When the Algorithm Becomes Big Brother: How We Lost Control of Reality

When the Algorithm Becomes Big Brother:
How We Lost Control of Reality

The Power of Perception – When Reality Loses the Battle is not another warning about fake news. It is a book about a world in which truth no longer needs to be banned in order to be defeated. It need only be slower, quieter and less compelling than whatever the screen places before us each day as reality.

Some books explain the age in which they were written. Others catch up with it before most people have even understood what has happened. The Power of Perception – When Reality Loses the Battle, by Dr Orhan Dragaš, belongs to the latter group. The English edition was brought out by Chiselbury Publishing in Britain, the Italian edition by the renowned Cacucci Editore, and the Serbian edition by Službeni glasnik. The book became a bestseller in Britain and Italy and has met with the same success in Serbia, while Destek, Turkey’s largest publishing house, will publish the Turkish edition at the end of August. That publishing journey shows that the book’s subject is not confined to one country, one political system or one media culture. It addresses a problem now confronting every society.

The foreword was written by Lord Christopher Geidt, a long-serving adviser and Private Secretary to Queen Elizabeth II. Geidt observes that many contemporary books examine the conflict between perception and reality, but few can match the breadth of Dragaš’s approach, which brings together philosophy, psychology, the media and digital culture. He regards it as an exceptional guide for those who still believe that truth matters and refuse to surrender their right to think for themselves.

The book was reviewed by Professor Michael Goodman of King’s College London, one of Britain’s best-known specialists in intelligence studies and international affairs. He calls it exceptionally timely and important, praising the assurance with which Dragaš connects truth, facts and perception to contemporary politics and society. Goodman recommends it to future political leaders, to those who follow current affairs and to everyone who refuses to accept that truth no longer matters.

Big Brother is no longer human

Almost everyone knows the central premise of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A regime controls language, rewrites the past, erases facts and tells citizens what they are permitted to regard as real. The Ministry of Truth falsifies documents, Big Brother watches every step, and the individual must ultimately accept that two plus two equals five if the Party demands it.

Dragaš begins with a more disturbing reality. In the world he describes, Big Brother is no longer even necessary. There is no need to burn a book, close a newspaper or outlaw a fact. It is enough to bury it beneath thousands of more attractive images, louder claims and more emotionally charged content. Truth can remain formally accessible while disappearing from people’s actual lives. Orwell’s citizen knows that the state is forcing him to accept a lie. People today often believe themselves entirely free, even as their choices are shaped by algorithms they cannot see, digital platforms whose criteria they do not know, and systems that learn from every reaction how to keep them in front of the screen for longer.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, truth disappears under the pressure of the state. In The Power of Perception, it loses because attention has been taken away from it. No one has declared it forbidden, but it has been made invisible, tedious or emotionally irrelevant. Whoever decides what we see first, how often we see it and what emotion accompanies it largely determines what we will regard as real.

Orwell’s world has a Ministry of Truth. In the world Dragaš describes, invisible recommendation systems assume that role. They need not erase a fact. They need only withhold it from view. They need not prohibit an opinion. They need only deny it visibility. They need not silence a person. They need only ensure that no one hears them. This is a power that wears no uniform, does not knock at the door and demands no public obedience. It works through the screen we open ourselves, the content we believe we have chosen and the conviction that every conclusion we reach is entirely our own.

The algorithm does not follow our choices. It shapes them

In his books, Yuval Noah Harari has explained how human beings built great communities throughout history through stories they believed collectively. He later warned that data and algorithms could become a new foundation of power. Because these systems gather data without pause, they can predict our choices with ever greater precision. Dragaš goes a step further.

His concern is not simply whether an algorithm knows what we will buy, what we will watch or whom we will vote for. He asks what happens when an algorithm takes part in creating what we will regard as true. That is no longer merely the prediction of behaviour. It is the editing of the world a person sees.

This is where The Power of Perception becomes a book about the next stage. Harari warns of the power of data. Dragaš describes the point at which data become the editors of our view of the world. The phone is no longer simply a device through which we receive information. It is the filter between the individual and reality. On its screen, somebody else has already determined the order of subjects, the importance of events, the visibility of people and the intensity of emotion.

That is why two people can live in the same city, speak the same language, witness the same event and still possess entirely different pictures of what happened. One will be shown footage that confirms their fear, the other content that feeds their anger. Both will believe they reached their conclusions unaided, and both will have ‘evidence’ on their screens.

Dragaš is describing the collapse of a shared foundation in fact. A society can withstand differences of opinion, interest and ideology. It is far less likely to survive when people no longer begin from the same facts. Debate then ceases to be a clash of views and becomes a collision between two worlds that no longer acknowledge one another.

This goes beyond Harari’s warning that algorithms will know our desires. Dragaš shows that algorithms already take part in forming them. They do not merely wait to discover what we want. They test our reactions every day and then return to us a carefully selected version of the world designed to intensify those same reactions.

