When Poseidon Went Viral: Gods, Myths, and Legends in the Age of Deepfakes

The 2026 Veriff Deepfakes Report found that seven percent of Americans are highly confident they can spot a fake... and are almost always wrong. Last week we reported on unexplained phenomena in the world's oceans. Now, that disruption appears to have moved from the water to the web. The chaos is digital, and it is spreading. The Veriff report, released May twentieth, details a widespread failure to detect manipulated media.

Fifty percent of Americans believe they can spot a deepfake. The data shows they cannot. This has fueled a surge in financial scams and market volatility. As Fraud Platform Lead Ira Bondar-Mucci stated, "The most dangerous element... isn't that deepfakes are becoming increasingly sophisticated, but that people think they can tell, and they cannot." At the same time, critical infrastructure is experiencing bizarre glitches.

On May twelfth, KLM Flight KL643 was forced to return to Amsterdam. A critical engine bleed air inlet valve failed mid-flight over Ireland. The failure was not malicious. It was simply... a failure. One that grounded a plane and disrupted air traffic control systems. Similar non-malicious but highly disruptive events are being tracked in banking and power grid systems globally. Meanwhile, online discourse has become untethered.

Conspiracy theories are claiming recent hantavirus and Ebola outbreaks were engineered attacks against Donald Trump. One Republican strategist noted the rhetoric is now apocalyptic, with influencers describing viruses as "political biological weapons." Public health experts have debunked these claims. The claims continue to spread. The common thread is a systemic breakdown in trust. Trust in what you see, trust in the systems you rely on, and trust in a shared reality.

The deepfake crisis, the infrastructure glitches, and the conspiracy theories are not separate events. They are three fronts in a single war on certainty. Let’s look at the pattern. The problem isn't just that a video is fake. It's that synthetic journalists are now being created from whole cloth. AI-generated reporters with names like "Nikolai Kuznetsov" and "Reuben Jackson" have been used to run coordinated cryptocurrency promotions.

Their faces are fake. Their work histories are fake. The publications they supposedly write for are real. This complicates verification for everyone. We have seen this before. In 1835, the New York Sun published a series of articles known as the Great Moon Hoax. They claimed a famous astronomer had discovered life on the moon, including bat-like humanoids. The story was a complete fabrication. And the public believed it.

The pattern is not that people are gullible. The pattern is that a well-told lie is more compelling than a complex truth. The difference now is scale and speed. The Moon Hoax took weeks to spread by newspaper. Today, a lie can circle the globe in minutes. The infrastructure glitches serve a different purpose. The KLM flight returned safely. But the incident revealed a fragility in systems we assume are solid.

When a critical valve fails for no discernible reason, it plants a seed of doubt. It suggests the world is more random, and less reliable, than we believe. This is not a cyberattack. It is something more subtle. It’s an attack on the very idea of predictable, orderly systems. This brings us back to the central finding. The chaos agent here is not a virus or a hacker. It is a loss of faith in verification itself.

The deepfakes, the glitches, and the conspiracies all work together. They create an environment where discerning fact from fiction feels impossible. When people lose trust in institutions, experts, and even their own eyes, they become vulnerable. This is the trickster's ultimate goal. It is not to make you believe one specific lie. It is to exhaust you. To create a world so saturated with contradiction and absurdity that you give up on the concept of truth altogether.

In that environment, chaos is king.