For years, people have treated post-truth, alternative facts, and competing realities as symptoms of a broken world. As if something fractured in the social fabric and let all the crazy spill out.

But if you look closer — structurally, not just sentimentally — this isn’t a breakdown. It’s an inevitable feature of how human reality has always worked.

We’re not witnessing disorder. We’re witnessing exposure.

Meaning is how we exist

Contestivism starts from a core assumption: meaning is the prerequisite for being. You don’t exist socially just because you’re alive. You exist when your meaning — your understanding of what’s true, what matters, and what’s real — is legible to others.

To lose control of meaning is to risk existential erasure. If your truth doesn’t count, if your values are dismissed, if your worldview is deemed impossible, then you become socially invisible. Meaning determines your position in the world. It’s more than communication. It’s ontological survival.

So humans do what’s inevitable: they contest. And they do it constantly across three domains:

• Epistemic: What is true?
• Axiological: What is good and valuable?
• Ontological: What is possible?

Every tweet, every protest, every conspiracy theory is a claim across these domains. Not always consciously, but always functionally. People aren’t just saying things. They’re trying to secure their place in reality.

Competing realities are nothing new

What we call “post-truth” is just a visible consequence of a meaning economy running at full exposure. Before the digital age, most contestations happened under the surface, filtered by institutions, shaped by slow and analog social rhythms, and often stamped out by dominant meaning systems.

But information technology compressed time and space. Suddenly, every assertion of truth, every subcultural value, every alternate ontology could find an audience and build momentum. What used to be a fringe pamphlet is now a viral thread. The Rubik’s Cube of being — the contested configuration of human existence — scrambles every time someone logs on and asserts a new meaning.

We are not seeing objective truth collapse into contradiction. It’s people relationship with it that has become a point of contention, of contestation. They started asserting competing truths more visibly, more rapidly, and more forcefully than the structure was designed to absorb.

Social reality was never built for this volume or immediacy

Every society has a semantic structure, a limited set of meanings that count as rational, real, or legitimate. That structure has elasticity, which is its capacity to accommodate difference. But it’s not infinite.

When the volume, intensity, and velocity of meaning contestations surge past that threshold, the structure reacts. Sometimes it stretches. Other times it snaps.

We’ve hit that limit.

Digital platforms don’t just allow new meanings to emerge, they amplify them. Algorithms privilege intensity. Memes travel faster than manifestos. If your meaning gets no traction, you adjust it until it does, because you’re always in pursuit of existential security. The result is a hyperactive contestive ecosystem where being itself becomes precarious unless you keep projecting your reality outward.

The information chaos is the sound of the contestivist engine humming along

In contestivist terms, we’re watching the engine of meaning do exactly what it’s meant to do: process endless contestations across epistemic, axiological, and ontological lines. Every person, group, and culture feeds into it, asserting or conceding meaning based on their current gradient of being.

• If your meaning is recognized and aligned with dominant structures, you experience full being.
• If it’s visible but deviant, you’re marginalized.
• If it’s illegible, you’re in suspended being.
• If you’ve internalized the dominant meaning at the cost of your own, you’re erased.

These aren’t abstract states. They’re the lived consequences of whether your version of reality is allowed to exist. And right now, more people than ever are realizing that their meaning is contested, denied, or outright impossible within the dominant structure. So they fight. They meaningfully assert. They strategically retreat. They radicalize. They meme. They livestream. All of it is contestation.

All of it is part of the system.

The “post-truth” moment is just the contest getting deafeningly loud

What many of us perceive as a collapse of shared reality is, in truth, a mass-scale exposure of meaning contests that were always there. The only difference is that now, they’re public, accelerated, and beyond what our construction of semantic reality was ever built to withstand.

This isn’t a bug. It’s not a moral failing or a tech glitch or a temporary fever dream. It’s social reality falling into place in the most conspicuous way possible.

Not because we finally lost the truth, but because we’re finally being forced to see that we never agreed on it in the first place.

For more information, download the Contestivism Paradigm Paper on: SocArXiv | Open Science Framework | PhilPapers