Why We Gave Truth Scientific Units

When designing TOTEM we faced a question: how do you quantify something as elusive, subjective, and slippery as truth? The answer, for us, lay not in buzzword bingo or social media lingo but in the precision of science and the weight of Latin.

We borrowed from the language of measurement—ampere, lumen, pascal—not for decoration but for structure. To take truth seriously, we needed to treat it like a force—a measurable atmosphere—a pressure that could rise or fall.

Scientific instruments don’t deal in opinions—they read the room, literally. They quantify the unseeable. Electricity becomes amperes. Light becomes lumens. Pressure becomes pascals. The physical world is made intelligible through units. So why not the truth?

We coined two opposing scales: Veritas and Mendax. Veritas—Latin for “truth”—was the Roman goddess of truth, often depicted emerging from a well, symbolising how truth is often hidden and difficult to access.

Mendax, also Latin, means “deceptive” or “lying.” It’s where the word mendacity comes from, and it describes lies not as accidents but as things made on purpose. These terms weren’t chosen for flair. They were chosen because they carry weight—philosophical, legal, mythological. They’ve survived centuries because they name something fundamental.

Just as a voltmeter doesn’t say “high-ish” or “pretty low,” our system resists vagueness. It assigns values. Calibrates atmospheres. Tracks fluctuations. Using units—graphically, linguistically, and physically—signals that this isn’t a metaphor. It’s a system. It’s a barometer for an era of distortion.

Truth, in our design, is no longer an abstraction. It’s something you can tune, read, print, and quantify. Just like you would test the temperature or check the air quality, TOTEM lets you gauge the climate of information itself.

In a post-truth world, we needed pre-digital language.