The Truman Show and our algorithmic reality

Jim Carrey’s The Truman Show looks like a quirky comedy, but it may be the best metaphor we have for understanding life inside AI-curated feeds.

Article link: https://open.substack.com/pub/johanosteyn/p/the-truman-show-and-our-algorithmic?r=73gqa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Audio summary: https://youtu.be/qoX2VkGziXo

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I write about various issues of interest to me that I want to bring to the reader’s attention. While my main work is in Artificial Intelligence and technology, I also cover areas around politics, education, and the future of our children.

The Truman Show is one of my all-time favourite films. I have watched it many times, and that final scene where Truman sails to the edge of his world, touches the painted sky and finds the hidden door still moves me deeply. Jim Carrey’s performance is brilliant, but what stays with me are the layers beneath the humour: a man slowly realising that his reality is curated, his relationships are scripted, and his choices are carefully managed.

When I think about artificial intelligence and our digital lives, I keep coming back to this story. Truman’s dome is not just a television set; it is a mirror for the algorithmic environments we now inhabit, where invisible systems quietly decide what we see, what we know and, increasingly, who we become.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

In the film, Truman Burbank has lived his entire life in Seahaven, a picturesque seaside town built inside a giant studio dome. Every person he interacts with is an actor. Every street, shop and sunrise exists for the benefit of a global television audience. He is authentic; his world is not. Above him, in a control room, the director Christof and his production team monitor thousands of cameras and adjust scenes in real time. Their job is to keep Truman inside the story and keep viewers glued to their screens.

When The Truman Show was released in 1998, most people read it as a critique of reality television and media voyeurism. It came before smartphones, social media and the modern internet. Yet in hindsight, it feels astonishingly relevant to an age of AI, data and digital surveillance. Today, we do not live under studio lights, but much of our information environment is still constructed for us. Our news, entertainment and social interactions arrive through feeds shaped by recommendation algorithms. These systems decide which posts we see, which videos autoplay next, and which stories are pushed to the top of our timelines. The dome is now made of code rather than steel.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

Christof is a useful way to think about artificial intelligence and platform power. He sits above Truman’s world, watching his every move, deciding when to introduce a new character or crisis, changing the weather if necessary. In our AI-driven world, there is no single all-powerful director, but there are optimisation systems playing a similar role. Recommendation engines and ranking algorithms constantly adjust what we see in order to maximise engagement, advertising revenue or time spent on a platform. They learn, moment by moment, which content keeps us scrolling, which headlines provoke outrage, which topics make us come back.

The hundreds of cameras hidden around Seahaven are echoed by our own data trails: every click, swipe, search query, GPS ping and purchase. In the film, those images are broadcast as entertainment to millions of viewers. In our world, the data is fed into machine-learning models that profile us, predict our behaviour and target us with content, adverts and political messaging. Truman never consents to being watched; he is born into the show. Many of us, and especially our children, are similarly born into digital systems that observe, learn and respond long before we understand what “data” really means.

The AI connection deepens when we look at how content is now created. In The Truman Show, human writers and set designers build Truman’s world. In our time, generative AI can write scripts, create images and videos, fabricate characters and simulate conversations. Agentic AI systems can test which messages work best on which audiences and redeploy them at scale without a human producer in every loop. The “production crew” of our digital Truman Show is increasingly made up of machines, trained on our behaviour and optimised for goals we did not set.

IMPLICATIONS

For individuals, the danger is not that everything we see online is fake. Truman’s feelings are real; his friendships feel real to him. The problem is that the frame around those feelings is artificially constructed. In the same way, the content we consume, the recommendations we receive and the connections we form are not imaginary. But the order in which they appear, the topics that are amplified and the voices that are hidden are shaped by AI systems optimising for engagement rather than truth or wellbeing. Over time, this can distort our sense of reality, polarise our politics and quietly shape our identities.

For societies like South Africa, with deep inequalities and fragile institutions, this is particularly serious. Our citizens live under digital platforms and AI systems largely designed in the Global North, reflecting their incentives, cultural assumptions and economic interests. We risk becoming both Truman and the global TV audience: actors inside someone else’s system and spectators hooked on the spectacle. Without strong regulation, digital literacy and our own capacity to build and govern technology, we may find ourselves living inside an AI-curated dome whose rules we had little part in designing.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

The most haunting moment in The Truman Show is not the spectacle, but the choice. Truman reaches the edge of the dome, discovers the staircase and stands in front of the exit door. Christof speaks to him like a god, offering safety inside the set and warning him about the dangers of the outside world. Truman hesitates, then bows, smiles and walks through the door. The film ends there, leaving us to imagine what kind of world he discovers.

In our AI-saturated age, we are somewhere near that same painted horizon. We may not be able to switch off algorithms or return to a pre-digital world, but we can learn to see the dome, to question who is directing the show, and to demand a say in how our reality is curated. For ourselves and for our children, that awareness may be the first step towards something like freedom.

Author Bio: Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net