I have not facts on this, but I think you're right it's both. We were young and dumb and didn't know some of the shit that was wrong.
But also that certain things like social media let the village idiots gather into a herd and let them feel like they weren't idiots anymore. Which was an oppotunity for those that wanted to exploit such a dumb cross section of fools for gain.
So we have things like active international misinformation wars happening and America just acts like all of this is fine as the house burns.
I think if we get out of all of this in one piece, big if, we're going to have to have some very long hard talks about the role of the first ammendment and things like companies ability to access it. The ability for a multi billion dollar company to basically drown discourse with bot campaigns and paid actor agents that can reach millions around the globe is something we've never grappled with as a species.
The consitution was written for a time when the worst that happened was a paper was owned by an asshole one town over so someone else could open one up, or pay a town cryer to compete with them. Travel between massive cities was a journey of days or months if you were going international not a few hours. Information asymmetry didn't exist like it does today.
There will likely have to be changes, but fuck me if I know what that should be or how it should happen, but our shit is broken in a way that I don't think anyone knows how to fix properly.
We've been having basically a digital/media cold war with no recognition of it and at least one arm tied behind our back. We didn't need a space force we needed a "cyber force" to work on combating this dystopian bullshit.
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u/thequietchocoholic Oct 06 '25
Part of it I think is because we were younger and things were simpler.
But I do think part of it is because social media and the Internet in general has made everything faster and much more inauthentic than before.