[seventhtiger]

I think you're attributing too much to Trump here. Trump is part of the same movement of rising authoritarianism and strong man politics. He may be the poster boy, but Putin has been there for decades.

My opinion, which I can't support, is that the dream of information technology automatically progressing democratic and liberal ideals has failed. Information technology is no different than chemistry. It can be weaponized effectively. Right-wing parties around the world learned how to powerfully engage with the masses. It really was a meme war. Propaganda is undoubtedly effective even when it's standing right next to the truth.

If you only read the news you would think it's only national leaders taking over and oppressing the populations. I don't think so. I think this is a trend towards grassroots nationalism and fascism. The people want this.

[repolfx]

Was there ever a dream of the internet promoting specifically left wing democracies? I don't remember any of that in the early days. Surely the opposite - a lot of early hacker culture was libertarian in nature. You seem to simply describe anything not left wing as "grassroots nationalism and fascism" but that's not a reasonable view.

[seventhtiger]

This is a conversation I'm really interested in but upon rereading my original comment I think it was low quality. I didn't mean some of things that I implied.

No I don't think the dream was for left wing ideology. I meant classic liberalism and democracy which aligns well with libertarianism. So regardless of political leaning the dream was that information will free the people. What we're seeing is that information is being used to entrench the establishment. It is the opposite of libertarian today.

Fascism and nationalism were in a time in history attached to left wing ideology rather than right wing. I don't want to imply that those movements are inherently left or right. But I do see that today they are attached to the right, who are using information very effectively to achieve their goals.