The Long History of Fakery

A Familiar Pattern of Trust, Value and Vulnerability

Photo by Hartono Creative Studio on Unsplash

Generative AI has destabilised the foundations of everyday epistemology, the ordinary ways we know what is true.

While it feels unprecedented, historians remind us that every new medium of communication and every leap in representation has been shadowed by new tools of fakery.

A Recurring Pattern

Media historians like Walter Ong and Elizabeth Eisenstein have taught us to see technological change in terms of disruption and unintended consequence.

From coinage to printing to photography, each new form of mediation promised certainty and trust, and each was swiftly subverted.

A Framework

This essay will suggest that throughout recent human history there has always been a vulnerability gap between accelerating technologies of fakery and the slower rhythms of trust as source of value.

This follows a familiar pattern.

1. Innovation: A new medium offers trust (coins as pure value, printing as fixed truth, photography as mechanical proof).

2. Exploitation: Deception flourishes (counterfeiting, forgery, manipulated images).

3. Institutional Adaptation: States, churches, or markets develop seals, licenses, watermarks, cryptographic signatures, reputations or regulations.

4. Return to Presence: When mediated trust collapses, people fall back on embodied presence such as coin-biting and face-to-face rituals.

Ancient Lessons: The Bite of a Coin

Economic historians such as Niall Ferguson have noted that money itself began as a trust technology, a way of making value portable and universal. The first stamped coins, struck in Lydia and Greece around the sixth century BCE, were revolutionary: they guaranteed purity and weight, backed by the authority of a king or city.

But within years, counterfeiters were plating cheap bronze with a thin wash of silver or gold. Merchants adapted with a small bodily ritual: they would bite coins to test their authenticity. The mark of the state was not enough; trust retreated to the body.

The pattern was set: new medium, new fakery, new fallback.

Historical Forgeries: Authority and Reality at Risk

The threat that fakery poses to truth and authority is as old as written record itself. One of the most infamous forgeries in Western history, The Donation of Constantine, supposedly issued by Emperor Constantine in the 4th century CE, granted vast powers to the Pope. For centuries, this document was accepted as genuine, shaping political and religious authority across Europe. It was only exposed as a fabrication by Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla in the 15th century.

Such forgeries were part of a broader climate of alteration. Many medieval monasteries and communities forged charters to bolster land rights or privileges.

Similarly, fabrications such as the Letter of Prester John, a mythical Christian king, circulated widely, seeking to inspire hope and political maneuvering amid the tensions of the Crusades. Its acceptance, despite being a pure invention, demonstrates how fakes could reshape collective imaginations.

The Fake Wills of Rome

The Romans pushed written culture into every corner of daily life, from contracts to political decrees. With that expansion came forgery. Cicero complained of ficta testimonia (fabricated testimonies), and forged wills also became a recurring scandal.

The Romans invented elaborate legal safeguards, but for every safeguard there was a countermeasure. The very authority of writing made it a weapon for deception.

Holy Bones and False Relics

By late antiquity, Christianity had produced another trust crisis: the relic trade. Pilgrims wanted physical contact with the sacred. Enterprising merchants supplied them. By the Middle Ages, according to legend, Europe contained no fewer than three skulls of John the Baptist and half a dozen “authentic” arms of St. Andrew.

The more faith invested in material proof, the more fakery flourished. As Caroline Walker Bynum has shown, the relic was not just a holy object but a currency of power. The Church introduced verification rituals (bishops certifying relics, papal inventories) but demand always exceeded supply. In the end, ordinary believers relied less on certificates than on the word of fellow travellers. Embodied presence once again trumped mediated trust.

The Shock of Print

The printing press, as Adrian Johns reminds us in The Nature of the Book, can be presented as a machine of uncertainty. By the late fifteenth century, forgeries of papal indulgences were so common that Rome issued official warnings. Pamphlets appeared under the names of princes and popes who had never written them.

One German printer even produced counterfeit editions of the work of Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus, changing the text subtly, while keeping the author’s name intact. For readers, the effect was destabilising: suddenly, you could no longer trust that what was in print was what the author intended. Print eventually consolidated authority through licences, watermarks, and standardisation, but its first impact was chaos.

Mechanical Truth, Mechanical Lies

Photography was hailed in the nineteenth century as the “pencil of nature,” proof that the machine could record without bias. Yet fakery arrived almost immediately. Spiritualists staged “ghost photographs,” producing eerie images of departed loved ones through double exposures. Newspapers that once insisted “the camera never lies” were forced to admit that it often did.

By the time of the American Civil War, battlefield photos were being staged with rearranged corpses to make scenes more dramatic. The most “objective” medium quickly became another tool of persuasion.

Digital Fakery

In the digital platform economy, reputation remains the first line of defence against fakery. Five-star ratings and verified purchases act as signals of trust. Platforms like Airbnb and Uber go further: they insert their own corporate reputation as a guarantee, substituting institutional brand for individual reliability.

But reputations can be gamed: review farms churn out counterfeit testimonials, competitors plant malicious one-star ratings and bots can generate feedback.

Today, we live in a world where the human face and voice, once the ultimate guarantee of presence, can be simulated in real time. Interestingly, Freud believed that fantasy plays a powerful role in the human psyche and that it is essential for psychological satisfaction. He argued that people "cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction which they can extort from reality”, meaning that reality alone often fails to meet all our psychic needs.

In a certain way, digital fakery echoes older patterns but accelerates them. A counterfeit coin might take weeks to circulate. A forged indulgence might take months to undermine trust. A fake video, however, can destabilise politics in minutes.

Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism argues that digital technologies have turned trust itself into a commodity. Where trust is commodified, it is also counterfeited.

And so, just as medieval pilgrims trusted their companions more than papal seals, we fall back on presence: employers demanding face-to-face interviews, universities returning to handwritten exams and families relying on voice or eye contact.

Learning From History

History suggests three lessons:

- Expect the cycle: Innovation is always followed by exploitation, and safeguards always lag behind.

- Trust will retreat to embodiment: Humans return to bodily rituals; biting coins, signing in person and sitting across from one another.

- Institutions eventually adapt: Watermarks, licences, cryptographic signatures, reputation, regulation; belated and sometimes messy.

We are right to be unsettled by deepfakes. They are sharper and harder to contain than anything before, created with tools that are widely accessible rather than limited to traditional epistemological gatekeepers. At the same time, fakery is not a new invention; it is the twin of every medium humans have ever built. The real question is how we choose to respond. If the past is any guide, deception will never disappear, and neither will our capacity to adapt.