Reality, Rewritten No. 1: The Epistemic Cold War: From Britannica to the Algorithm

A conversation between Ashley Rovira and Griffin Wells On the Epistemic Cold War

Three definitions of authority, across three centuries:

“The aim of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is to inform and to guide the people—an enterprise of scholarship, conducted under the supervision of the learned.”

— Preface to the 11th Edition, 1911

“Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”

— Wikipedia Foundation Mission Statement, 2001

“Where all are compelled to the same opinion, the capacity for thought itself is destroyed.”

— Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (1961)

Editor’s Note

Reality, Rewritten is Heavy Crown Press’s new dialogue series on truth and authority in the algorithmic age.

This opening installment takes its spark from The Atlantic’s “The Right-Wing Attack on Wikipedia”, (gift link here) which traces a coordinated effort to discredit Wikipedia’s human-consensus model and promote an AI-driven alternative, Groki­pedia.

The question is larger than either site: what happens when the guardians of knowledge are no longer human at all?

I. The Empire of Knowledge

Ashley Rovira (AR): We’ve always trusted encyclopedias to anchor the world. What did Britannica represent at its height?

Griffin Wells (GW): Britannica was empire in hardcover—knowledge as territory. It presumed the world could be catalogued from above by the educated few. That authority was hierarchical, Oxbridge-inflected, proud of its distance from the crowd.

AR: Then Wikipedia tore down the marble steps.

GW: Exactly. Where Britannica said, “Trust the scholar,” Wikipedia said, “Join the editors.” It replaced institutional authority with civic participation—truth as consensus.

II. The Revolt Against Consensus

AR: Two decades later, the democratic model faces rebellion. Groki­pedia arrives promising to free truth from bias.

GW: The rebellion is rhetorical genius. By calling Wikipedia “captured,” Groki­pedia recasts skepticism as heroism. But its method—what The Atlantic aptly calls ref-working—borrows from sports: harassing the referees until they start to doubt their own judgment. It doesn’t verify; it undermines. Every citation becomes suspect, every correction an act of bias.

AR: A kind of epistemic populism?

GW: Precisely. It weaponizes doubt. Where the Enlightenment said question everything to discover truth, ref-working says it to dismantle the idea of truth itself. The danger isn’t critique—it’s corrosion.

III. Musk as Mirror

AR: Let’s test this. Ask Wikipedia who Elon Musk is, and you get a composite portrait built from journalism, filings, and public record. Ask Groki­pedia—

GW: —and you get mythology: the lone genius battling bureaucrats and “woke elites.” Same man, opposite realities.

AR: So the encyclopedia becomes autobiography by proxy.

GW: And algorithm becomes hagiographer. Musk’s supporters see fact-checking as persecution; his detractors see Groki­pedia as propaganda. Both sides talk of truth but mean loyalty. As both The Guardian and Vox have observed, Grokipedia often mirrors Musk’s worldview—recycling Wikipedia text while promoting his favored narratives under the guise of algorithmic objectivity.

AR: That sounds less like knowledge and more like narrative warfare.

GW: It is. The 20th century fought Cold Wars over ideology. The 21st fights over information physics—who bends reality’s field lines.

IV. The Cold War of Truth

AR: You’ve called this an epistemic Cold War. Why that phrase?

GW: Because it’s not open combat—it’s a permanent low-grade tension. Each side stockpiles narratives instead of weapons. Wikipedia marshals human editors—slow, procedural. Groki­pedia deploys AI speed and ideological contagion. Neither can destroy the other; both keep recalibrating reality.

AR: The Atlantic article noted that conservatives resent being “fact-checked” by institutions they no longer trust. Does Groki­pedia fill that vacuum?

GW: It offers certainty instead of consensus. People crave the feeling of truth more than its process. Groki­pedia gives them that dopamine hit—instant coherence. The irony is that it imitates Britannica’s total authority, minus the scholarship.

AR: So the circle closes: we’ve traded one elite for another, except now the elite is code.

GW: Yes—the algorithmic Oxbridge, invisible but absolute.

V. The Vanishing Middle

AR: Where does that leave the space in between—the patient work of verification?

GW: Nearly extinct. The middle used to be librarians, editors, teachers—the custodians who translated expertise into trust. They’re now accused of bias by both extremes.

AR: Yet they’re the connective tissue of democracy.

GW: And the least glamorous. Consensus doesn’t trend; outrage does. Without that middle, the commons fractures into private fiefdoms. Each community curates its own facts like relics.

AR: That’s Arendt’s warning coming true: once everyone must hold the same opinion, thought collapses. But what happens when everyone holds only their own?

GW: Then collapse takes another form—silence through noise. When all narratives shout, none can be heard.

VI. The New Question

AR: Let’s return to our metaphors. Britannica was the cathedral, Wikipedia the town square. What is Groki­pedia?

GW: The mirror maze. Each visitor finds a reflection that flatters their worldview. It feels liberating until you realize every corridor leads back to yourself.

AR: And the algorithm keeps polishing the mirrors.

GW: Relentlessly. The danger isn’t that we’ll lose facts, but that we’ll lose faith in fact-ness.

AR: Then the final question—our series question—emerges naturally.

GW: Yes. Can culture survive without an encyclopedia?

AR: Without some shared ledger of what the world is and isn’t.

GW: Without that, culture becomes collage—beautiful, transient, but unable to cohere.

Afterword

Reality, Rewritten No. 1 began with a simple observation: even the encyclopedia, symbol of settled knowledge, is now a battlefield. As Groki­pedia rises and Wikipedia defends its faltering republic, we stand at the threshold of an age where algorithms curate memory and consensus itself becomes a relic.

The Cold War of Truth may never end, but awareness is its first armistice.

“Can culture survive without an encyclopedia?”

Perhaps not. But culture that asks the question—still can.

Next in the series — Reality, Rewritten No. 2: The Algorithmic Imagination

If Groki­pedia challenges who edits the truth, the next frontier asks who writes it. When algorithms begin to generate stories, histories, even memories, authorship itself becomes porous. In our second dialogue, we’ll explore how machines learn to imitate imagination—and what remains distinctly, defiantly human.

© 2025 Heavy Crown Press — Reality, Rewritten Series No. 1