If you’re in the mood to read something a little bit heavy tonight (I understand if you aren’t) I recommend this interesting piece by JV Last at the Bulwark. Unfortunately, they don’t offer a gift link option but I’ll give you an excerpt that I hope gets the point across:
The dream of the internet was that it would create a high-information, high-trust society. Technology was supposed to make facts and primary sources immediately available to everyone, thereby ushering in an age of rationality and data-driven decision-making.
If you lived in Bumblefuck, Missouri, the internet meant that you were no longer beholden to the limited stream of news provided by your local paper, three broadcast networks, and assorted cable news players. You’d be able to see the information with your own eyes.
Instead of relying on a small number of information gatekeepers, you now had direct access to data. So you no longer had to rely on what the media told you about, say, crime. You could pull up the FBI crime stats and look at the numbers with your own eyes.
But it hasn’t worked out that way.
The internet has made all of that data readily available to people. And it turns out that often there is too much of it and it is too complicated for normal non-experts to understand. But the bigger problem has been the sheer volume of noise that the internet gave rise to. The noise overwhelmed the information, accelerating the decline in trust in institutions. The net effect was to make the populace as a whole less tethered to facts and data—and more animated by folk stories and something like an oral tradition.
[…]
This Matt Pearce essay brought me up short because it hits on a truth so profound that I can’t believe it never occurred to me before:
The result of all of this [changing economics of media] is a growing consumer alienation from the actual sources of information, a return to a kind of folk-story society ripe for manipulation by demagogues who promise simplicity in an increasingly complex world.
This. This is it, right there.
We are now a folk-story society. The drones. The immigrants eating cats and dogs. The crime wave and “economic hardships” that haven’t been real since 2022. It’s all folklore. Stories that a post-literate people pass on to one another in the oral tradition.
I cannot recommend Pearce’s essay enough. You should read it all.
Basically, the vast majority of what we come across on the internet is bullshit.
I think is also probably correct:
Pearce’s big insight is that this new world is ripe for demagogues because they thrive in societies that run on folk stories. The demagogue’s lies spread from person to person and even if the demagogue is conclusively exposed as a liar, no one believes the exposure
If liberal society is an organism, a demagogue is a virus. The demagogue takes advantage of the freedoms afforded by liberalism to attack the host. Sometimes, if the demagogue is virulent enough, it can kill the society.
Over time, liberal societies build up antibodies to demagogues. The accumulation of such antibodies are one reason that the longer a liberal society endures, the more likely it is to survive challenges. Relatively new liberal societies are vulnerable because they have not had the time to build up antibodies. Old liberal societies are more robust. These antibodies come in many forms: laws, traditions, institutions, civil society, an independent media.
We once hoped that the technological revolutions of the information age would become another antibody; another layer of protection. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Instead, it’s clear that the current state of technology has been like a radiation dose that kills off antibodies and compromises the organism’s immune system—in this case, leaving our society more vulnerable to demagogues than it has been in generations.
The one thing I think might be a factor here that Last doesn’t mention is the power of celebrity in all this. I have to wonder if that isn’t fuelling this demagoguery as much as anything. If that’s so, there might be a way to challenge the demagogues. Celebrity comes in many different shapes and sizes.
I’ll admit that when I heard about these people taking videos of constellations and planes and freaking out because they thought they were alien drones made me think of primitives looking up at the sky and seeing god’s and monsters in those lights. We really are going backwards.