Why does nothing feel real anymore?

“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.” So reads post-internet artist Jon Rafman’s Instagram bio. For a long time, the only image on his grid was an AI rendition of a man climbing out of a gooey pod in The Matrix to the desperate plea: “Nooo put me back.” Relatable content. Similarly, as we crawl out of our simulation pods, AKA our phone screens, glimpsing at the dystopian horror that surrounds us, there’s a pervading sense that nothing feels real anymore, with an ever-accelerating news cycle that takes major historical events splintering them entirely into unrecognisable bytes of information – out-of-context video clips, self-referential memes and AI remixes – on our social media, leaving us disorientated amid the chaos.

A recent example of this is Donald Trump’s assassination attempt, which many of us experienced in real-time through memes and increasingly cooked conspiracy theories. Was it all staged? Maybe. Perhaps it was the Deep State, a Satanic cabal or a false flag psyop, suggests one meme. Not to forget the slew of Trump-themed simulacra on our feeds, all posted within 48 hours of the gunshot – t-shirts, tattoos, video-game playbacks, an AI rendition of Trump and his security service as catboys.

“We are existing within the context SO hard rn,” says one commenter, hinting at how literally every aspect of our lives feels narrativised, like a TV show with no final season. As for the increasingly horrific genocidal images that flood our screens, these are juxtaposed with thirst traps and shitposts, which shine a cruel light on the role that technology plays in dehumanising real crises, turning them into a narrative, a video-game lore, that feeds the entertainment industrial complex through clicks and engagement. Switch the control settings on Instagram, however, and they suddenly disappear from view, replaced with sanitised and inoffensive trends such as Hawk Tuah or a brat-ified Kamala Harris.

The unreality we experience on our feeds can be felt in wider pop culture too, whether it’s Miuccia and Raf Simons’ SS25 Pradarave show, where models walked down a rave-themed catwalk to throbbing strobes and the repeated mantra “the power of reality, in a world of the imaginary”, or reality-bending films such as AGGRODR1FT, I Saw the TV Glow and Sasquatch Sunset. “Is any of this even real? Like, are you really sitting there?” asks filmmaker Harmony Korine in an interview with The Guardian, mirroring Rafman’s hyper-simulated sentiment. He’s talking about the way digital screens have taken over everyday existence. “We’ve all become transhuman, but now glitches are starting to appear, do you know what I mean?” As his recent AGGRODR1FT and Baby Invasion releases indicate – both are programmed like a first-person shooter – it’s that life is a game with an extended cast of main characters, side characters and NPCs. To win the game is to feed it coins or content with the hope of cashing out, AKA get boosted on the feed.

Want to match my freak? Reality shift into another dimension? Schizo-post your way to internet-sanctioned brainwashing? Nowadays, it’s not a matter of what exists, but what you choose to exist as. A recent report suggests that Gen Z don’t bother to fact-check information they see online, instead choosing to believe what like-minded peers or trusted influencers say – basically, what they see as important. Plugged into our personal psy-opticons we create our own mental maps to justify our own narratives, like Terrance McKenna’s ‘self-transforming’ machine elves on a DMT trip. It’s not a cosmic jump, then, to feel like everything is a psyop, everyone is a crisis actor. 

Given the wild pace at which information is spewed out across the net, it’s of course never been easier to unlock new realities, especially when the mainstreaming of AI is its own funhouse, a hall of mirrors that creates hallucinations each seemingly weirder and more kaleidoscopic than the next. “Reality has never been stable or entirely consensual, but the acceleration of information exchange has radically impacted our perception of it,” agrees Valentina Tanni, the author of Exit Reality, a book tracing the rise of weirdcore online. “The internet is our primary interface with the world today, and every time we access it, we are confronted with thousands of disjointed and contradictory viewpoints.” Take the popularity of simulation theory, for instance, the idea that there are countless multiverses existing at the same time as each other. “The multiplication of readings of reality, including the fake ones, makes this idea conceivable and comprehensible on an intuitive level,” she elaborates. “We don’t need to be versed in physics to get it: the internet offers a front-row seat to the unchecked complexity mushrooming around us minute by minute.”

In 1978, media theorist Villem Flusser predicted this arrival of vibes as the main barometer of our online experience, writing, “The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our ‘reality’ and turning it into a ‘global image scenario’.” This “pseudo-magical” quality makes it increasingly hard to know what’s real and what’s just an on-screen simulation, making it easier than ever to fall down the rabbit hole of our personal mythologies – think viral trends like reality shifting to subliminals and the online manifestation techniques present in hustle culture and the dark feminine corners of TikTok. Unpacking this dizzying weirdness further, he concludes: “Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images: imagination has turned into hallucination.”

Similarly, the way we function online is like an AI chatbot hallucinating meaning amid the infinite scroll, piecing together narratives from the soup of information online – a selection of clips, posts, memes, obscure internet references that generate an intangible vibe. Paired with other reality-bending tech such as VR headsets and XR devices, we’re increasingly pulled out of our bodies and into the virtual, the derealisation of which can be felt all over culture, from the ongoing Gen Z loneliness pandemic to the nonsensical brainrot that clogs up our feed with horrifying toilet-man hybrids and memes about gooning.

“We need to maintain a solid connection with the material layer of life,” warns Tanni. “Despite our best efforts, being online is still mostly a disembodied experience; if we don’t pay attention, we easily disconnect from the messy, uncomfortable, and complicated experience of being a body in a non-mediated world.” Admittedly, this unreality is fun for the Discourse – it’s bought us things as varied as AI cats and lain-pilled memes. But be careful, “weirdness can be very addictive”.