[gremlinsinc]

Say theoretically everything was the same in this timeline EXCEPT there is no reddit, facebook, twitter, or 4chan.

QAnon has no platform available. Hell, maybe we still have blogs but you aren't plastered echo-chamber friendly messages you have to actually search for stuff to read or maybe go to a phpbb forum.

Trump without Twitter, QAnon, 4Chan would've probably played out differently. Without a way for society to constantly feed his narcissism would he have been so anti-mask - would anti-science even be so big if there weren't echo-chambers re-inforcing this?

That's just social media itself. It's literally poisoned our society as much as a social credit score in China probably has there among relationships. Piss someone off and now you're an enemy combatant and can't travel.

I think tech can also fix a lot, but it depends how we use it and what we do with it. I hope we can science our way out of Global Warming but I'm not very optimistic about us surviving into 2100s.

[mseepgood]

You don't need social media or high tech to attack and dismantle democracy, to exert racist police brutality, to mishandle a pandemic, or to flock together and storm a government building like the US Capitol. All of this happened in world history before, with less advanced technology, a century or even longer ago.

[ntsplnkv2]

This is very true, but you also don't need a machine gun to wage war. It's just far more efficient at killing people than your homemade bow and arrow.

[antman]

What was the actual importance of QAnon? Just a newsreel skevomorphism, an entity easy to defeat as it was easy to setup. Pretty much irrelevant, disenfranchised people still exist. QAnon and other crazy but promoted ideas have served as smokescreens hiding actual problems and at some point people will take their shot at going against some actual structural issues. No easy way out and who knows when that tipping point is but 2100 sounds very optimistic for those structures hold.

On the other hand Tech can work as a cheap social stabililty agent as seen successfully in China.