> we won't know what's real at all. I am struggling to see how we will function

That's where we started, in a way. Perhaps our short time of feeling we had a grip on reality will just have been a passing phase, before returning to normality.

the difference is, before media, everyone understood that if they didn't experience something directly, they had to trust someone who spoke, and that speech was always understood to be an interpretation and possibly fiction.

but now we have all these artificial experiences that might clock real to the senses and have a reputation of fidelity, yet have always been editable and are increasingly made of black box constructive interpretations that value who-knows-what over fidelity. and no part of the process can be interrogated for motivations or detail.

You will need a transcript of processing and intermediate results.

But how do you know a particular transcript is not fake?