Chapter I: It’s Fishy In The Feed: What’s A Gaslitcatfish?

 

Our social media feed is well named, as is our news feed. They’re both keeping us well fed. We’re all the sum of our parts, and everything we think or do, everything we’re made of, was fed to us.

That’s not the problem. The problem is the diet isn’t good for us.

While we’ve been fed, we’ve been conditioned. There’s no getting around it – we’ve been farmed. Our perceptions have been manipulated to make us believe a manufactured reality so that we’re more easily controlled.   

A politician lies straight to our faces, and his misstep is clipped and subtitled for viral sharing. He’ll do it again tomorrow when he denies it happened. We’ve been conditioned to view this as normal.

An influencer has the sobs-into-a-ring-light thing going, mascara running at the perfect angle to encourage us to spread her pain all over the internet. We don’t like her much, but we get daily updates from her account. 

There’s a video going around of some celeb spilling a dirty secret – except it isn’t them, it’s a deepfake cut from training data. We don’t care because we suspect it’s the sort of statement they’d make anyway.

Even the next-door neighbour’s smile makes us wonder: is that genuine or a well-rehearsed act?

It feels like the whole world is one big stage lately, and a lot of us are stuck in the audience asking the same thing: Is any of this real? 

The question isn’t new, of course. We’ve always lived in a fantasy world, pretending to be other people, spinning myths, chasing dreams. What makes this particular moment feel like a real crisis is the scale and speed and targeted nature of it all. Fakery used to be a low hum in the background of our culture. Now it seems like it’s the operating system. Our grip on what’s real is undoubtedly slipping. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the past couple of years shines a stark light on the chasms between our social strata. 

AI’s promise was that we’d get a better work/life balance and cures for cancers and scleroses. Instead, we’re stuck with a reality-distorting, energy-hungry monster that can’t crack a walnut, yet still threatens to take most of our jobs. 

We allow our perceptions to be shaped by a small group of people with very little oversight over the process. The giant tech companies they run, that decide what you’re being fed, have no ideology other than pursuing the capitalist dream of infinite growth. 

This is where the gaslitcatfish thrives.

 

The What?

What the words “gaslit” and ”catfish” mean these days is obvious to some, but not to others, so here’s a primer for those who don’t know:

• Gaslighting is a psychological abuse tactic that involves denying someone else’s perception of reality until you convince them to doubt their own senses. 
• Catfishing is an online scam where a person creates a false persona and convinces others to believe that it’s real. 

The gaslitcatfish swims in a society where reality is constructed. It’s a made-up world filled with make-believe characters, otherwise known as the world we live in. A gaslitcatfish is both manipulator and manipulated. 

We’re all presented with a vision: the world as we’re told it is. We’re also told this vision is in perfect sync with reality. It isn’t. We know it isn’t. Yet that’s the basis upon which we construct our personalities and worldviews. Meaning those are built on false foundations. This is the face we show the world. 

There’s a gaslitcatfish in each of us. Some know what they are; others are blissfully unaware any of this is going on. Being a gaslitcatfish is often an involutary act. Most people don’t recognise they’re doing it until it’s pointed out to them. 

 

Life’s A Gamble

Imagine you’re scrolling the friendly neighbourhood of your social network feed. 

You suspect the articles you’re seeing aren’t true, but you desperately want them to be. You know the picture you’re being shown isn’t real, but you really wish it were. Or you get it that the headline of the story is just Pavlovian clickbait, but that doesn’t stop you clicking it. It’s all a bit of a laugh anyway, so you share it with your friends as if it’s true. 

It seems a harmless gesture, but it increases the uncertainty. It adds a brick to the wall. This is how the fakery grows. And because the algorithm now knows the last dopamine hit worked, it makes sure to send you another.

After enough of this, you live your life as if many of the falsehoods around you are facts. You’re fatigued to the point of barely checking anymore. It’s just easier this way. And you spread them as truths. You do this for good reasons. 

Why rock the boat? Better to keep your sanity. Everyone else is doing it. The alternatives are horrible. 

There’s always a perfectly reasonable excuse if you look for one. 

