Tom Thomas is a writer with a career spanning forty years in publishing, technical writing, public relations, and popular fiction writing.
“My business now is to weave circumstance, happenstance, intention, and mischance into stories.”

The Machine Condition:

Rumor on Steroids – September 6, 2026

How do people get their information? How do they discover the world, form the background to what they think and do, and learn what to trust and what to suspect? Those are questions each one of us faces as we grow up and become functioning adults.

For tens of thousands of years, going back to our hunter-gatherer origins—that is, in preliterate societies—people relied on knowledge handed down through the generations, grandfathers and grandmothers to fathers and mothers to sons and daughters. Such knowledge was usually based on keen observation and reliable deduction. And for the questions that humans could not answer directly, there were priests, medicine men, and wise women—usually living apart from the tribe or village—who could interpret signs, read the skies, and offer answers based on imagination and secret lore.

And yes, these societies had their background of free-floating, bogus, preposterous beliefs. Aside from sharing secrets and lies about specific individuals in the village, they also disseminated fabrications about gods, ghosts, demons, fairies, strange sightings, mysterious forces, and night terrors. These were the equivalent of our modern-day UFO beliefs and legends of secret societies like the Illuminati.

Then came the written word. And along with tallies of grain harvests and sheep flocks kept on clay tablets and pounded papyrus reeds, people wrote down their myths and legends, collected narratives of their gods and prophets into manuscripts, and began regularizing their popular knowledge. There were still rumors and fantasies, of course, but now there were also regular stories, accepted interpretations, and some kind of voice of authority that did not live alone in a hut in the woods.

Through rising civilizations and passing dark ages, people kept the handwritten books and transmitted the collected knowledge and lore down through the generations. Some of it was based on keen observation and some based on imagination and guesswork—but that is the nature of human storytelling. Still, you could usually go back and find your authority in a book somewhere.

And then came the printing press and paper made from readily available wood pulp. These technologies originated in China and blossomed in the West in the 15th century. Suddenly, in civilizational terms, you didn’t have to go to a handwritten manuscript kept by a monk in a cloister or in a rich man’s collection of curiosities to find information. Suddenly, it was available to read on university bookshelves, then in publicly funded libraries, and finally in stores where you could buy the book for your very own. Suddenly, the average person was expected to attend school, become literate, and read the story for him- or herself.¹

Because someone had to go to the trouble of—and pay for—putting an author’s words into type, printing them on paper, binding them into books, and distributing them to the public, there was a brake on the pell-mell dissemination of knowledge. Editors—I was one myself for several years—began choosing who and what would get published, worrying about coherence and accuracy in the text, and fussing about standardized language and style. So, the average reader had some assurance that the content of a book was reasonably close to the locally accepted truth or clearly identified as speculation and/or fiction.

The next stage of human communications came a few hundred years later. Regular postal service allowed ordinary people to write letters back and forth with friends and relatives. And soon after that, the invention of the telegraph, followed by the telephone, let them send messages electronically and eventually converse in person over vast distances. But all of these were still personal messages, one-on-one, just sent faster than traveling by sailing ship and horseback to visit with your correspondent.

About a hundred years after the first telephone in 1876, microprocessors started putting personal computers on people’s desktops.² In another dozen years, various government agencies and online services began linking these personal computers through high-speed transmission lines, and the internet was born. This vastly increased the speed and power of communication, both for personal and business uses.

Out of the internet, with the overlay of other online services like Facebook and Twitter, was social media born. Now, anyone could spread words, images, music, and videos to their five thousand best friends and on to the whole world. No editors or established authorities existed to monitor these exchanges and determine their truth. We even got an internet service called Wikipedia, which took over the authority of the various printed encyclopedias by posting articles that anyone could author and then anyone else could edit. The presumption was that helpful human contributors would crystallize all human knowledge into a single, authoritative voice.³

And now, into the domain of the internet and social media enter the large language models (LLMs) of “artificial intelligence.” These platforms try to gather every available written word or image, run them through an algorithm, and output on demand supposedly new ideas and graphics. They are subject to no authority and are not self-correcting. They sometimes access true sources and sometimes conflate and confuse them—resulting in what are politely called “hallucinations.” And their output is usually so unexceptional and mundane that many people call it “slop.”

One person may speculate about nearly anything. But writing it in a letter or speaking in a private conversation, he or she can muddy the waters of human knowledge only so deeply and so widely. That person, given a private printing press or a website, can reach farther but still leave their name and informational “fingerprints” on the communication. But given a platform on social media with access to the churning power of a Chat-GPT or Claude, they can touch the whole world. And so, imagination, rumination, hopes and fears, truths and lies, rumor and innuendo, all flood the human psyche.

We thought computers and the internet would put the knowledge of the world at our fingertips—and they did that. But they also pumped up the winds of rumor and speculation to gale force. No one, eventually, knows where to look or what to believe. And that day is here.

1. Usually, at first, boys and men were expected to be educated, but eventually girls and women, too.

2. Where before, all the world’s computing power had been offered by giant machines locked in the basement of businesses and government offices.

3. And Wikipedia is good for facts which are generally not disputed. (I use it for simple reference to historical figures, prominent dates, and non-controversial science facts.) The problem is when a noted physicist might contribute a detailed Wikipedia article on an esoteric subject like quantum mechanics—which will then be edited by a disbelieving rube whose education in mathematics and geometry stopped at “pie are round, cornbread are square.”

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