Folie à plusieurs. The madness of many. A rare form of psychosis whereby the delusions of one become those of masses—like a cult, or a fever. A rash of hysteria in which neither the one with the primary delusion nor any of the others that follow has any awareness that what they believe is not the truth. In our case, a contagion of competing hallucinations hellbent on volatility in the euphoria of this collective riotous derangement. We are living in the age of hallucination (seeCambridge Dictionary’s word of the year, 2023) multiplying like Raktabija’s blood seed, as every person is a storyteller and every storyteller is a madman chasing truth, but only fatefully inscribing our annihilation. In 2024, this is our departure point. But how did we get here? Stay with me.

The last time we were here (looking at 2019), I wrote that the “current state of our every day and its potential worsening— whether you call it a circus, alternative fact, an unreality or, simply, the ‘end’— has formed a behemoth supermassive black hole, and we as the ‘Fake News’ horsemen are the diffused material churning wildly in the ‘hellish hot-and-cold gas storms’ at once wielding the power to feed or betray our fate.”

At the time I suggested that the industry needed a “self-destructive reimagining…an astronomical apoplexy that spits our particles away from the black hole, out into space, and into a different course where we might enter into a new gravitational pull and form the basis of a new world.” Our industry did not heed that sound advice. Instead, we fed our fate. But, in some ways, that’s not entirely our fault. The world was headed toward its end anyway, and a new world was already on the horizon, heralded by the explosion of generative AI and LLMs onto the already-hallucinatory scene. Between then and now, our world has undergone an overthrow in three movements.

The first of the movements saw the rise of a new generation which has established its presence, its self-image as worldview, loudly in the political turbulence of the pandemic/post-pandemic era, and did so largely by “taking back the narrative,” using social media to become the authors/curators/performers of their own stories. This shift has also played a role in the fall of the old institution of journalism, as distrust (more on this later) drives more young people to social media and each other for their news and storytelling. See, each generation that rises into positioning moves according to its own worldview. New values and ethical codes, trends, social mores, and general cultural shifts all emerge from that view. Each generation, in essence, becomes its own world, intent upon vanishing the old world along with the flawed generations that came before. Views and conceptions of the world, thus, emerge and disappear with each generation. They always have.

I know what you’re thinking: if this were just a new generation coming to replace an old one, then we would have seen everything about this moment before. And frankly, we haven’t, because this current moment is a special kind of Hell the likes of which remind us in every day’s fresh chaos that we are experiencing something more intense than a mere generational turnover has ever caused.

True (whatever that means, anymore). But this is the first time that we are shedding a world to grow a new one, while also facing the finality of our impending planetary expiration. It is a moment for the temporality of the infinite against the finite— and socioculturally, it’s truly a race to the bottom.

That brings us to the second movement: the acceleration of the landscape. The climate emergency reminds us our time is not just fleeting but in shortage, even as everything else around us accelerates: conflict, virus, prohibitive inflation, shortages of foods, medication and formula and basic products for living, political extremity and the persistence of hatred, the dogged search for a capital-D Democracy that has probably never been here at all, if we’re being honest, and, most importantly, therapy. Everything, all at once, making individual life within that of the world in general pretty intolerable (hence, we have all found our last remaining human comforts can survive only in “Goblin Mode” [see Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year, 2022]).

In general, the absurdity of our current landscape looks like this: Both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are running for president, Taylor Swift and Beyonce are now their own respective beats with reporters devoted to their every record-breaking, earth-shattering move, equally record-breaking are the wildfires and heat waves killing more people each year while New York City nearly washed away — to say nothing of Pakistan’s super floods last year — the meteoric rise of Gen AI has done many things, including making an even more unspeakably horrific (if possible?) spectacle of the Israeli war on Gaza by aiding in the rabid and undecipherable spread of dis/misinformation across social platforms, Ukraine has largely fallen from headliner grace while still being covered more visibly than the civil war in Sudan, the events following the coup in Niger, or the enormity of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there’s a new Murdoch lording over the vast family empire, people — more than one — actually dressed up as the Titan submersible for Halloween, Britney Spears topped The New York Times bestseller list silencing critics of her dance with knives, alien corpses were presented to the Mexican government as evidence of life beyond, book bans have made a flamboyant comeback, the Hollywood strikes — also largely centered around the rise of AI — consumed the better part of the second half of the year, Congress is in utter disarray — to say nothing of the circus of the speakership — on average, 2.5 newspapers have closed each week this year, Elon Musk is providing an effective microcosmic example of a real-time inversion of reality via X, formerly known as Twitter, Instagram is so over, guns (literally everywhere) — there have been more mass shootings in 2023 than there have been days — TikTok (that’s it, just TikTok), everything has become unutterable and yet everyone is uttering loudly and without pause all the time, this season of Love is Blind should never have happened, and, while we’re here, interest in marriage is declining among youth even as micro weddings are trending, the pandemic paradoxically supposedly taught us about community and togetherness, but we live highly individualized lives in the face of all of the obstacles and increasingly expect the world to cater to our individual “needs,” whether or not they are really necessary, everything is expensive, weird things have become unavailable, the Supreme Court’s politicization has become a real life horror movie for Americans from all walks of life and it’s being contained not at all by a new honor-imposed ethics code which is largely toothless, too many people are still refusing to disappear their eyebrows so we’re all just (still) in Goblin Mode without the goblin eyebrows. And that’s just a sample of events — a time-capsule, if you will.

