How to survive the information crisis: ‘We once talked about fake news – now reality itself feels fake’

Katherine Viner opens by confessing that writing this article was itself a struggle, attributing her diminished concentration and thinking capacity to the degraded attention environment created by digital technology. Her writer's block was ultimately resolved through human conversation — a detail she presents as emblematic of the essay's broader thesis about human connection.

Viner catalogues what she calls an 'age of crises': the environmental crisis, with scientists warning of irreversible climate tipping points and a 70% decline in wildlife populations since 1970; a global political crisis in which autocracies now outnumber democracies for the first time in 20 years, with Trump achieving in one year what took Orban, Erdogan, and others nearly a decade; a surge in global violence including Russia's war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, the catastrophe in Sudan, and a newly described US-Israel war on Iran; and an economic crisis in which fewer than 60,000 people control three times the wealth of the bottom half of humanity.

The essay then turns to the information crisis, drawing on Naomi Alderman's argument that the current moment is historically comparable to the invention of writing and the printing press — potentially transformative but immediately destabilizing. Viner argues that digital technology is not incidentally harmful but structurally engineered to elicit conflict, anger, and 'numb attention,' citing tech critic Jacob Silverman's observation that today's internet is designed to elicit responses 'hostile to human flourishing.' She points to Elon Musk's behavior on X, AI-generated deepfakes, AI slop, and the blurring of reality and fiction — including White House videos splicing movie footage with real airstrike imagery — as evidence that 'reality itself feels fake.'

Viner identifies the Guardian's ownership model — held by the Scott Trust with no profit-driven shareholders or proprietor — as foundational to its ability to resist commercial and political pressures. She contrasts this with Jeff Bezos's intervention at the Washington Post, where he blocked a Harris endorsement before being seated prominently at Trump's inauguration, and later mandated that the paper's opinion pages champion only 'personal liberties and free markets.'

She outlines the Guardian's journalistic commitments: covering stories others won't, collaborating across news organizations, correcting errors, reporting globally without filtering through State Department or Foreign Office perspectives, and expanding representation — including hiring the Caribbean's first dedicated correspondent, whose on-the-ground presence proved critical during Hurricane Melissa. She discusses the Cotton Capital project investigating the Guardian's founding funders' ties to slavery, and a 10-year restorative justice initiative with descendant communities.

On AI, Viner takes a nuanced position: she finds it useful as a research tool and cites a Guardian analysis of 100 years of UK parliamentary immigration rhetoric as an example of AI-assisted journalism that would otherwise have been impossible. However, she argues the Guardian must emphasize what AI cannot do — intimate on-the-ground reporting, holding power to account, and human editorial curation that produces serendipity rather than algorithmic reinforcement.

The essay concludes with the Guardian's reader-contribution model, which has grown to nearly 1.5 million monthly supporters contributing over £125 million in the last financial year. Viner frames this not merely as a business model but as a political act — readers funding open-access journalism as a defense of shared reality. She closes by arguing that hope — defined not as blind optimism but as faith in human agency — combined with connection and community, is how society survives the current crises.