Who Decides What Is Real?

Reality is not something given. It comes into being.
Through conversations, images, stories, rules—through what we collectively accept, often without saying so. What we call “real” has always been the result of shared human effort.

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann captured this paradox in their classic The Social Construction of Reality:

Society is a human product.
Society is an objective reality.
Humans are social products.

We shape the world, and the world shapes us in return. But this dialectic is now shifting in a fundamental way. The power to produce reality no longer resides solely in human negotiation.

When machines become world-makers

We are living through a quiet paradigm shift. Reality is no longer primarily constituted through language, discourse, or interpretation, but through computation. Where words once brought reality into being, computational operations now perform that role—embedded invisibly in platforms, networks, and devices.

Media theorist Boris Groys described Google as early as 2011 as a “philosophical machine”: a system that orders reality through visibility. What can be found exists. What cannot be found disappears.

That observation is more than a decade old. Since then, we have moved from search engines to learning systems—from rankings to large language models, from statistical relevance to generative reality. And already, another threshold is coming into view: AGI.

Visibility has become an ontological category. Reality is produced through ranking. What appears at the top counts. What is filtered out loses its claim to reality. Reality is no longer negotiated; it is sorted. Debates about truth give way to code. Relevance is calculated, not discussed.

Artificial intelligence and operative realism

We are now entering a new stage. Artificial intelligence does not merely reflect reality—it produces it. From data traces and probabilities emerge texts, images, voices, entire scenarios. The simulated becomes real because it works.

What is real is what appears coherent enough not to be questioned. The central question is no longer Is this true?
It is Does it work?

With that shift, our epistemic foundation changes. Truth is no longer tested but accepted—so long as it integrates smoothly.

When nature itself becomes malleable

The next wave runs even deeper. With quantum computing, synthetic biology, and neurotechnology, construction no longer concerns information alone. It reaches into matter itself.

Biological processes are modeled, optimized, rewritten. DNA becomes editable. The brain becomes an interface. The body becomes a system to be managed. Nature no longer appears as something grown, but as a substrate for technical design. Not only meaning is constructed—materiality itself.

The human in the feedback loop

Humans are not outside this process. Berger and Luckmann described internalization as the way social structures—norms, roles, orders of reality—are taken into ourselves.

Today, internalization takes on a new quality. Technology externalizes human traits, translates them into models, and then feeds them back into biological substance. What once described reality now intervenes in it. We shape technology, and it shapes us—until the boundary between subject and object begins to blur.

The human becomes compatible.
Optimizable.
Computable.

Reality under computation

Ontological, epistemological, and anthropological questions are no longer openly debated. They are answered quietly—by systems that function.

Against this backdrop, Berger and Luckmann’s formula can be rewritten:

Society is a technological product.
Society is an objective reality.
Humans are technological products.

The challenge, then, is not only to understand this transformation, but to locate ourselves within it—as participants in a world we no longer merely experience, but continuously produce and absorb with every click, every calculation, every simulation.

If reality really is real—
is reality really real?

When computation replaces negotiation, one uncomfortable question remains:

What happens to that which cannot be computed?

I will pursue this question next week in the first Letter from Tomorrow.

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