> You can put letters in any order you want and make them say any damn lie.
You can run a web server by responding to every request by hand-typing the response, too. But you couldn't realistically run one-one-millionth the modern Web that way. You can't have global-scale e-commerce that way, et c. Some things that technically could work that way, can't actually—it's too slow, too expensive. This is very much one of those "quantity has a quality all its own" things. Increase the productivity of every astroturf-poster or propaganda-front-news-site manager a few hundred times and that's a big difference.
> I am as concerned as the next guy but throwing the towel already seems a bit premature?
Where'd you get throwing in the towel? I do think we're (especially the US) really unlikely to do what we need to in time, in part because measures that are probably necessary to defend against this are themselves risky and rather unappealing. But we might.
That assumes that democracy can survive overreacted skepticism.
If you don't trust anything, you ... don't trust anything.
How can institutions survive? We're already living through a moment where large swaths of the population cannot get a fix on the same reality as their neighbors.
I would argue that this is happening precisely because the gullibles are being led into playing skeptics.
> cannot get a fix on the same reality as their neighbors
I believe this phenomenon was way more severe in the past. The reason you notice it now is because these meme cones are rubbing up against each other in public forums. In the past, isolated communities wallowed in their own wacky shit totally unchallenged. Pick any major religious movement of the 19th century and tell me they had a firm grasp on reality?
As a counterpoint, most cults of modern day have found digital guidance and strength where before they would not have.
Take this site, even. Ok, it's less cult-y as more people learn of it, but in the past there wouldn't have been anything close to the sort of community you can run into here. Maybe I've run into one, two people in real life as "in the know" as what you typically find here...
> The reason you notice it now is because these meme cones are rubbing up against each other in public forums
Yeah, it is true the amplification effect makes crazy stuff like the church of Scientology public knowledge, but there's also just that there's too much noise to keep track of all the special little brands of cult-ish "crazy". It's really hard to gauge the effect here, unless you have a study perhaps you could link? That would be quite on topic here.
This was not an impediment to liberal democracy.
I am as concerned as the next guy but throwing the towel already seems a bit premature?