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by unyttigfjelltol
1254 days ago
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There's a good chance we'll look back on this as a post-truth era. I have some guesses about underlying drivers, but they're just guesses. At the top, we have regulatory 'avoidance' masquerading as 'innovation', and enough regulators stood down for it to have consequences. We have the entire journalism industry brought to it's knees financially, and turning to low-quality opinion written predominantly by immature, inexperienced people. We have politics-- international actors leveraging social media to sow disinformation, and domestic actor(s) enthusiastically and successfully denying truths with impunity. And we have official sources of truth corrupted-- the trends above, and others led to ready availability of bad information in sources previously regarded as authoritative. Unfortunately, the epicenter in many cases can be traced to changes in society and power brought about by the technology industry, which 'disrupted' society and replaced it with substitutes that empowered anti-factual narratives and personalities. The recipes for avoiding being scammed are nice, but this is a structural problem that shouldn't be laid at the feet of individual people unfortunate enough to be conned. |
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Regulators, and checks and balances of all kinds, have been systematically dismantled and de-fanged. People literally can't fathom the full scale of the power disparities.
Still, trust in authority is at a record low - if not yet low enough! You're 100% right that this is a structural problem. It's too easy for bad actors to not only avoid accountability but to even get the crowd blaming the wrong people.