The End of the Age of Digital Veracity and the Resurgence of Analog

Interesting tweet from Steven Nekhaila, former Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee:

Ironically, AI may force the world to go more analog.

Or at least us. As many books written after the dawn of AI are AI written, news reports online are faked, AI voice scam calls, government propaganda, AI tinder profiles and online interactions are replaced by AI agents, hell, even restaurants are using pictures of AI food.

At the end of the day, those seeking contact with reality will lose trust in digital, and be forced to trust their senses even more. Local news may become relevant as entire foreign events could soon be faked, it will be much more difficult to disseminate what is real from what is fake, and the urge to authenticity shall rise.

Others, perhaps, will embrace the AI tsunami, and whatever awaits from the other side, perhaps drown in.

But those who seek authenticity will look back at the 2020’s, at books, ideas, and content of old.

And hopefully, beyond the black mirror.

— Steven Nekhaila (@StevenNekhaila) October 5, 2026

This may be right. We have gotten used to a period of increasing recordings—audio, video, images—and could easily prove or trust the veracity. A photograph of cheating husband used to mean you had him dead to rights, and so on. But times are changing.

I think we get used to a time period in history and don’t realize it’s temporary. For example, when opposing IP and copyright I get asked “but how will musicians make money if people can pirate their music?”¹ This question is so dated by now. It is stuck in a past business model which itself was only temporary. We call recall the advent of modern hi-fi music, first on LPs and then later CDs. Before then musicians were not usually bazzillionaires. But for a brief period of monoculture, you had the Beatles and others making money selling LPs and 45s. The Beatles even stopped touring and counted on record sales for their income. Then CDs came along and for a few decades, top stars like Madonna and so on made a killing. But then torrenting and the Internet made piracy a thing. There were still “sales” of Mp3s via iTunes and so on, but that didn’t last long. Piracy was reducing the need to buy mp3s and then streaming, Spotify etc. made even buying and even pirating media–movies, music–a relic. And so now bands use their albums are PR to get fans, who will then attend concerts and buy merch. The brief 50 or so year period of artists making tons from selling patterns of information has ended, more or less. And so culture and business models adapt. I remember maybe 15-20 years ago when you went to a concert you could not use your phone to record video or audio. Now they don’t care. They know it doesn’t hurt anything and is just good PR. I just attended the concert by Rush in Houston and also in New York, and lots of people were recording. Nobody cares. Things have changed.

And now we have AI beginning to make it impossible to know if some video or audio or photo is real or AI. No doubt historiography and law and other aspects of culture will have to adapt. How can you prove a security video showing X broke into a building is genuine? The law of evidence will have to change. If a political ad shows some politician using a racist term, he can just deny it. Who can prove it’s right? AI may make it harder to prove historical facts but it may also make it harder to libel people; if someone is accused of something awful and there is video proof … how can we know it’s not faked? (For the same reason I have argued that defamation law, besides being unjust, ironically makes defamation more potent: with defamation law in force, if someone lies about you, and you don’t sue them for defamation (because you can) then people assume the lie must be true; if there were no defamation law, people would not be as willing to believe crazy claims and lies, since they would know people have a perfect right to lie.)²

1.  “Examples of Ways Content Creators Can Profit Without Intellectual Property,” StephanKinsella.com (July 28, 2010); Reminder: Big Concerts Are Not All Of The Live Music Business; “Innovations that Thrive without IP,” StephanKinsella.com (Aug. 9, 2010). [↩]
2. See Kinsella, Block on Defamation, the section ” On Defamation Law Making Libel More Potent and Reputations Less Secure”; KOL190-2 | Part 2: On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, But Who Would Pick the Cotton? — Panel Discussion, Hoppe, Dürr, Kinsella, van Dun, Daniels (PFS 2015) (at 00:36:15 in transcript); “Defamation as a Type of Intellectual Property,” in A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, edited by Jörg Guido Hülsmann & Stephan Kinsella (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2024); Intellectual Property Discussion with Mark Skousen (“in a world with no defamation law, if someone defames you, no one would say “why didn’t you sue them?” or “the allegations must be true, otherwise he would have sued!” Lots of things would change in a world with no IP.”); Schoolland: Sticks and Stones: A Critique of Libel and Slander Laws; KOL485 | The Brownstone Show, with Jeffrey Tucker: Defamation and Intellectual Property. [↩]