And so we’ve come to the third movement, (you guessed it) the rise of AI, which has served to exacerbate all of the above by way of dis/misinformation spawned by misuse and (yup, you guessed it again) textual “hallucination” — the lies AI will conjure when it doesn’t have the information you’re looking for.

If manmade phenomena in the realm of the political account for the human sources of the seeding of this contagion of competing hallucinations, then Gen AI and tools like ChatGPT account for the inflammation of an already raging indecipherability between reality and fiction. This, in a society in which each individual, having developed their own God complex as the writers of their own fictions-into-reality — armed with their story, narrative, truth, without mediation, with which to bludgeon each other, their beholden and expected audiences — summons forth an devastating endangerment of storytelling that implicates and corrodes us all. It is through the storytelling that the madness is spreading.

Ours is a transitional time that is sorely in need of, but gleefully ushering out, the journalist. A time in which the idea of “sticking to the news” or “just storytelling,” is an expired form of practice which gives way only to the further calcification of our industry while throwing more fodder into veritable wildfires. We are all telling our own stories, even as we are all stuck in someone else’s. And we are no longer trusted as the gate keepers of fact and verified information, much less of the virtues of objectivity, fairness and balance that we stake our claim to.

An October 2023 Gallup study found that nearly four in 10 Americans — 39%, the highest number on record — do not trust the media “at all.” Another 29% say they also have “not very much trust” in the media, “making the current assessment of the media the grimmest in Gallup’s history.”

All of this is to say, we have arrived to a moment which begs of journalists not something more, but something other. A moment in which dis/misinformation seeds from man and machine alike, where storytelling has been overrun by the masses, social media is itself a deliriant emitting the digital exhaust inducing pathosophically crippling hallucination, a distorted, mutant information ecosystem where single hallucinations can poison the proverbial well, becoming myriad individual and mass hallucinations, and where, in all all of this, our positioning as the trusted fourth estate, guardians of democracy, has been compromised in the eyes of an audience without allies — all of it together beckoning a reckoning.

But don’t worry: “This is not the ending — you haven’t read it yet.”

So says the madman to his doctor in the opening scene of John Carpenter’s 1994 horror fantasy film, “In the Mouth of Madness.”

In the film, horror writer Sutter Cane — “the century’s most popular author, Cane outsells them all!”— is under scrutiny in the press as either “a harmless pop phenomenon, or a deadly mad prophet of the printed page.”

Cane’s work, a newscaster says, “has been known to have an affect on his more unstable readers,” describing disorientation, memory loss, and paranoia. Really, his books were creating mass hysteria that spread like a virus — a contagion of vision that spread among readers who believed the books could make them see. Cane himself became convinced his writings were real and no longer fictional. Crazed readers, including Cane’s agent, took to the streets, axes in hand, in what became a global rash of public violence that only ever stopped to ask: “Do you read Sutter Cane?”

Both the “senseless extreme violence,” and the insanity, in the film are treated like a spreading hallucination driven by a fantasy. “Is it something being created by the press?” a doctor on the radio asks (it’s not).

When an insurance investigator — John Trent —  is assigned to track down Cane and retrieve a final manuscript he hasn’t turned in, he becomes the symbol of the cynicism and politics of being “above”/on the “right side” and believing you aren’t susceptible to the madness, hysteria, group think, paranoia, (spoiler: you are).

