There has always been misleading information, but that's not a good thing. Growing up, I think the promise of the internet was that with a more decentralized source of information we'd be better equipped to see and understand what's really going on in the world. What the spread of this kind of fake news shows is that it was never really the fault of the TV news and big corporations that there was misleading information. We want to be lied to.
People don't want to be lied to. They want a narrative, they want to be told a story that integrates information into something digestible. All narratives are simplifying, some are based on emotion, some are based on facts, but all are false, to one degree or another.
What's really going on is very hard to figure out. The Arab Spring took everyone by surprise; it's not enough to look at individual leaders and what they say and do, it's the superposition of multiple trends that are the cause of things.
Different people have different appetites for trying to figure it all out, and some have a hard time with unpleasant or contradictory information. They can become numb and start becoming avoidant, clinging to simpler inflexible positions that make life easier to live.
Others develop shortcuts to understanding the world and start coming to very strange conclusions, conspiracy theories that connect not through cause and effect, but by who benefits, outcome oriented post hoc rationalisation. Cynicism protects the ego by dismissing people who talk about the actual complexities as naive. But fundamentally they want to believe there's order to the chaos.
I personally think that the lack of a common enemy has created some kind of social autoimmune disorder, where reality isn't testing and proofing ideas, and our collective attention is free to amplify small irritants into national issues. We don't have enough real problems. Even terrorism today is a non problem, looked at in proportion to its lethality.
The sad thing is we have plenty of big problems—overpopulation, pollution, environmental collapse—we just can't get behind them because we're wired for tribalism, and there's just not enough common understanding on a large scale to put any wood behind the arrow of sustainability.