The lie we invite in

One of the book’s greatest strengths is that it does not allow the reader to remain comfortably in the position of an observer. It is easy to believe that the victims of manipulation are always other people: less educated, politically blinded or technologically naïve. Dragaš destroys precisely that illusion.

The human mind does not search constantly for truth. It searches for meaning, security and confirmation. It more readily accepts what fits an existing belief, responds faster to fear and anger than to a dry fact, and often turns a first impression into the standard by which everything that follows is judged. Digital platforms did not invent these weaknesses. They turned them into a precisely measurable and extraordinarily profitable system.

Every click, every pause over an image, every share and every impulsive reaction becomes data. The system then learns what unsettles us, what pleases us and what confirms the picture we already hold of ourselves and the world. Over time, the content delivered to us is designed less to broaden our understanding than to keep us in the same emotional state and reinforce what we already believe. That is why the book’s title is exact. Reality is not losing the battle because it has disappeared. It is losing because it no longer enjoys an automatic advantage. A fact must compete with a video lasting a few seconds, a headline designed to provoke fury, a photograph stripped of context and a speaker who projects absolute certainty without possessing a scrap of evidence. In that contest, truth often arrives last, after emotion has already won.

Contemporary manipulation works chiefly by amplifying what a person already wants to believe. The most effective system leaves us feeling that we reached the conclusion freely and by ourselves, while the route to it was carefully laid out in advance. Dragaš reaches one of the book’s most disturbing conclusions here. Freedom of choice can remain formally intact while the space in which we choose has already been shaped. We may click on whatever we wish, but somebody else has already decided which pieces of content will be placed before us.

There is no going back to a world before algorithms

The Power of Perception – When Reality Loses the Battle does not idealise the age before digital platforms, nor does it claim that there was once a golden age of pure truth. The media, political power, money and social authority have always influenced what people see and what they believe. The difference lies in the speed, scale and precision of today’s systems.

Never before has a platform been able to test millions of versions of content at the same moment, measure the reactions of billions of people and offer each of them a different edition of reality. Never before has an ordinary person been, all at once, the audience, the product, a source of data and the voluntary distributor of the content shaping them.

That is why Dragaš does not reduce the answer to advice about spending less time on our phones or reading the news more carefully. He calls for the rules governing how information reaches citizens to change. Algorithms cannot remain an untouchable commercial secret. Media organisations must show how they established the facts. Institutions must explain their decisions. Technology companies must be held accountable for the consequences of the way they direct the attention of billions of people.

Truth, in this book’s account, can no longer defend itself through authority alone. It must earn trust again. That requires evidence, explanation, the possibility of verification and a willingness to correct mistakes. In an age of general suspicion, it is not enough to tell people to trust experts, media organisations or institutions. They need to see why a claim is reliable and how it was reached.

That is precisely why The Power of Perception is not a pessimistic book, even though the world it describes is deeply unsettling. Dragaš does not argue that reality has been lost for good. He argues that we can no longer expect it to fight for itself. Truth must be defended through knowledge, responsibility and the human capacity to recognise the moment when emotion begins to pass itself off as evidence.

This is not a warning about tomorrow

Artificial intelligence can now create a photograph or video of an event that never took place, a recording of someone saying words they never spoke, and footage that millions will accept before anyone has time to verify it. Political campaigns target the fears of particular groups with ever greater precision, while social media reward the content that produces the strongest reaction.

Perception now determines how we vote, whom we trust, what we regard as dangerous and how we make decisions, from politics and security to education and family life.

Orwell described a world in which power tells a person what they must think. Harari warned of a world in which algorithms exert ever greater influence over our choices. Dragaš shows that we have gone further: the algorithm now shapes what a person accepts as their own opinion. This is what makes the book more contemporary and, in a particular sense, more unsettling than its great predecessors. It is not about a distant dystopia, a future regime or a technology yet to arrive. It is about the phone in our hand now, the headline we have just opened, the video we forwarded without checking and the anger we may have felt before we understood what had happened.

The Power of Perception – When Reality Loses the Battle reaches far beyond readers concerned with politics, the media or technology. It is a book for anyone who wants to preserve the right to independent judgement at a time when the most powerful systems humanity has ever built are competing for their attention.

Its most powerful idea can be reduced to a simple warning: truth will not win today merely because it is true. We will have to learn how to recognise it, restore its visibility and distinguish what we know from what has merely been presented to us convincingly enough.

Orwell imagined a world in which reality was imprisoned by force. Harari imagined one in which we handed it over to data. Dragaš shows that the most dangerous moment has already arrived: we can lose reality without coercion, convinced throughout that we are choosing entirely freely.

The greatest defeat will not come when falsehood becomes more convincing than truth. It will come when people cease to care what is true, so long as they like what they see. Then there will be no need for a censor, a dictator or a Ministry of Truth. A screen, a few seconds of attention and an algorithm that knows our weaknesses better than we know them ourselves will be enough. At that point, reality will not be defeated from outside. We will surrender it ourselves.