We are living in the late stages of an epistemological crisis. In our modern, AI-powered era, the very idea of truth – what it is, who has it, and how it’s accessed – has collapsed in on itself. People no longer know what to believe, not necessarily because they are less intelligent or more cynical than past generations, but because the structures and institutions that used to help people make sense of the world are all but gone. What remains is a kind of digital populism of the mind, where the loudest voice, the sharpest aesthetic, the most charismatic personality, and, tragically, the most convincing and creative misinformation, wins. This is the age of the mega-influencer. It will only get worse from here.

The mega-influencer is a new sort of figure. For years, major broadcasting networks would platform individuals we referred to as ‘pundits’. They would offer commentary on current events, even when most of them did not possess some real expertise over their subject matter. We tuned into them because we were glad that someone was caring about the issues we too cared about, or because they were quite adept at interviewing people we were interested in hearing from. Punditry, of course, was not a great way to learn about the world, for it outsourced thinking to someone else. But punditry was a staple of our media world, downstream from the ‘public intellectuals’ of the latter half of the 20th century. With pundits, though, there were limits. There were editorial boards, producers, a basic set of standards about tone and fact. The pundit could speculate and stretch, but they still generally operated within the gravitational pull of something we might call reality and objectivity. Not always, but often.

This is no longer the case. The mega-influencer owes nothing to a newsroom. They answer to no editorial standard and report to no institution, though many of them have nefarious, often foreign, backing. They are self-made and self-verified. They are the platform. And unlike the pundit, the mega-influencer is not just offering commentary. They’re offering gospel, an all-encompassing system of thought, a worldview that absorbs every fact, event, or controversy and spits out certainty. The mega-influencer acts as a god in this manner, declaring something into existence just by its mere utterance. There is a religious dimension to the rise of the mega-influencer.

What we are witnessing is the triumph of postmodernism’s long campaign against objective truth. Beginning in France in the latter half of the 20th century, postmodernism taught that grand narratives were tools of oppression, and that claims to truth were veiled exercises in power. The line between authority and authoritarianism was blurred completely. There can be no more History, just a variety of ‘histories’ that are all worth equal weight. While the postmodern impulse was mainly a feature of the Left, we’ve seen its embrace now on the right with the rise of the mega-influencer, who borrows its tools and language almost to a tee.

In that vacuum of ideas, people turn to loyalty. They pick their influencer like they would a team or a tribe or their preferred detergent, and, from that point on, everything that comes out of that influencer’s mouth is taken as fact, insight, or prophecy. No one asks about sources. No one tracks citations. The mega-influencer becomes the source. And when this happens at scale, with a little push from AI, we don’t just lose access to the truth; we lose the very idea that truth can be accessed at all. In this world, ideas have scant value. Eric Hoffer, probably the greatest philosopher on the nature of mass movements, commented in his vitally important work, The True Believer, that: ‘The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.’ It is frightening how well that captures the nature of the mega-influencer.

This is a profound moral and spiritual problem. When people lose the ability to discern truth, they become susceptible not only to error but to evil. The mega-influencer may not wield institutional power, but they shape the public imagination. And in a world where narratives seem to matter more than facts, the imagination is where wars are won and lost.

If we want a way out, we’ll have to do more than flag posts and videos. We’ll have to relearn the old ways: reading slowly and closely, checking sources, sitting with ambiguity. We’ll need to turn off X and open books. Most of all, we’ll need to remember that truth is not a vibe, not a trend, not something you ‘feel in your gut’ because your favourite account said it. It is something to be sought, wrestled with, earned. Until that happens, the age of the mega-influencer will march on. With it, the confusion, the false prophets and the fraying of whatever common world we still share will continue.

And perhaps, in the long arc of things, that very confusion will be what drives people back to something that has deep roots. The endless novelty, the deception, the noise – eventually, it exhausts and torments the soul. Already, people are starting to look elsewhere: toward what is old, rooted, firm and proven. There exists within man a craving for something that is not transient and ephemeral. It’s time to tune out the mega-influencer and tune back into the hallowed habits of thought that the digital age has eroded.