3 reasons why:
-
The internet, including social media, may be the single greatest vector of mental disorder triggers invented by the hand of man. The amount of information, the violence (yes) of it, the dopamine addiction, hell, just the sheer noise of the internet can overwhelm. We are seeing it now, people who commit crimes based upon things they saw on the internet, things which literally are not true.
-
The nature of the internet is fracturing the consensual realities which, until now, has bound societies together. The use of likes, blocks, follows, shares, and more allow each of us to create our own mental landscape of what the world is. America, for better and worse, is an idea, and one which could be reliably molded in the Age of Print and even in the Age of Electronics… as long as the electronic voices were all top-down, as they were pre-1994 (which is when I date the beginning of the “popular” internet, the Netscape IPO. Others have their own opinions.)
But now? Now everyone has their own idea of what America means, all molded by their chosen electronic communities (like us), the voices of dissent tuned down (unshared), even out (blocked). Instead of one reality, we now have thousands. Millions. More, and this is a problem for a country which is a shared illusion.
- Back in June, a group of us Dopers did “The Long Bust”, a multi-post response to a Wired magazine cover story from 1997. This story, “The Long Boom”, predicted what the world of 2022 would be like. The ultimate article was a bunch of 1990s techtopia predictions of better efficiencies, greater democracy, a more peaceful world brought about by the sharing of ideas which is now available because of this newfangled internet thingy… and while you can find our work (I’m very proud of it) at the link below, the one thing not even mentioned in either the (extremely-wrong) article itself (or the sidebar which predicted a bunch of (negative) stuff which did come true)… none of them thought of the possibility bad actors, including nation-states, would use the internet to wage propaganda wars on other countries. I think most of us would have scoffed at this as late as 2012, maybe 2014, but by now it’s an obvious problem. Fortunately, the most blatant practitioner of this handed his own ass into a fire in Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean Putin has stopped, nor is he the only one.
So we have a machine we created which allows the United States to be a target for nation-states wishing to psychologically destabilize our population via means which we have already seen as effective (trucker convoy. J6. All the Russian Trump support on FB in 2016). We are especially vulnerable because much of our system of government relies on the belief in that government, and the structure of our government allows for maximum impediment by bad-faith actors who themselves may be under the sway of foreign propaganda, and, of course, the first amendment gives broad powers to those who want to spread the airways and internet with lies.
And, the worst thing?
It is profitable to do this.