a statistic* that made us go “hmm” (likely not written on a bathroom stall) & some color to explain.

*many, many, many sources online will make claims about data, facts, or research without providing
the actual research & methodology to support their claims. we pledge to, wherever possible,
vet the numbers we provide here & cite the research sources.

while normally how a mansplainer gets his water, “well, actually” will explore the different angles of an argument or conversation & favor celebrating nuance & complexity over the short-term satisfaction of “hot take culture”.

Look, I don’t know if it was roundabout the 7th finger on Netanyahu’s hand, or watching RFK Jr., a la Stone Cold Steve Austin (it’s the tight denim), suplex¹ a Twinkie (words that never went together before last week) off the ropes at SNACKdown², but I found myself wondering out loud: “How TF can anyone trust what they see anymore?”

Between the deepfakes/doctored videos that have been around for ages, or new and hauntingly improved AI-generated videos, or even the fact that AI tools are now scraping the internet & publishing “research” without ever providing any actual data, source material or methodology…we’ve known for a while we’re maybe cooked.

When fake things start to look real to a worrying extent³, we experience a real disconnect in an “uncanny valley,” a loosening hold on reality - how can we tell what is real and what is manufactured? Even more worrying is what happens when fake things began to look and sound real: Real things can now be called into question as fake.

We saw this happen with the very intentional erosion of trust in the media - when bad actors deemed everything being reported as “fake news,” it exposed very real & concerning bias issues in the media…which then led many people to wholesale throw out the entire fourth estate, refusing to believe anything they published. This is not a new problem, only new mediums: It’s not just video but pages of AI-generated search results making claims that look and feel and sound statistical (and therefore reliable and informed) without showing their work. I could tell you that the data shows that 98% of unstructured data readers are widely considered to be the wisest & most brilliant people in their communities, but without telling you how I figured that out, it should throw up some red flags for you (but it’s true, I promise.)

I’m not saying anything people don’t already know. What we may not know yet is the breadth of the downstream impact beyond “hey guys, we’re proper fucked.” When our hold on reality is being loosened independent of us, we begin to lose the ability to trust in a shared reality. When we can no longer rely on this shared reality - that other people are seeing/experiencing what we are seeing/experiencing, making it a factual thing that is happening - our body’s self-preservation response is to turn inward. This plays out over and over again in trauma responses: When we cannot rely on others, we learn to only rely on ourselves. In trauma contexts, this creates loneliness & isolation. In information contexts, this pushes us to trust more in what we know.

The problem: Not a single one of us actually knows as much as we think we know.

Can’t trust shared reality → activated nervous system in response to a lack of safety → trust only what we know → encounter something that does not fit our narrative/what we know → “do the research” → unintentionally seek only things that confirm our bias. Why? Because confirming our bias gives us the big sigh of relief - it signals to our brains & bodies that we can feel okay again, we’re safe, we were right…EVEN WHEN what we’re “right” about looks like certain danger.

Put another way, if you don’t know what to trust, you trust yourself, and therefore the sources that agree with you. Changing one’s mind is a deconstructive and scary process that inherently challenges our understanding of reality - when we are already experiencing that fear everywhere else, it’s very easy to fall back on what we know so we can feel like SOMETHING makes sense.

Hard truth: No one is immune to it. It’s tempting to believe that the “other side” is guilty of this, but more media literacy doesn’t necessarily save us. It can often make us feel more insulated against fallacy, believing we are smart enough to tell the difference, so if we didn’t “fall for it,” it means it’s simply not true. It’s just confirmation bias that went to a liberal arts college.

The knee-jerk response here is to start from a place of distrust. I cannot stress enough how bad I think this solution is. Starting from distrust only feeds that physiological & cognitive response that will make our brains run toward “safety.” Instead, I believe we need to start from a place of curiosity about everything. This requires accepting how much we do not know & building feelings of safety around not knowing, around being wrong, around changing our minds. Curiosity, like anything else we do, is a muscle that needs to be worked in order to be strong: “muscle memory” requires first that we make the memory. Being intentionally curious instead of distrusting is the first step.

Being curious also means understanding how to verify not just what we are seeing or reading, but our own claims & beliefs. When we see a headline that either confirms or counters our bias, do we know how to do real research & verification? Do we know how to find answers that are closer to the truth & not ones that simply make us feel safer in the short term?

Like it or not, we currently live in a political climate where systemic structures rely on our cognitive & physiological responses to feeling like we are unsafe or in danger. Cornered animals are dangerous and dangerous animals will be made to heel through any means necessary. We have to be able to exercise pulling ourselves out of this response pattern & understand that safety exists not in being right but by having more information. We must go back to the fundamentals of research, push ourselves to remain open & curious (even when it is uncomfortable), & make peace with knowing that we may not always have all the information & should stay open to new data that sheds new light.

Seek truth over short-term safety, even when truth is complicated and complex and incomplete. When we can’t trust our shared reality, the response should not be to turn inward to find safety in ourselves, but to redefine the conditions we can feel mentally safe in. The safety of knowledge can simply be the knowledge that we don’t know it all, but we trust ourselves to be open to learn.

danielle has too many tabs open, but she swears they’re mostly interesting.

“enshittification” is the term given by cory doctorow to the systematic decline of tools & services we have come to rely on. put more succinctly, “it’s 2026…why TF doesn’t anything work anymore/like it’s supposed to?”

I’m about to break everyone’s heart when I tell you that flying, that notoriously smooth, uncomplicated mode of travel that everyone loves and no one ever experiences problems with, may be throwing a few hiccups our way this year.

First, the concept of “enshittification” most fundamentally relies on the product or service being so widely used & enmeshed in culture that extracting oneself from it is damn near impossible. In late-stage capitalism, this signals to companies that the honeymoon period is long dead. There is no need to woo you anymore, you’re here, you’re hooked, and we had to cut all the truth and beauty and speed and convenience we sold you because our CEO wants to buy Steve Cohen’s 14-foot preserved shark and he’s a few million short.

That’s what it means to become “enshittified.”

This week, two recent airline stories are here to illustrate the further enshittification of flying, largely that even though us poors still gotta do it, we should expect an overall slightly worse experience.

I’ll caveat this by saying that some travelers genuinely love the upgrade bidding - several find that, on certain airlines, it means they can get upgrades for much cheaper than usual. And while this could be true, I’m inclined to think it’s some creative pricing at play: getting an upgrade for a $400 bid when a flat-rate upgrade was supposed to be $450 might be a deal…or it might just be that they increased the visible price to make it look like a deal. Additionally, airlines all stand to make more money off of the bidding scheme than consumers stand to save (and sad, no more free surprise upgrades), so it ultimately just feels like marketing designed to make you feel like the deal is better than it is. 🤷🏻‍♀️

each week, we’ll end our newsletter with action item(s), or “what TF are you supposed to do about all this now?” we hope they help. 🤞🏻