Every swipe, every scroll, every share is a gamble on the reality wheel. A binary choice. Red or black. Truth or fiction. Fact or fake. As expected. the house always wins. The house being whoever controls the vast amounts of wealth flowing through the place at any given time. Right now, much of the world’s investment capital is being sunk into what’s being called the “AI bubble.” More on that later.

 

A Feeding Frenzy 

What you feed your body metabolises into the person you are. You are what you eat, in a very real sense. There’s obviously more to it than that – a fair amount of chemical witchery in between – but that’s essentially what it boils down to. There’s no separating you from the things that constitute you. 

The same is true of everything from galaxies to microbiology, from genes to memes. What you put in has a say in what comes out. Naturally, results can vary: any given input will impact some a lot, others hardly at all. It really is a spin of the wheel. 

Like life, really.

 

The Age of Illusions

This fakery is nothing new, but lately it’s become impossible to ignore. 

Illusions – creations of our imagination – once occupied a sacred space in our minds. They allowed us to conjure possibilities, tell stories, and think up futures before they happened. 

The fakery means our dreams aren’t engineered for the survival of our species anymore, just for the benefit of certain elite members of the species. What was once tribal bonding has morphed into marketing, manipulation, and mass delusion. Which sound like chapter headings from the playbook of every totalitarian regime there ever was.

 

The Safety Trance

When reality becomes unstable, when you have no confidence in the evidence you’re presented with, totalitarianism inevitably seeps from the cracks. 

People want security. They need it. This is why totalitarians thrive in chaos. The more upheaval, the better. Desperate or vulnerable people will fall for whoever offers a simple solution to their problems, who promises the security of certainty. The fact that these promises are rarely kept has never been a factor. You don’t need to be a history buff to notice that. It does take some critical thinking, however, to see that most complicated problems do not, in fact, have simple solutions. Or that trading your rights for safety doesn’t usually work out too well. 

When we no longer trust what we see, we surrender to those who shout the loudest, entertain us best, or confuse us longest. This isn’t a crisis of truth; it’s a crisis of perception. Whoever controls your reality can decide what you do and when you do it. Without stable perception, freedom is a very fragile thing indeed. 

 

About Then And Now

Before face filters, shamans conjured spirits from smoke, and kings and jesters alike put forward natural events as proof of their divine claims. Illusion has long been a handy tool for mass control, but something has shifted since the turn of the century. The performance is no longer optional background noise. It pervades the whole environment now. 

From the ads on our buses to the choreographed personas of our coworkers to the optimized dating profile we scroll past at two in the morning, we’re surrounded by formulated content. So many hot singles near you! Dreams are being sold on an industrial scale, and we’re buying them up as fast as we can.

But don’t blame the dreams. 

Stories, myths, and imagination are the warm engines and weird fruit of human creativity. Without them, we wouldn’t have art or science, possibly not even language. When those gifts are repurposed as vehicles of manipulation, when imagination becomes simulation, and simulation becomes coercion, then we see a more sinister side, a fakeness.

The gaslitcatfish is the mascot of this fakery: a hybrid trickster, equal parts abuser and abused, scammer and scammed, whispering in your ear while feeding you a hologram of itself. 

To understand it means learning to recognize the illusions shaping us, tracing them back through history. Taking them apart. Learning how they work. It means cultivating skepticism without drowning in cynicism. It means reclaiming imagination, not as a knife turned against us, but as a blade to carve out futures we might actually want to live in.

 

Some Of Today’s Illusions

• AI hallucinations. Texts, images, and voices that are generated from our data. They’re wholly or partly invented, and blend fiction with fact in an uncanny and unsettling manner.
• Engineered narratives. The governments and corporations are generating stories so consistent and convincing that resistance starts to feel like madness.
• Institutional distrust. Faith in media, science, politics, and community is at historic lows. This is by design. Doubt itself has been commodified.
• The exhaustion economy. When every day’s news cycle is a flood of contradictions and confusion, the result is paralysis – a population whose primary response to the danger is to keep chasing those dopamine hits.

