- Joined
- Oct 19, 2024
I think, personally, that the key component of the problem is probably the fact that we've gotten to a point where there's just so fucking much information out there coming from so many sources (with so many of them having some seemingly legitimate claim to reliability) that the ability to discern what's actually, sincerely reliable has become a skill in and of itself. It's nowhere near as difficult as becoming a near-expert in everything from climate science, to immunology, to paleontology and human evolutionary biology, obviously, but it is something that has to be both taught and understood properly.
Throughout essentially all of human history, up until the last 35 years or so, an average person has really had only a handful of information sources. Early on, that might be the older members of your band, then the elders in your village or (if you were privileged enough to have access) a few philosophical, theological, and "medical" experts who could actually teach you a few things outside the range of what anyone would learn from personal experience or locally respected individuals over the course of a single human lifetime. What they believed was mostly nonsense (and, sometimes, bizarre nonsense) by modern standards, but it was nonsense grounded in the limited pockets of reality that they had access to. Unreliable, or just unorthodox, information was pretty strictly regulated, either socially or legally. Sometimes that was a good thing. At other times, it limited individual freedom of thought to a harmful degree and actively held society back. Either way, though, it resulted in a mostly homogenous local landscape when it came to a group's worldview and information access, and that's what we as a species have evolved to handle. Starting in the Early Modern Period, increasing access to print sources began to increase the number of information resources an average person could access, but we were able to cope with that. Not always very well, since information that clashed with traditional worldviews was often considered dangerous and potential malicious even if it was objectively true, but accurate information tended to win out in the long run. As late as 1990, major institutions with expert backing were seen as reliable by all but a few outliers in any given location, at least in the developed world.
Did that make it easier to spread propaganda? You can bet your ass it did. Senator Joseph McCarthy had his moment in the Sun as a media darling in the 1950s, despite having no evidence other than a claimed list of Communist infiltrators that nobody else ever got to see, because the media trusted Congress and the people trusted the media. Major moral panics similar in both framework and even actual content to Early Modern witchhunts, like the Satanic Ritual Abuse mass hysteria of the 1980s and early 1990s, even spread at times through sources generally seen as reliable. That was especially common during times of social conflict and upheaval, just as it always had been. It wasn't an unqualified positive, having only a few information sources, but it was relatively efficient when it came to filtering out deliberately malicious content and batshittery. Then, along came the Internet, and suddenly everyone had access to a megaphone and a soap box the height of a goddamn space elevator. Not everyone was heard, of course, but everyone theoretically could be, and that created a whole new information landscape where a doctor of genetic anthropology with thirty years of experience studying Euarchontoglire phylogeny at UCLA and a third-generation Church of Christ minister from La Vista, Nebraska whose sole source was a signed, first edition copy of The Genesis Flood had equal access to the public square and equal opportunity to explain how Plesiadapus fit into the backstory of human civilization. At first, most people exposed to both still had the same social framework that they'd had for generations, but that was soon overwhelmed by the new world they were flooded with. Their children, who were fated to grow up with that all of that from a young age, never had any sort of inherited framework for separating truth from bullshit unless they learned it from somewhere else.
Add onto that, what have historically been seen as reliable sources are increasingly paywalling content, especially those that have the resources to put information out in a visually appealing, viewer-friendly format. It's understandable from a business perspective, but it still means that the majority of people who don't care enough to spend actual money on accessing them, specifically (as opposed to receiving them via antenna, or as part of a package deal with other cable channels like their parents), are going to have a choice of shoddy-looking reliable resources, or information packaged as entertainment by social media users who can get by on ad revenue. Not all of those are unreliable but, without societal structures to function as arbiters of reliability, most people really can't judge the difference in accuracy between content from PBS Eons' and Answers in Genesis' YouTube channels based on anything other than how slickly they're presented. That's a terrible guide post, but reality is what it is, and it matters more than what sources a video cites to the average person who only holds a high school diploma or an associate's degree.
Online echo chambers also magnify the effect of that flood of information by pushing people to extreme new orthodoxies, politicizing facts, and often tainting even historically reliable resources. When a formerly trustworthy source starts spouting dogma, and universities begin developing unwritten rules for what research gets funded and what outcomes can be safely published, people who don't buy into the associated ideologies wholesale get pushed even further into the stream of total bullshit. The rise of genuine misinformation is a result of those two factors amplifying one another. There's too much information to reliably assess without social filters that no longer exist, and sources that were once favored by those social filters are going through a cycle of promoting bullshit again, this time because of political polarization and gatekeeping rather than mass hysteria. Where historically that would have led to a short-lived flare of briefly damaging but ultimately unimpactful public opinion shifts, our historically unprecedented ability to question "reliable" mass media (which should theoretically be a good thing; the Satanic Panic might have been a blip on the radar in the big picture, but real people got their lives completely and utterly fucked) is now driving people straight into the arms of complete charlatans and malicious woo peddlers every time news anchors say something that clashes with observed reality.
I'm not really sure what the solution is, at this point, or if there even is one. There's a decent chance that the Information Age is going to get so overwhelming that it collapses into a singularity, where the flood of misinformation rises to a level where it has to be stopped by someone, and that someone may not actually have a worldview in touch with reality. We, as a species, unfortunately have a need for that just like we have a need for food, water, and socialization. If there's no healthy food, no sure spring, and no stable community, people will eat rotten meat, drink from a stream filled with shit, or join a cult. Without a reliable source of clear, simple truth (whether factually correct or not), people can and will turn to dictatorship to shut down the presses.
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