[sorcerer-mar]

The problem is that a massive orchestrated campaign to sow distrust of institutions can succeed well beyond what's needed to achieve their destruction.

The actual truth and institutional trust are both far harder to establish than they are to destroy. I'm not sure how institutions survive in the presence of this asymmetry, alt-media's conscious effort to exploit it, and freedom of speech.

[rayiner]

Etsy or Pinterest didn’t create women who like to collect fabric samples, those satisfy an existing demand. Similarly, I don’t think alt-media created this anti-institution sentiment. It’s catering to a consumer base that already exists.

I think you need to go back further to the education system. I’m a 1990s kid, so I grew up having teachers tell us to “think for ourselves.” In high school, a bunch of our teachers joined the students in protesting the administration over a (completely innocuous) dress code. GenX and millennials were positively marinated in anti-establishment, anti-institution rhetoric growing up. The Joe Rogans of the world are a predictable result of that education.

[bsder]

> GenX and millennials were marinated in anti-establishment, anti-institution rhetoric growing up.

Would that were true and they were fighting against the system right now...

They were marinated in "Both sides are bad(tm)! The System(tm) is bad. You can protest by dropping out of the system!"

Except that ... doesn't work. "Dropping out of the system" instead advantages both the status quo and those who do actually muster up the energy to fight.

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790

[sorcerer-mar]

Interesting theory but anecdotally doesn't fit with my experience.

The most compliant, least critical, and laziest thinkers in my acquaintance are all squarely "anti-institutional" now.

> Alt-media arose in maybe the last 10 years. Most of these anti-vaxxers were fully baked (intellectually) by then

This isn't true. There was definitely a crunchy left-wing anti-institutional anti-vax cohort that's very old, but the modern energy behind the movement is not from this group. And alt-media is much older than you give it credit for. Rush Limbaugh premiered in 1988. Alex Jones' InfoWars was founded in 1999.

[rayiner]

The anti-institutional left educated what became the anti-institutional right. If you teach kids to “distrust authority” and “think for yourself,” you’ve taught a meta-principle. You can’t predict which direction they’re going to go with it.

[sorcerer-mar]

But again: Alex Jones' and Limbaugh's hugely popular shows pre-date that. So does the libertarian strain on the right. Modern MAGA definitely spun out of the Tea Party which didn't originate at all in leftist education.

[keysdev]

>The problem is that a massive orchestrated campaign to sow distrust of institutions can succeed well beyond what's needed to achieve their destruction

don't think that is needed. The institutions did by themselves. Especially the large ones private and public.

[sorcerer-mar]

No, they really didn't.

Institutions made mistakes, sure, as they always have. None of these mistakes, individually or in aggregate, justify anything close to the discredit they've received.

Had there been similarly ignorant, ideologically motivated, and orchestrated media to report on all these institutions' past failures, they would've "failed" long ago. But because there wasn't, the institutions carried on despite their "failures" and delivered huge amounts of value to society.

For every modern transgression I can point to analogous historical ones. You can say "see, they've always been rotten!" and my response is "yet despite that they've delivered value." Almost as if real life is full of tradeoffs, complexity, tensions, and imperfections everywhere.