this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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I don't think it's so much that people have gotten dumber, there's always been dumb folk, but the age of social media has made them less fearful of looking stupid.
You don't feel so dumb when you can find a bunch of people who agree with you.
There's also the compounding effect of being able to hear more voices from around the world thanks to the internet.
Every village has an idiot. These days you don't need to visit the village to run into their idiot.
And the idiots can have conferences now
And now that it's easy to do so, they're banding together to form entire metropoli of only idiots.
They have their own village now.
As I tend to say: before social media every village had a village idiot. Now the village idiots are connected, more easily to find and spreading their lack of knowledge.
Then they legitimize each other too, "How can we be wrong, there's thousands of us!"
My father was hi-jacked by QAnon so bad that he won't even read anything else because he sees any contradictory information as an attack.
The internet has made it easy to find others to group with no matter how extreme you are.
There was a ton of stupid conspiracy theories around the whole clones sheep thing back then. I think looking back on that time period (like two decades ago, not one) the dumb conspiracies were forgotten as they didn't lead to anything outside of fearmongering.
Same for the moon landing, there are still conspiracies that it was all faked.
I never understood the goal of things like denying the moon landings or saying the earth is flat. "Ok, you're right. Now what?" I especially like that they think NASA is powerful and has a huge budget. Tell that to congress and watch them laugh.
The only thing I can guess is their brains have been fried by dramatized TV shows and movies where plot gives all the relevant information to explain all inconsistencies for a satisfying ending. Sometimes you're just a person in a cave looking at shadows, trying to find an explanation for everything with the little information you can gather in your life is a waste.
It's also allowed then to connect with one another. Pre- digital age, every village had their idiot. Now every village idiot can share their stupidity with one another instantly.