Trailer

Have you noticed that more and more of the world feels, well, fake?

Online there's a daily avalanche of dubious advice and information - about health, money, success, happiness - much of it delivered with total confidence and little regard for evidence.

There's the fabricated reviews, inflated metrics and synthetic content.

Influencers present themselves as authorities. The 'fake it till you make it' mantra has hardened into the business model.

Everything is now content. Performed for likes, not tested for truth.

Meanwhile, institutions once trusted to tell us what is true now compete for attention like everyone else - just as new technologies emerge that can generate convincing false information at scale.

How did we get here? What can we do about it? And, well, do we really care?

In this six-part series Jamie Bartlett sets out to understand how fakery stopped being a flaw and became the operating system of modern life.

This isn't a series about individual liars or shysters. It's about the cultural conditions that made modern fakery not just possible, but incentivised, rewarded, and often indistinguishable from success.

From the scripted spectacle of 1980s professional wrestling to the collapse of the global financial system, Jamie traces the incentives that normalised our fake world. Along the way, he's joined by his AI companion, Jimmy Botlett.

The series builds towards one urgent question: in a future shaped by generative AI and synthetic media, how will we tell fact from fakery - and will we even care enough to try?

Credits:

Presenter: Jamie Bartlett

Series Producer: Tom Pooley

Sound Design: Rob Speight

Production Coordinator: Neena Abdullah

Original music: Coach Conrad

Editor: Craig Templeton Smith

A Tempo+Talker production for BBC Radio 4.