There was a time when reality seemed shared. Not perfect, not without bias, but shared. Something approximating a common thread running through our collective consciousness. Mass media stitched it together, evening news broadcasts drew its borders, and the same voices told stories that pulled us into some semblance of a unified experience. The world might have felt complicated, but at least we were complicated together.
But that consensus, fragile as it was, has unraveled. Today, what we once called “reality” has splintered, chipped away by the algorithmic tailoring of the internet and the disorienting echo of social media. No dramatic collapse, no explosive moment, just the slow erosion of the common narrative. Now, each of us walks through a world meticulously crafted to fit like a glove. Algorithmically personalized, hyper-curated, and utterly isolated.
We approach this election not as a people voting together, but as fragments trying to force meaning into a spectacle that barely feels real. The old structures that gave us a shared stage are gone, replaced by endless competing simulations, each constructed to appeal to our most basic comforts, fears, and desires. Voting has always been about choice, but it used to feel like a choice we made together. Now, we choose alone, reaching across a chasm of bespoke realities.
This isn’t an attempt to bring comfort. It’s an acknowledgement of the uncomfortable truths that underpin our disintegrating consensus, a glimpse into a tangled chaos where reality gives way to simulation, and substance disappears beneath spectacle. The election looms, and with it comes a question larger than any candidate. Can we still find anything real among the noise or are we simply clutching at shadows in an endless hall of mirrors?
Reality once had a texture. It was something you could reach out and touch. It wasn’t perfect, but it was real. Walter Cronkite’s steady voice at 6 o’clock gave us a sense that, for better or worse, we were all in the same movie… watching the same scenes, getting mad at the same villains, rooting for the same heroes. It wasn’t a flawless narrative, but it was a common one. It threaded our individual lives into a story larger than ourselves.
Then slowly, it began to fall apart. Not violently, but pixel by pixel, almost too quietly to notice. The internet seeped in, social media metastasized, and the cultural fabric began to fray. No more was there one thread. We each began to weave our own. And now we wear garments made of different cloth, algorithmically tailored just for us, bespoke realities that fit our fears and hopes like a glove. Election Day is no longer a single, collective event. It is a multiplicity, a thousand elections held in a thousand different universes, each with its own script, its own heroes and villains. We aren’t debating policy, we’re debating the nature of existence itself.
We have stepped beyond the real and into Baudrillard’s nightmare, a hyperreality where substance has been swallowed by spectacle, and governance is an afterthought. Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation is not just theory, it’s the operating manual of our age. We have long since lost the original, and we’re left only with copies of copies. Reflections of reflections, until the distinction between the real and the imagined becomes meaningless.
As a consequence, our politics have become a theater of simulation. Campaigns are curated experiences, full of manufactured resonance, where memes become weapons, and deepfakes move like shadows across the wall of Plato’s cave. The spectacle has devoured the substance, and we are lost in its labyrinth. We don’t ask whether what we see is true, we ask if it’s compelling. Virality has replaced veracity. The hyperreal is sleek, it’s emotionally satisfying, and it’s so much easier than the rough, uncomfortable texture of truth. The election, then, is not about governance, it’s about choosing which illusion feels less hollow, which narrative is more beautifully empty.
So then picture Election Day not as a grand, unified ritual, but as millions of micro-elections, each of us stepping into a booth that has been uniquely designed for our own curated bubble. This is not a shared contest, it’s a scattered constellation of disjointed choices, where each voter is cocooned in their own personalized reality.
Social media promised a window to the world, but it turned out to be a hall of mirrors, each reflecting back a twisted, comforting distortion of what’s outside. Algorithms have not simply given us new ways of seeing, they have authored new worlds for us to live in, new contexts for us to understand our place within. Millions of private realities now overlap in the shared space of a ballot box, but they’re as disconnected as alternate dimensions. There is no common language anymore, no common stakes. Just fragments of stories, hastily intersecting before spiraling apart again.
Democracy is predicated on consensus… on some sliver of common ground, some shared truth that allows us to move forward, even imperfectly. But what happens when that consensus disintegrates? When truth becomes fragmented, when consensus is not just unattainable but unwanted?
There’s something seductive about the fracturing, something that suggests new possibilities, new forms of governance tailored to the micro-realities people inhabit. Hyper-localized politics for hyper-individualized experiences. But let’s not kid ourselves about the danger that lies in those cracks. Democracy is wobbling, unbalanced on this splintered ground. Without consensus, the very notion of a “common good” becomes quaint, almost laughably naive. How do we make decisions together when we no longer share even the smallest notion of what “together” means?
Without some fundamental agreement on what’s real, democracy loses its compass. The common good becomes impossible to locate… dissolved into a thousand personal goods, a thousand isolated desires, all of them valid, none of them capable of uniting. The more we lean into these splintered realities, the more fragile our democracy becomes. Less a mechanism for collective will, and more a platform for individualized expression, with nothing solid to stand on.
And yet, we still vote. Perhaps it’s defiance. Perhaps it’s ritual. Perhaps it’s nothing more than habit. In this fragmented age, the act of voting has become a grasp at something, a desperate attempt to pull the shards back together, to insist that something, anything, might still matter.
It is an imperfect act, a flickering gesture towards unity in an era that thrives on division. It won’t heal the broken mirror. It won’t recreate the gilded reflection we once saw. But it is, at the very least, an attempt. A refusal to give in completely to the siren song of the hyperreal. Even amidst the fog and confusion, voting says something. It says we are still trying. That the common good, however elusive, however shattered, still calls out to us, even from behind the endless mirrors and screens. The mirror might be broken, but broken glass can still catch the light, still reflect back something of worth.