The Thin Line: Epistemology of Disinformation

Abstract

Will, Power, and the Crisis of Truth in Hypermodernity offers a philosophical investigation into disinformation not merely as a distortion of facts, but as a constitutive force in the contemporary crisis of truth. Drawing on Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Foucault, Habermas, and Gadamer, the article frames disinformation as a technology of narrative power that operates at the pre-factual level—shaping the very conditions of intelligibility, belief, and reality. In hypermodernity, where algorithmic amplification and mass simulation generate a hyperreal order detached from external referents, truth becomes less a correspondence with reality than a performative effect of discourse. The piece analyzes how disinformation erodes symbolic consensus through the strategic deployment of empty signifiers, delegitimizes institutions via associative contagion, and fragments the public sphere, thereby undermining the autonomy of the rational subject. Rather than advocating a return to naive objectivity, the article proposes a “politics of veracity”—a normative framework grounded in discursive sincerity, mutual understanding, and institutional accountability. Ultimately, confronting disinformation demands not only technical fixes but an epistemic and ethical reformation: the cultivation of subjects capable of inhabiting ambiguity while committing to truth as a fragile, contested, yet emancipatory practice of freedom.