If you look, you’ll spot it. Fakery is baked into the platforms we populate, the media we consume, and the near-identical political candidates we tell ourselves we pick. The gaslitcatfish isn’t hiding among the anemones – it’s swimming midstream and smiling at us with its pretty teeth.

 

The Dream And The Waking

George Carlin once joked, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” The line is funny because it’s true. It cuts to something painfully real: the only way to remain inside today’s illusory world is to stay asleep. To wake is uncomfortable or, at the very least disconcerting, which is why most people are quite happy not to. 

Right now, we’re facing a true cultural emergency. The collapse of our shared reality isn’t just an intellectual exercise; it’s the background condition for everything from the strength of our democracies to the causes of climate change to whether there are flags on the moon. If we can’t agree on what’s real, how do we act together? If every fact is up for grabs, how do we make collective decisions? And if every image and video we see is questionable, is it even possible to trust our own eyes and ears? 

The curtain is rising on a new age of human history, and what’s behind it isn’t just the smoke and mirrors of old; it’s smoke and mirrors lubricated by machine learning, optimized for engagement, and used by the powers that be to move you around like a piece on a chess board.

 

Looking Back To See Ahead

To take note of the present moment, we must zoom out. The gaslitcatfish isn’t a sudden mutation. It was a foreseeable evolutionary step in our quest for knowledge. 

Fantasies have always existed. There are few things we love to do as much as we love to imagine. Each new medium we employed created new illusions, and each illusion remodeled how we previously saw reality. The point here isn’t nostalgia. There never was a golden age of pure truth and reason, no matter what the rose-tinted glasses say about it. The point is pattern recognition. 

Once we learn how illusion functioned in the past, we can see the shape it takes today, recognise it for what it is, and plan tomorrow accordingly. We’re going to uncover many masks of fakery, not to knock imagination, but to expose how it was twisted into a delivery system for manipulation. 

Imagination isn’t the poison. It’s the needle that injects the poison. We need to analyse this addiction properly if we’re going to kick this habit.

 

Imagination Separation

Think of this as a survival manual for the age of illusion. Imagination is one of the things that makes us who we are, and it relies on us creating fantasies. It should be obvious that not all illusions are bad. Imagination is a gift most of us cherish, and we’re a better race for it. 

What we need to do is separate it as a survival tool from fakery as a weapon. We’ll learn to spot the gaslitcatfish in its many guises, especially if we see it staring back at us when we look in the mirror.

 

The Saturation Point

What’s new isn’t the novelty, it’s the totality. Illusion is no longer peripheral; it’s all around us. 

Think of your daily scroll again. How many images do you see in a day that are untouched by filters, edits, or optimizations? How many headlines cross your screen that aren’t designed to provoke a reaction or produce a click? How many interactions happen outside the gaze of an audience? Fakery is no longer rare. The question isn’t, “Is this fake?” anymore, but, “What kind of fake is this?” 

Eventually, we reach the saturation point: when the volume of illusions overwhelms your ability to separate them from reality. The gaslitcatfish doesn’t need you to believe every lie. It needs you to doubt in large doses as often as possible. Until the exhaustion has you giving up on truth altogether.

 

The Collapse Of “Seeing Is Believing”

For centuries, the above phrase was, in practical terms, short for proof. If you saw it, it was real. That no longer holds:

• You can see a photo of a protest that never happened.
• You can see a message from a friend that they never sent.
• You can see your own face in a crowd you’ve never been in.

When our senses become unreliable, reality slips. What we face is a deep, systemic crisis, a collapse in the basic structures of trust. Doubting the media or politicians is understandable, acceptable even. It’s when we doubt our own senses, our neighbours, even ourselves, that things go haywire. This shift is purposeful. It’s profitable. It’s politically useful. And it’s spreading faster than our ability to adapt.

 

The Exhaustion Economy

The goal isn’t always persuasion. As Garry Kasparov, the chess master, once said, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” When your critical thinking skills are under-developed and your feed is a constant churn of contradictory headlines, of AI images and manufactured outrage, the most common reaction is fatigue. 

“It’s tiring trying to figure out what’s real all the time, Not to mention it’s battering my mental health, what with the daily grind and all. So it’ll probably be better for everyone all round if I stop caring. Can’t I just not think about it and enjoy my life like everyone else?”

