alt Hacker News> What does that mean? Is the older information environment books and newspapers? Then only a tyrant could arrange a return to that state, which didn't prevent the readers being credulous anyway.
No, not a return to books and newspapers, but a return to where there was a huge array of distributed and untrustworthy information sources, with the central authorities often having only a weak influence on them. The world was rife with gossip, rumors, and misinformation that spread mainly through word-of-mouth and papers and pamphlets of various kinds many of which had very little regard for the truth. As was complained of very often and sometimes led to quite amazing consequences.
Of course, in this environment, most people recognized that everything should be taken with a grain of salt, because they knew quite well that people could just make things up and there was no easy way to disprove it. That would be the environment we'd be returning to, to some degree - we'd actually still be better off, in that an educated and informed person would usually still be quite capable of determining if it was true or not in many instances, thanks to the good part of the Internet.
> we'd actually still be better off, in that an educated and informed person would usually still be quite capable of determining if it was true or not in many instances
Oh, so "we" doesn't actually refer to humans in general.
Gullible people can now automatically be detected and exploited, gnawed down to the bone and thrown away with none of the people who harvest their resources ever meeting or even thinking of them, but you are too smart for that, so it's fine. You don't need there to be a public space that is rational and allows humans to grow in, you had parents, you had an education, and there isn't anyone dear to you that you'd have to worry about either.
But at the same time demanding the public to support more of what benefits you. Why? What's in it for the majority of people to accept something they don't like just because you like it? Why should they accept chaos because you think you'd rise above it? What kind of unilateral partaking in society is that? Frankly, this seems so callous and myopic I think you would last nowhere near as long in a true post-factual-reality pandemonium as you think you would, either.