What if Kate Middleton isn't actually real?

Over the past week, I’ve seen the future, and I do not like it. The uproar surrounding the manipulated image of Kate Middleton and her children puts an unflattering mirror up to our society. Put aside what it says about our inability to afford women in the public eye the necessary space for recovery. Shelve too the obvious inadequacies of Kensington Palace's PR machinery. At its core, this saga has given us a glimpse into a future dominated by artificial intelligence and an age where no-one believes anything they see or hear.

I’ve delved into the labyrinthine depths of TikTok and YouTube so you don’t have to and I’ve seen the various ways that not only amateur sleuths but also PR professionals and Photoshop experts are unpicking the story and supposedly ‘revealing the truth’. These are often coated with faux concern and manufactured outrage to propel the story, of course. But the real seduction here is not emotion, it’s the allure of investigation as the algorithm encourages us to keep swiping, keep digging, to get closer to the truth. This isn’t doom scrolling, it’s conspiracy chasing and it is just as addictive and as damaging.

It isn’t that we think royal life is more like The Crown, it is that we actually want it to be more like Gone Girl. Just as we saw the way in which TikTok amateur sleuths hampered investigations into the accidental drowning of Nicola Bulley and the Idaho murders last year, it is the unpicking of the truth and the unravelling of trust that keeps us hooked. Less David Icke, more Fox Mulder from the X-Files: ‘The truth is out there’ if we keep looking.

In a previous era, back in the 2010s, we naively celebrated the internet as a bastion of citizen journalism, empowering individuals to uncover the unknown amidst the noise. Then around 2016 we moved into the post-truth era, where emotion overtook facts as a universal and certain source for anything was no more, as the media segmented into the old mainstream and the algorithmically driven non-mainstream.

But I think this week’s events suggest we’ve turned another corner. From the post-truth to the post-trust society. The difference is subtle, but the latter is far more corrosive. We have long ceased to believe anything that comes out of politicians’ mouths, but in a post-trust society, we will cease to believe that the event at which they spoke even took place. Yes, the future is even more cynical than the present - if that’s even possible.

This paradigm shift holds profound implications for future generations, particularly Gen Alpha. Today, millennial parents fret over the perils of social media on young minds, but in reality our children may face a different challenge altogether. How can they be under the influence of influencers if they do not believe anything they see? Social media's currency will inevitably wane as outright scepticism becomes the norm. Ah, that’s you by the Effiel Tower? Photoshopped. That’s your real face or weight? Oh that would be Facetune. That’s you bagging a promotion? Whatever. ?This cynicism is already there in Gen Z but it will be even more pronounced in Gen Alpha.

Commentators like to assume that the post-trust age will be most damaging to the public sphere, namely in politics, but in fact it will be far more corrosive in the private realm, generating distrust amongst friends and families. I’ve heard recently of someone being scammed via Whatsapp where a criminal impersonated a friend of a friend supposedly selling Taylor Swift tickets. It was only when she eventually messaged his wife did she realise that his phone had been corrupted and it wasn’t him at all. Likewise, with the rise of AI voice cloning, where cybercriminals are now using the voice of someone’s family member to scam them out of money. ?Young people are already sceptical of online interactions with strangers but what happens when it starts to infiltrate ‘closed, private’ spaces such as Whatsapp groups and audio calls or voice notes from their friends?

‘Face to face’ may well turn out to be the only operating zone of trust. This has interesting implications for working from home, because the Post-Trust age spells chaos for businesses. Employees will demand transparency and authenticity, but they probably won’t believe your internal comms. Instead, they will go in search of the truth on Fishbowl. ?But more worrying is businesses exposure to cybercrime. One recent case was of a CEO of a UK-based energy firm who thought he was speaking on the phone with his boss, the CEO of the firm’s German parent company. Cybercriminals managed to swindle the business out of a quarter of a million pounds.

In the Kate Middleton picture controversy, therefore, we have seen a story that originally operated on palace silence and public patience but spiralled into conspiracy and ‘kill notices’ on dodgy pictures. I’m not sure PR professionals, comms directors, CEOs, politicians, parents and yes, even royals are ready for this chaos. Our kids, though, just might be.

Digital Etiquette in the Workplace

Recently, I had the opportunity to collaborate with The Adaptavist Group on its "Mind the Generational Gap" study, surveying over 4,000 knowledge workers across five countries.?It is rare to work with such extensive data and the findings are pretty interesting:

• A staggering 90% of teams report conflicts over digital tools, with 60% acknowledging these disagreements hamper productivity.
• 43% agree that digital communication across the generations results in misinterpretations of tone or context. Think different uses of emojis, and yes, voicemail over voice note.
• But there is also a degree of cross-generational envy about each other’s skills: 53% of Gen Z envy colleagues’ phone confidence, while half of over 50s are irritated by young people’s lack of traditional tools such as a pen in meetings. 47% of Gen Z think that older workers slow things down with dated techniques.
• A significant 82% oppose generational categorisation, believing workplaces should stop supporting generational stereotypes. The study reveals 45% worry generational labels lead to damaging stereotypes, and 40% fear potential exclusion from being categorised by age.
• Older workers, in particular, express discomfort with age-based classification - 81% of workers 65+ and 65% of those aged 55-64 say dividing generations is problematic.

This last point speaks to ‘generation fatigue’ that a lot of workers feel in the workplace and probably across society at large. We deploy stereotyping around age in a way we would never do around sexuality, gender or race. In this individualistic age, it is not surprising that we are starting to reject such a reductive approach. But still the approach that I bang on about is about helping people understand, empathise and learn from someone born in a different time. In this increasingly age-siloed society, this has arguably never been more important.

For the full outline of the data please visit the Adaptavist website.

The Reading Room

1. What happens when your first steps are turned into an #ad on YouTube? We are about to have a decade of tell-all stories from child influencers on the horrors of growing up online. This is the start of it.
2. We’ve heard that all data is biased, built as it is by the bros in California. Some have called for a global feminist campaign to tackle anti-female AI bias. But can I make the case that Chat GPT is a feminist invention akin to the microwave or the dishwasher? All signs are that Gen AI is saving workers, mostly women, from doing mundane tasks. In my case, I use Chat GPT to write the emails I don’t like sending. And when I do get it to do something that is a little more sophisticated, the results are so bad that it makes me feel better about my own abilities….a bit like most women feel when they outsource to a man (….joke!).
3. A piece from 2013 that is still relevant today: on the rise of GYPSEYS. There is much here which helps explain why millennials are so angry and why Gen Z are so cynical at work.

Generations Overheard

“I don’t get it, why aren’t they scared of us?”

“…yes, but also why don’t they want to be us?”

A question to me from a senior lawyer and her colleague who wanted to know why Gen Z were so hard to manage.

Thanks for reading,

Eliza