This is the state where disbelief becomes apathy, and apathy turns into blind compliance. The gaslitcatfish loves it here. When you’re too tired to fight for truth, you surrender to whatever’s easiest, most entertaining, or most familiar. In this sense, the real enemy isn’t “fake news,” it’s hopelessness. Fakery demoralizes you, and demoralized people are easier to rule.

 

A Mirror, Not A Mirage

You might be tempted to imagine fakery as an intrusion, some new disease infecting our digital blood. But the truth is that the fakery’s not just around us. It is us. Every one of us contributes to it. 

The influencer’s stage-managed tears mirror our own curated posts. The politician’s performance reflects our desire to be seen as influential. The deepfake’s plausibility relies on the same storytelling instincts we use when we exaggerate about an argument at work to our friends. 

The rippling skin of the gaslitcatfish reflects something insightful. We’re the ones who created this hall of mirrors, our world of illusions. We need to see them not as tricks or traps, but as ploughshares that have beaten into swords and turned against us. It’s time to think about how we’re going to beat them back.

 

A Glimpse Backward

This is why history matters. None of this emerged out of nothing. Every new medium we were exposed to – cave art, sermons, parchment, pamphlets, newspapers, radio, television, the internet – created fresh opportunities for fakery. Each modified the boundary between the real and the illusory, and then sent us off to the comic convention in anime cosplay. 

Our choice is similar to that in The Matrix movie. Red for reality, Blue for the dream world. The fakery, as I’m calling it. Throw in the magnetic attraction of the black pill representing naked nihilism, and it’s no surprise most of us willingly choose the blue. We hated Cypher for selling Neo out, but we got why someone could end up doing it. Comforting lies are always easier to swallow than uncomfortable truths.

A medieval peasant standing under the glow of cathedral glass wasn’t that different from a modern teenager staring into a glowing smartphone or a character from the movie. 

All absorb a vision of reality designed by people who want to control them. They experience wonder, confusion, and awe in equal measure. And they’re, subtly or forcibly, directed toward the blind faith of unsubstantiated belief.

 

Setting The Stage

Reality feels unstable because it is unstable. Not because we suddenly became more impressionable, but because the tools for shaping our perceptions aren’t under our control. We live in a world where fakery is the rule, not the exception. 

We’re going to see if we can navigate these illusions without having them dictate our reality. We’ll trace the long history of fakery, from way back then to right about now, past shamans and mindbenders, from myths whispered by firelight to memes flashed across screens all day. And we’ll see how illusion has always been double-edged: tool and weapon, liberator and control mechanism.

 

Imagination As Survival

Next, we step back into prehistory, where imagination’s fires sparked the first flickers of illusion. As fires often do, those fires started around other fires. With people telling tales around dying embers to try to keep the night at bay. 

But before we condemn fakery outright, we need to acknowledge its dual nature. Illusion isn’t always sinister. At the beginning of human history, imagination was a vital tool for our survival. Consider a hunter crouched in dim torchlight, drawing a bison on a cave wall. The beast in the stone wasn’t deception, it was a projection, a mind-movie. We all have them. 

Whether it foreshadowed a hunt to model the future, or told of one that already happened, we don’t know. What we do know is that the act spoke of a mind that wanted to represent its thoughts. It also wanted other people to see what it was thinking. 

Paradoxically, the very ability that lets us conjure these survival scenarios is also the thing that helps us infect others with harmful mind viruses. We imagine, we simulate, and we create possibilities that don’t exist. Once a person who creates possibilities is heard, they can choose whether to share their visions as facts or not. The gaslitcatfish bobs happily inside this paradox. 

 

When Illusion Turns

Everything changes when imagination ceases to be communal and becomes centralized. When the town square no longer belongs to the town. When those in power start looking after their own interests, rather than those of the tribe. 

Originally, cave paintings were shared experiences, and myth-making was collective storytelling. We don’t understand the meaning behind the cave art, and the images have the feel of an in-joke – like you had to be there to truly appreciate them – but as certain people controlled the myths, they perfected the show business part, and the balance shifted.

