Perhaps one of the greatest differences between the pre-and the post-1995 worlds is that the internet simply makes an epistemic confusion and chaos among a wider public visible that was always there before the online world existed.
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Post-95 online worlds matter in making more visible and accelerating centuries old patterns of polarisation and paranoia in response to economic and geopolitical structural crises.
To understand that destabilsing shift to a post-American order we need to focus on those deeper stuctural dynamics.
For example: Fox News launched in 1996, helmed by the guy responsible for the propaganda machine behind all the nastiest turns of the Republican party over the previous few decades built on the ruins created by the Southern Strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ailes#Career
I think it's also that people get the sequencing confused. The segregated pubs I mentioned were abolished by a weatherspooning that was part of exactly the same kind of commercial consolidation that gave us Facebook, and the transfer of sectarian communities online.
It's like thinking food was healthier before MacDonalds and not understanding that fast food emerged at the same time as strong universal food safety standards and enforcement.
Technological and climate change has often led to societies coming off the rails. For example, iron working contributed to the late Bronze Age collapse and the printing press to savage wars in Europe. With, IT, global warming and nuclear weapons we may be looking at very severe consequences.
I would argue that it perhaps accelerates the issue, not necessarily amplifying it.
Reason for my view is having lived through the breakup of Yugoslavia and the way truth and rumors and lies were impossible to keep apart even then, and the resulting civil war is as amplified as an issue gets.
The discourse around the impact of social media is very similar to the role of radio in the rise of Fascism. History doesn't repeat itself but this bit sure as hell rhymes.
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To understand that destabilsing shift to a post-American order we need to focus on those deeper stuctural dynamics.
Things will continue to be unstable until these Poppies can be cut down to size.
Please read the thread below and watch the following talk by @eliothiggins.bsky.social at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit:
Reason for my view is having lived through the breakup of Yugoslavia and the way truth and rumors and lies were impossible to keep apart even then, and the resulting civil war is as amplified as an issue gets.