We are more freaked out by the possibility that Artificial Intelligence will assume human powers to author works, than we are that media manipulation will undermine our ability to discern reality. This, at any rate, is the lesson of the Jianwei Xun affair, which roiled the theory-sphere and popular press in the EU earlier this year. Xun’s book Ipnocrazia.Trump, Musk e la nuova architettura della realtà (Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality) extended a thesis familiar to readers of Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 Simulacra and Simulation and its many precursors: the world known through media lacks verifiable points of reference. Trump and Musk, Xun contends, are virtuosos at exploiting such a situation, multiplying narratives in so frenzied a fashion as to render futile attempts to verify—or falsify—any one of them.