Illusion became a servant to hierarchy. Holy men and women twisted astronomy, a science, to create astrology,  a story. Fakery became infrastructure, not just improvisation. We often like to believe that we’re rational moderns, immune to such tricks, but the truth is that our feeds are filled with the same machinations, now just digitized. 

The influencer is a shaman, the politician is a priest, the corporation is a kind of monarchy. They sell us alternate realities. And like our ancestors, we buy them. Not because we’re stupid, but because the illusions are more pleasant to live with. Life is uncertain, and certainty is preferable for peace of mind.

 

Living With Fakery
How does it feel to live in a world where fakery is the rule? The signs are everywhere:

• Anxiety. You live in constant suspicion because you can’t trust what you see, hear or feel.
• Isolation. Human connection collapses when trust collapses.
• Exhaustion. Fatigue and apathy replace curiosity because every claim needs fact-checking. You only have so much time.
• Cynicism. When you’ve been fooled too often, it becomes easier to stop caring altogether.

The danger isn’t just that we’ll believe the lies, but that we’ll lose the will to distinguish them from the truth. That’s the ultimate victory of fakery that Kasparov hints at: not persuasion, but resignation. 

Not belief. 

Surrender.

 

The Role Of Power
This fakery isn’t distributed evenly. Anyone can play with a mask, but not everyone can project the illusions at scale.

• A teenager editing selfies isn’t the same as a corporation engineering an ad campaign.
• An online conspiracy forum isn’t the same as a state flooding information channels with disinformation.
• A single scammer catfishing isn’t the same as a platform monetizing parasocial relationships by the billions.

All gaslitcatfish aren’t created equal. Fakery becomes more dangerous when it aligns with power, in opposition to the ethos of the tribe. 

Can we cultivate skepticism without suffocating wonder? Is it possible to be wide awake at all times, without abandoning the chance to keep dreaming?

 

Waking Up

You could assume that waking up in the gaslitcatfish age is easy. Just unplug everything. “Get offline, go outside. Touch grass, man,” but unfortunately, you can’t. The illusions are sewn into our daily lives. Pretending they don’t exist by turning your PC off won’t help. 

Waking up means seeing the seams where the fabric was stitched together. It means noticing when the story shifts, when the performer breaks character, or the algorithm nudges you. It means resisting the exhaustion economy by getting involved anyway, even when it feels like you’re wasting your time. 

Waking up also means reclaiming imagination as a shared survival tool. Belief in the illusions reinforces an unequal social order. That’s the plan. Those without power far outnumber those who have it. It’s only through this inequality that they’re able to maintain the status quo. Our most powerful weapon is our numbers. We are the people, after all.  

The current political divisiveness evident all over the world plays into their hands and should be seen in that light. Just because you disagree with someone doesn’t mean you stop realising you still have to sit down with them when you decide how the society you share is run. Again. more on that later. 

If we start pulling together instead of pulling apart. If we allow others to differ and keep channels of communication open. If we can manage to be grownups about the fact that we’re stuck with each other, that dialogue is the only way to have a mature relationship. Then we could conceivably band together against this existential threat. Because while we’re going with the flow, the gaslitcatfish isn’t just floating in the chum. It’s being factory-farmed and monetized by those who profit from our instability.

 

A Cultural Emergency

The stakes have never been higher:

• Climate collapse demands collective action, but how do we act together when reality itself feels contested?
• Democracy requires shared trust, but how do we build that trust when the lies are indistinguishable from the truth?
• Human connection requires vulnerability, but how do we reveal ourselves when every intimacy might be staged?

Our ability to survive – socially, politically, even biologically – depends on our ability to navigate the fakery without drowning in it. 

The stories aren’t going away. We decide how we’re going to react to them. They’re either going to dictate how we think, or they aren’t. This is the only choice. 

If we don’t learn to negotiate the stories shaping our world, their authors will decide our shape for us. We’re at the mercy of a few very wealthy people pushing their own agendas. A healthy economy has the wealth circulating, not hoarded by a sliver of the population. 

Let’s see what we can do about that.