In the months leading up to November of 2024, our society broadly was living in the most naive, delusional, self-imposed bubbles we’ve ever constructed for ourselves and we’re not a lot better off now, we’re just starting to see consequences.

Yes there have been people giving dire warnings, there have been plenty of groups trying to organize opposition to our plunge into fascist authoritarianism, mostly people who were students of history or have lived in other countries and have seen the warning signs before.

But largely, most Americans lived and still live in extreme echo-chambers. It may not seem like it because it’s utterly common now to fire up the internet every day and scroll through your feed and think you’re actually getting the news and objective interpretations of current events. But we long since have given ourselves over to customized algorithms and personal feeds, mostly without even realizing it, we just tend to aim towards whatever is comfortable and agrees with us. Covid accelerated this process to a massive degree because it normalized a completely shut-in life, or at least a completely shut-in and wired perspective of life.

The biggest warning sign we should have all paid attention to was the rise of extreme worldviews, like flat earthers. Seriously, not because they have anything to do with anything or have any impact on anyone, but as a barometer to measure how people or groups of people are being peeled away from the collective and reprogrammed by closed-off spheres of influence. This should have been our warning sign that the internet broadly is dangerous and it changes how people see the world. We NEED social conformity on some level to function as a society, but we gave the internet free-reign to just give anyone whatever society they want to conform to and live in, at least until it butts up against other people’s micro-societies, or worst-case, when nefarious people of incredible means deliberately hijack these tools to create the micro-society they want people to conform to.

China is a monstrous nation that hurts a lot of people. But they were onto something with their extreme paranoia about the internet and fears of social disruption to the point they built The Great Firewall. I don’t think we needed censorship per-say, but we did need some very serious scrutiny and monitoring a long, long time ago to prevent rich fucks from using our own freedom to split everything apart. I really don’t know if America will ever be close to what it was as we knew it even a decade ago, and I don’t know if we’re going to have another free and fair election. And the worst part is that if the worst-case scenarios continue to unfold, most people are just going to give the situation passing glance and shrug as they live in their own worlds with their own narratives.

Edit: I don’t want my thesis to read that far-right echo chambers are what got us here. It was those, yes, but it was also the echo chambers on the other side not providing us a clear path towards better outcomes, communities boosting the naive delusions of the opposition who celebrate every debate between youtube personalities and genuinely thought the progressive-left was somehow gaining ground. You’re all seeing only what you want to see. You’re living in a giant AI feedback loop.