Thread by @docrussjackson

Manufactured nihilism: the issue for many isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.

vox.com/policy-and-pol…

One consequence of pervasive confusion about what’s happening is that people feel more comfortable siding with their political tribe. If everything’s up for grabs, & it’s hard to sift through the competing narratives to find the truth, then there’s nothing left but culture wars.

It helps to think of zone-flooding less as a strategy deployed by a person or group and more as a natural consequence of the way media works.

We don’t need a master puppeteer pulling the media’s strings. The race for content, the need for clicks, is more than enough.

The instinct of the mainstream news has always been to conquer lies by exposing them. But it’s not that simple anymore. There are too many claims to debunk & too many conflicting narratives. The decision to cover something is a decision to amplify it & in some cases normalize it.

Nearly all the incentives driving media militate against a rethinking, so we’re likely stuck with this problem for a long time.

Democracy can't function without a shared understanding of reality. As long as the zone is flooded with shit, that shared understanding is impossible.

The UK/US Right practice "Smokescreen trolling” - flooding the zone with (bull)shit & lighting the fuse to every moral panic possible, while obscuring the underlying assaults against pluralistic, multiracial democracy.

How we respond is VERY important.

wired.com/story/far-righ…