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guidomerkinsrules said

but those 12 seeds needed fertile ground for purchase
anti-intellectualism - in all of its myriad forms - has been a backbeat of this country from jump
we just keep inventing new ways (yellow journalism, am radio, cable tv, now social media) to reach and radicalize these...fertile minds

Click to expand...

It has only been since the mass adoption of the internet, and really moreso the arrival of Web 2.0/social media, that we have seen mass intellectual regression we are dealing with the fallout of right now. We are moving backwards at frightening speeds, and that basically always presages a major collapse.

These people existed. But they couldn't network. They couldn't establish echo chambers. They weren't gaining meaningful ground against science and medical consensus. For most of the 20th century we were seeing growth in those areas.

They do all of that now. The ability to connect with one another and galvanize their messaging turned them from cranks into actual dangers. It signal boosted their nonsense to a lot of people who otherwise would not have been a part of what was going on, but were ao ignorant or completely lacking media literacy that they jumped on the insane train because they take everything at face value.

I've said this before, but we were as a species/society not ready for the rise of the internet and it's associated fallout. I have genuinely come to believe it has been an almost compete net negative intellectually, economically, and socially. And even the things that were once good about it have become increasingly enshittified in the past decade.