deepfakes make that counterfeit cheap, what happens to truth?
III.
Truth finds itself in a perpetual arms race. Because resources are gated behind truth, there’s always something to be gained by a successful attack: access to money, to locations, to social position. The likelihood of attack and the degree of resources spent to prevent it are proportional to the resources at stake.
The history of currency counterfeiting is full of cat-and-mouse games between issuers and criminals; it’s a story of pigments and papers, presses and plates, printers and painters. There’s a constant anxiety on the part of issuers and receivers: is the currency real? Is the creation of an unauthorized reproduction more expensive than the resource it protects? Is it cheap enough to detect a counterfeit?
For many social resources, the evidence is self-defending to an extent when access requires local, current presence and a social history. Your mother or spouse will not offer you love and affection if you do not appear to be the person they birthed or married. Your neighbor of twenty years will not support a stranger’s claim to access your house. In all but the most unusual and most accidental scenarios, the cost to be physically, locally you in ways that pass direct social interaction is impossibly expensive with current technology.
When one of these constraints is loosened, the cost to counterfeit falls rapidly — when the gating is not local, is not current, or does not require a social history. The lack of a need for social history means that the gatekeeper’s ability to verify you depends on what you know, what you carry, or who you appear to be: the counterfeits are the classic fake identification, social engineering, or biometric hack scenarios. The remaining two constraints are both evidence-mediated by necessity — spatiotemporal displacement can only carry truth when supported by testimony or physical evidence proving the necessary spatiotemporal coordinates. You win a photo-finish race in the photo; you prove your identity with a video; or you authorize something with a phone call.
Prior to media-based evidence and modern communication networks, displaced truth was extremely vulnerable to counterfeiting because the evidence was either verbal or token-based: seals, signatures, or encryption served to authenticate statements. Media allowed displacement in the form of phone calls, photos, and videos — and this was functional for nearly two centuries because the cost of casual counterfeiting was far higher.
It’s worth reiterating that media is not reality or truth — the immediacy of a voice or a video call is still a reproduction through a medium, just like a painting. But because historically these reproductions were near-impossible to generate in high fidelity and real time, they became conflated with truth itself — that the reality on the other end of the reproduction matched what was perceived by the recipient has become an intrinsic assumption. The complexity of the technology and the pervasiveness of these reproductions overwhelm the ability to consider each instance as a reproduction; the heuristic, then, is that media is local evidence of spatiotemporally remote truth. That the evidence might not match reality is a fact we know, but one we rarely test.
The beginning of the twenty-first century finds us in a world filled with resource-gating mechanisms built on this heuristic. A broadcast of a speech by a president is trusted by the public as a faithful transportation of attention through space and time to the room in which the speech is made by that president. My mother trusts that a call from my phone with my voice is, in fact, me. Strangers trust that my passport bearing my face is me. I trust that an old video of my great grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party shows it more or less as it occurred.
The dark side of the heuristic is that we’ve spent two centuries architecting what is now a deep, society-wide vulnerability. A cloned voice call from me to my mother asking for money due to emergency, a deepfaked video of a political candidate making an inflammatory comment, a real time broadcast on Twitch by an old man reskinning himself as a young girl to play games, a pornographic face swap of a teenage girl shared with her classmates — all of these ride the trust-first heuristic. Elections are swayed, people are swindled, and reputations are ruined because the cost calculus has been abruptly inverted: it’s now more expensive to verify the truth that the reproduction matches reality than it is to create a reproduction of a credible but ultimately false “truth.”
And most perniciously, the mere possibility of deepfakes shifts the cost of establishing correspondence with reality from “expensive to fake” to “expensive to prove” — the “liar’s dividend” — with two results. Individually, attackers accessing resources throw the burden of proof on the defender: prove that your proof of violation is itself real before proving that my violation was real. Socially, resources become gated by self-reinforcing basins of individuals holding broken truths that do not correspond with reality, only overridden at great expense in time, resources, and personal risk: prove that my truth is wrong — that the earth orbits the sun — because it’s always worked for me before, I doubt your motivations, and you’re asking me to agree that everyone I know is wrong when that agreement might have consequences for me.
IV.
In a modern world built on cheap evidence of truth and faced with the abrupt failure of that foundation, it’s natural to ask how we restore the old balance. The architecture is load-bearing and pervasive, and the stakes are high. Can we not teach better media literacy? Add more automated detection, more filtering, more provenance? Can we limit or ban the use of the technology entirely? Failing that, can we go back to the communal models of evidence and truth that existed prior to cheap, trustworthy media?
I think it’s most useful to consider these in terms of cost. Each proposed solution requires resources, and the question is the same as it has always been: does the solution establish evidence of authenticity cheaply enough to win an arms race against the cost of creating faked evidence, where an attacker is motivated by some resource gated by the truth that the evidence supports?
Media literacy helps, but the cost in attention was untenable for already-strained modern attention budgets even before generative AI opened the floodgates. Radical skepticism is the same. Both of these ultimately lose to the sheer volume of evidence that must be evaluated; even the most media-savvy person cannot analyze every frame of every video and personally validate the truth of every claim in a news article. AI-based filtering, even if it becomes technically capable, faces the same content volume problem.
