The world didn’t change overnight. It changed slowly, quietly, right in front of us and most of us either looked away or believed it would somehow sort itself out. It won’t.
This week offered a masterclass in the new normal. Donald Trump posted an ultimatum on Truth Social threatening to “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power plants if the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t fully reopened within 48 hours. Iran responded with the energy of a country that had nothing to lose.
Then with the casual confidence of a man who has never experienced consequences, Trump posted again. Wonderful news. There had been “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” with Iran. He boasted, “l didn’t call them. They called me”.
Iran’s response was swift and sharp. There was no call, no negotiations, and Trump had “backed down out of fear.”
Trump has now deleted his post. Two versions of the same 48 hours. Two entirely different realities. You get to pick your favourite. It is like loading up Super Mario and standing at the world select screen. Every path is available to you. The easy castle, the treacherous one, the shortcut you found on YouTube. Nobody is forcing your hand. You simply choose the world that suits you best, the one where you already know the layout, where the enemies are manageable, where you feel most likely to win.
That is what we do with reality now. Two versions of the same 48 hours exist simultaneously: Trump’s and Iran’s. And we walk up to the screen, look at both worlds, and select the one that feels most comfortable.
This no longer shocks us and that is the problem. We have grown so accustomed to Trump posting, retracting and reshaping reality in real time that the bar for what constitutes a lie now sits somewhere near the stratosphere. “Fake news” was never really about the news. It was about training us to doubt everything so that when the actual fakery arrived, we’d have no framework left to challenge it.
Enter artificial intelligence, right on cue.
The conflict in the Middle East has seen AI-generated content flood social media at a scale we haven’t seen before. Last week, the internet erupted over whether Benjamin Netanyahu was alive, based entirely on whether recently released videos of him were AI-generated.
Respected journalists shared footage, then quietly deleted it and apologised when it turned out to be fabricated. The first reply to almost anything posted on X now is “Grok, is this real?” — directed at Twitter’s own AI tool, which can only answer based on how it has been programmed. We are asking one machine whether another machine is lying to us. The confidence this inspires is limited.
Meanwhile, AI is making itself known in the corporate world through a rather more tangible mechanism known as the redundancy notice. Atlassian cut 1,600 jobs, roughly 10% of its workforce, citing AI directly. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes acknowledged it plainly that the company needs fewer people in certain roles because AI now does the work. Atlassian’s stock ticked upward on the news. The 1,600 employees who got the email presumably felt differently. They are far from alone as AI-related layoffs pushed US job losses past one million in 2025, and 2026 is tracking worse. Australians are not immune.
Women, it should be noted, are overrepresented in the administrative, communications and coordination roles AI is consuming first. Not because women are less capable, obviously, but because decades of undervaluing those roles left them under-protected when these IT advancements have arrived. There is a grim irony in jobs that were never “important enough” to pay well suddenly becoming important enough to automate.
So here we are. We cannot trust footage from a war zone. We cannot trust a post from the President of the United States. We cannot be certain the article we are reading was based on fact. And many of the people who might have helped us navigate the fog have just been handed a redundancy notice.
We were nudged here, step by step through each tolerated lie, each excused deepfake, each shrug at a deleted post. The technology only accelerated what was already underway. The question is not whether we can reverse it. The question is whether we can be honest enough to stop pretending it isn’t happening.
The world will not wait for us to catch up. It will simply keep posting. And then delete. And then post again.