This... thing (blog? archive? performance piece? low-level public nervous breakdown?) was originally meant to be something quite different.

Long before this blog existed, I had planned an entire YouTube project built around found footage, old broadcasts, stock video, ambient music, and voiceover. Somewhere between a documentary, an essay, and a show from 4Later.

At the time I convinced myself there was space for something between Adam Curtis and US Public Access Television at 2am.

I wrote outlines, fragments, and even finished a number of scripts. Most of them unfinished though, and thankfully probably better off that way. (in truth, I loved the writing, and the sound of my own voice... the editing however...)

The first was to be called:

“The Death of Shared Reality”

While the script has had some tidying, it's still far from finished. But, rather than rewrite it into something cleaner, or more current (as I have, and will continue to do for other posts), I feel I've picked over the bones of it this subject enough and better on other projects.

So, here, unfinished, and fully work in progress is the start of the YouTube series that never was.(Please read it aloud, and in your best Adam Curtis impression, as originally intended)

– c.

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Until very recently, most of society experienced reality together. Not totally, and not all the time. But enough that it felt shared.

For almost all of human history, your understanding of the world was limited by physical distance. News moved at the speed of a horse or a ship. It was slow, and most people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born.

Then, humanity began to scale its shared reality.

The printing press allowed ideas to travel faster than people, and newspapers created national conversations. Radio followed, beaming entire countries together through the same voices and cultural moments arriving at the same time into millions of homes.

Then came television. Within living memory, millions of people watched the same shows, read the same headlines, and listened to the same albums. Culture moved slowly enough for society to absorb it together. A television episode wasn't just “content”, it was an event. Something that happened at a specific time, on a specific night, and was then discussed through schools, pubs, and offices the next day.

Entire workplaces tried to work out who killed Laura Palmer, while schools argued about whether Mulder was right and the truth really was out there. Families sat in the same room watching the same thing at the same time because there were only so many channels, and those limited choices created shared reference points. Even when people disagreed, they were disagreeing inside a shared reality.

And all of this mattered. Shared media created a shared context, and that context created a stable sense of social reality. Not necessarily objective truth, but the feeling that despite politics, class, geography, or religion, most people were still broadly inhabiting the same world.

Then the internet arrived. Initially, we were painfully naïve about it. We genuinely believed that global communication would make societies more informed and more empathetic. Borders would blur, information would become free, and humanity would be more connected. And in many ways, that happened. But something else happened alongside it.

The systems built to connect us were eventually redesigned to segment us. Not through censorship, but through personalisation. The internet stopped being a shared environment and became an individual experience. It stopped being the internet and became your internet. A version of reality assembled from your behaviours, fears, interests, reactions, and vulnerabilities.

Two people can open the same app and see two different worlds. They can live in the same city, experience the same event, and walk away with entirely different understandings of what occurred. One person’s feed is full of economic collapse and institutional decay; the other’s is full of technological optimism and self improvement. Their reality forms around the content of their feed. They didn't necessarily seek these realities out, the systems simply learned them.

And those systems discovered that if you want to keep someone engaged, informing them isn't enough. You have to make them feel something. Outrage and fear work better than almost anything else to keep people scrolling.

The result is that modern society feels less like a shared reality and more like millions of parallel realities running side by side. We don’t consume the same media, we don't trust the same institutions, and increasingly, we can't even agree on a basic sequence of events.

Shared reality didn’t disappear overnight. It dissolved under the weight of recommendation engines, infinite scroll, and personalized feeds. These loops are so effective they’ve reshaped not just what we believe, but how we experience existence itself.

And maybe that's why modern life feels increasingly unreal. It's not that reality disappeared, but that we stopped experiencing it together.