The Operatory Dissolution of Truth: Ontotechnics of Functional Falsehood

This essay analyses how social platforms operate as ontopolitical infrastructures whose ontotechnical design reallocates the conditions and costs of proof. By indexing value to attention capture—clicks, shares, dwell time—they privilege the performative efficacy of adherence over epistemic validity, making functional falsehood operationally superior. In this environment, filters of appearance and retentional efficacy displace confrontation with evidence, destabilizing classical accounts of truth (correspondence, coherence, pragmatism, truth as event). Empirically, statistical learning without understanding amplifies emotionally charged content and produces authorless falsity by design rather than intention. The essay proposes an operative program: friction algorithms and sustained verification time; binding multistakeholder governance (audits ex ante/ex post, objective-function transparency, model/version registries, redress); digital public goods (open provenance protocols, trust graphs, evidence repositories); and critical literacies with counter-algorithmic practices that redistribute the cost of proof. Reframing critique as intervention at the level of infrastructure, it concludes that public reason must be materially engineered so that truth regains a right it has been algorithmically denied: the right to spend time.