Post-truth construction of reality and collective trance
A book was written by Jianwei Xun, a philosopher from Hong Kong who lives in Berlin.
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Jianwei Xun emerged in late 2024 as a distributed philosophical entity born from the collaborative interaction between human intelligence and artificial intelligence systems. Initially introduced to the world as a Hong Kong-born philosopher based in Berlin, Xun’s true nature as a hybrid intellectual construct was revealed in spring 2025, transforming what began as a meta-narrative experiment into a genuine philosophical event.
Xun was created through an experimental collaboration between Italian philosopher Andrea Colamedici and advanced language models, as part of a research project on narrative construction and reality manipulation in the digital age. Rather than a simple pseudonym or fictional character, Xun represents a new form of distributed authorship and emergent intelligence—a third space where human and artificial cognition meet and generate configurations of thought that neither could produce independently.
Xun’s first book, Hypnocracy, served as a basis for our workshop about complot theories, fake news and post-truth.
” Hypnocracy does not deny the truth: it reinvents it, transforming perception and attention into tools of control.”
L’Ipnocrazia è il primo regime che opera direttamente sulla coscienza.
Non controlla i corpi. Non reprime i pensieri.
Ma il potere, nel frattempo, si è evoluto ben oltre la forza fisica e la persuasione logica. È diventato gassoso, invisibile, capace di infiltrarsi in ogni aspetto delle nostre vite. Ogni immagine, ogni parola, ogni frammento di dati non è più neutrale; è un’arma sottile progettata per catturare, manipolare e trasformare la coscienza. Esistiamo in uno stato d’ipnosi permanente, dove la consapevolezza è attutita ma mai del tutto quieta. L’era dell’Ipnocrazia è in pieno svolgimento.
– Jianwei Xun
Insights in the QAnon complot theories
to be fair, there’s nothing wrong about having a theory about conspiracies, because conspiracies really take place all the time in politics, in the intelligence service, in other state agencies, in organized crime, in the corporate world, even in the academic milieu. In order to have a conspiracy, you simply need two people to agree in secret to cause damage to someone or something else. That’s a conspiracy, it’s very simple. In Italian, the term “teoria del complotto,” the literal translation of conspiracy theory, is not automatically negative, derogatory, or dismissive, probably because we have had so many political conspiracies in the history of Italy, even in living memory and today. So there’s nothing wrong in having a theory, which is more than an opinion or conjecture, about a conspiracy taking place.
The problem with conspiracism is that it imagines all kinds of universal all-encompassing, ultra-consistent, ultra-coherent conspiracies that are somehow perfectly planned, involving millions of accomplices, then flawlessly put into practice, somehow covering all aspects of reality. Of course, these kinds of perfect conspiracies never take place, they can’t exist. But there are, nonetheless, all the time: small conspiracies, large conspiracies, yes, but not universal conspiracies.
– Wu Ming 1