It is a film that is ultimately about the ease with which a society can undergo an inversion of reality and insanity. Driving out to find the fictional town from Cane’s books, Hobbs End, Trent and an editor sent with him — Linda Styles — talk about why she likes Cane’s books (they scare her) and why he doesn’t understand the hype (they’re not real).

“It’s not real from your point of view and right now reality shares your point of view,” Styles says, “What scares me about Cane’s work is what might happen if reality shared his point of view.”

“Whoa we’re not talking about reality here,” Trent interjects. “We’re talking about fiction, it’s different, you know?”

“A reality is just what we tell each other it is,” she replies. “Sane and insane could easily switch places if the insane were to come to the majority. You would find yourself locked in a padded cell, wondering what happened to the world.”

What Trent and Styles come to find is not just that Cane’s writings are real, but that they are creating reality and writing one final madness on the way to the end of the world. And the more people believe in his writings, the faster that end arrives and the sooner “The Old Ones” — the until-then condemned ancient demons that used to reign over the world—can return.

As the film comes to a close, we return to the madman in the asylum cell from the opening scene. We now recognize him as Trent, and he is now able to walk free. Indeed, the “insane” have come to the majority and Trent finds himself wandering and wondering what happened to the world, racked with chaos and violence.

It is a fiction in which we as journalists can find ourselves, only not as Sutter Cane, though we may think we are the ones writing the world. Indeed, the insane have come  to the majority, but the world and its many hallucinating storytellers is full of Sutter Canes, inscribing the state that we’re in, ushering in the fulfillment of a final madness, just like the film, only unlike the film the Sutter Canes are simultaneously their own unstable readers. We— journalists—are all instead John Trent, meant to question everything and investigate not just the world’s fictions, but its warring realities, and all the nuances (and hallucinations) therein. We need only not to fall into the trap of believing we are above the madness.

In 2024, the job of journalism, facing down the volatility of it all, the loss of trust, and an election year, will be to think through the viewpoint of the world coming to an end, think through the cults of hallucination, to find a way back to relevance, if not authority.

Journalism is getting harder. To do relevant work in a time when social change has made us irrelevant, when we are all caught in the feedback loop of self-image as worldview and worldview as self-image, we must create a space for new perspectives by radically questioning and challenging those views. Not click-baiting or antagonizing, but legitimizing the call for a third option by pointing to the holes and blindspots those feedback loops all suffer. And to do it in a way that, as I begged in my last prediction, is participatory and transparent (a way that forms community out of audiences), cross-disciplinary and establishes a new standard for credibility, along these lines, rather than the old tenets of the institution (lest our own ancient demons find their way back).

What we can offer that is of value, what makes us relevant, is this challenge, and nothing we do at this point should be without it. I’ve said it before, our livelihood lies in complicating the narrative, not keeping it simple in a world already devoid of the understanding of nuance and complexity, and no less rich in conflict for it. The art of questioning is one not every “storyteller” has yet mastered—in fact, most never will. More than anything, questioning is itself a way of looking at the world and seeing what’s there, unintelligible as it may be to the masses — a way of deciphering the madness. And if disrupting the presenting narrative is seen as an act of violence, then it is sometimes necessary to be a violence perceived. One that might lead to the creation of a new poetics of these maddening end times — one that gives limited space for mourning the loss of what once was, or even fighting to save it, and all of its attention to building the new way forward and safeguarding our place in what will come to be. The institution has crumbled, we must build something new.

Journalism is no longer a “pillar of the modern social order.” We have been knocked to the dirt and need to learn how to move like subterranean creatures. We have for some time now stood between society and the gulf of the deceptive informational abyss. The black hole of excess, an “infodemic” sick with hallucination. But without trust, we are no longer the gatekeepers of our collective sanity, and throwing more information into the frenzy won’t help any, if it’s even noticed at all.

Romanian philosopher, fellow suicidal ideator, and little bit of a drama queen, E.M. Cioran has said that “the premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moment’s return and reunion.”

“One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it,” he said.

Journalists, I believe, in this moment of madness, must find a way to turn the lights on. Far be it from me to advocate for lucidity—and, who knows, this is after all the prediction of a madman, and what can a prediction in the age of the madman even be, other than just another fiction written by another God, under risk of becoming real in a new world where the old world has become just a bedtime story for children, a myth, folklore, nothing more—but in the age of hallucination, if the world does not trust us, it should at least fear our light in its chaos.