As every citizen receives a personalized stream of machine-generated reality summaries, societies begin to require visible receipts for how public knowledge was assembled.
Information no longer arrives as a shared article or broadcast but as countless custom briefings tuned to each person’s habits, fears, and prior beliefs. In response, institutions force platforms to reveal the ingredients of each summary: source sets, edits, ranking logic, and interventions by humans or machines. A new literacy emerges around reading the receipt rather than trusting the headline. Yet the burden of reality shifts onto citizens, who must inspect metadata just to know whether they are standing on common ground.
On a subway platform in Madrid at 7:15 a.m., an office worker scans the receipt tab beneath her transit-alert briefing before deciding whether to reroute. She checks which agencies supplied the data, whether a synthetic summary layer intervened, and when the last human review occurred, all before the next train arrives.
Provenance labels can strengthen public reasoning, but they can also become decorative compliance. Most people may learn to trust whatever receipt format looks official, allowing sophisticated manipulation to survive behind a standardized interface.