A rational question, then, is if the filtering and validation can be done as part of the reproduction process; after all, there’s no content avalanche if there is no fake content produced in the first place — or at least you can filter cheaply if the provenance of the evidence can be validated through chains back to the source camera or microphone.
There are several problems with this. Most prominent is that any attempt to establish provenance at the device level faces the same “analog hole” that digital rights management faces for copyrighted materials. You can verify that a real camera owned by a specific person really did create a reproduction of something in its lens at a specific time and place, but you cannot verify that what the lens was capturing was real — that it wasn’t staged, or just aimed at a screen presenting some deepfaked scene. The possible solutions for this are both infeasible and draconian; you can imagine some elaborate scheme where cameras refuse to record screens that embed security watermarks in the displayed images, for example, but short of banning and enforcing the use of only compliant devices, the analog hole remains open.
Which brings us to the earlier legal question: if we can’t ban or limit the use of screens and devices, what about prohibiting the use of artificial intelligence tools capable of generating imagery in the first place? Apart from the question of whether that outweighs the general utility of such tools, it is already possible to use them locally on your own private personal computer with publicly available and open-source models. Bans or limitations would require global monitoring of how you’re using your own computer in your own home, which is both a massive data problem and a privacy invasion that I think most would agree is unacceptable.
A compromise approach would be filtering at distribution points with AI doing the analysis. This, I think, is the most interesting because, generally speaking, the harm of faked evidence occurs on distribution, not on creation; fake evidence that no one sees can only harm the creator at most. However, the sheer volume remains a problem, and introduces two new ones; first, a lag in the time from reproduction to distribution, which may or may not be tolerable depending on the scenario and the speed of filtering. Secondly, as we established earlier, truth is absolute per basin, which means that what qualifies as faked depends to some extent on the basin; filtering of any sort — human or AI — carries the truth definitions of the creator. We all agree that we want truth, but we disagree on what is true. Without the ability to look outside the filterwall, every person must trust that the filter implementation is not corrupted and is not excluding truth by accident or design. From inside, a perfectly faithful filter and a perfectly dishonest one are indistinguishable. And unlike lag, which can be reduced through technology within physical limits, delegation of truth — effectively, of reality — trades the cost of verification for the vulnerability of control.
If there is a solution, I think it’s to leave the arms race wherever possible — to architect resource distribution in a truth-agnostic manner. How possible this is depends on a new cost-benefit analysis: does the value of the resources being gated justify the cost of validation and the cost of switching? Where the cost of validation is trivial or where the resource value exceeds that cost, then we should expect to see established truth-gating persist but come under escalating attack as the ratio breaks either through a cost or a value increase. At some point the cost to defend the resource with the existing gate is no longer justified. If there is some alternative gate and if the cost of switching is not prohibitive, then we expect to see a switch; otherwise, we see a broken resource access mechanism.
At what point the switching cost is justified and whether a non-truth-gated alternative is even coherent is not a simple, universal lever. Basic income, for example, does not require any truth about an individual other than generic uniqueness, but is vulnerable because the resource distribution is centralized and the uniqueness key is a local property of a physical body. Other claims and resources are more intimate and more local intrinsically, like relationships with spouses and children, which creates a greater cost for attackers. In every non-local case, I suspect safety requires a reversion to locality when the resources at stake are anything but trivial. Unfortunately, much of modernity (e.g., international commerce, nation-wide governance, journalism) is irreducibly truth-dependent and centralized.
Basins remain intransigent in any case. As we saw earlier, they self-reinforce and the social costs of perceived defection are high. In a world where a trustworthy mass media reaches enough of a basin, there is no defection, only a synchronized shift in truth. In a deepfakes world, this inverts and there is only defection until the accumulated costs of friction with a mismatched reality, subsidy, or force make it rational for the basin to update or dissolve.
While it might be possible to slow the process down, short of unimaginable civilization-level rejection of technology, the change in the cost structure cannot be reversed. Two possible paths preserve scale and existing institutions: first, governments or corporations develop global-scale centralized filtering and surveillance (perhaps AI) capable of enforcing their truths at the individually local level, with all the privacy and control implications that implies. Or more improbably, some future superintelligence might eventually establish its own truth regime which it could administer at scale, centralized and simultaneously local, perhaps even invisibly. Whether that’s possible is something history will resolve, and whether that regime would be aligned with truths we’d find acceptable is far from assured. In either case, scale is preserved by force at the cost of autonomy.
Practically: the arms race has broken spatiotemporally displaced truth through economics. It’s too slow and too expensive to validate everything; enforcing truth at the source is invasive and cannot plug the analog hole; and we struggle to agree on what truth is in the first place. Fallback to a local, communal model of truth cannot support the weight of ensuring that every transaction, every report, and every property claim is authentic; we now live in a world of institutions scaled by cheap, teleported truth to a level far too large, too global, and too impersonal. Either the institutions change or the scale does.
This analysis is an application of my Conserved Attention Theory, but no familiarity is expected or required. If you're curious, the link is there!
I spotted this FT article today showing how it's happening already even inside criminal justice systems -- and note that systems degradation doesn't require the allegations to be true. Allegations existing does the damage.
See here for the FT article: ft.trib.al/mBpKGJ5