' REALITY DISTORTION FIELD ' : A.I. CLOWN ESSAY

IN AN ERA where artificial intelligence can readily conflate collective thought with objective truth, tech founders and those who buy their products are less tethered to the real world.

The skills cultivated through theatrical play may also be useful for leadership. 

Lydia Laurenson, a writer on Silicon Valley culture who spent a year as a member of an immersive-theatre-slash-secret society in San Francisco, has heard many prominent founders and people in tech described as possessing a '' reality distortion field.''

They not only master logistics and motivate employees, but create a worldview compelling enough to sustain the creative and technical challenges a new idea required. [ The term was famously used in 1981 to describe Steve Jobs].

'' Taking a start-up from nothing to one of these massive companies, is this insane act of culture building and creation,'' Ms. Laurenson says.

Even the most anodyne-seeming start-up can feel ''culty,'' 

Creating a convincing reality for employees and investors- using some of the same techniques found in theatrical play - is simply part of the founder job description.

It may be true that transforming people's perceptions of what is possible can help them think more imaginatively. But the tech world's fascination, with improv and theater also reveals a darker philosophy.

If all of life is a performance, there are few limits on those willing to take charge of the scene. If nothing is truly real but people's perceptions - perceptions that a canny actor or founder has the capacity to alter-

Then misleading investors as to the viability of a start-up, or spreading viral conspiracy theories through social media to affect an election outcome can be reimagined not as lying but as alternate reality-formation, the canny creation of truth by consensus.

Distort reality intensely enough, and there's no such thing as reality at all.

And in an era where artificial intelligence can easily conflate collective thought with objective truth, tech founders and those who buy their products are less tethered to the real world. 

!WOW! thanks most profoundly, Tara Isabella Burton and The New York Times.