I’m worried about the rise of genuine White Nationalism that’s occurred while people were worrying about “SJWs”. I mean real White Nationalists, not some redneck asshole down the street that goes to Klan meetings every weekend but doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground; but the people who are creating and citing studies that “prove” black people have a lower IQ, or are inferior in some other way; young people who know how to speak convincingly and how to pull people to their side. It seems to me that young people are becoming more and more extreme on each side of the political spectrum, and that probably has something to do with growing up in the internet age. It’s allowed these ideas to grow in isolated settings, where they aren’t ‘softened’ by discourse with opposing ideas. I really hope that these ideas stay fringe and confined to the internet and the public discourse doesn’t become Communists vs Nationalists again; it didn’t work out so well the last time.
One could also say that the internet age has facilitated a departure from herd mentality, for good or ill. Now everyone feels like they can be an expert, and I think this is a large part of why the mainstream media is so vilified. Everyone is way too cool to believe things that ‘the man’ pronounces from on high, but the problem is that nobody is omniscient and many people still can’t see the walls of their ideological prisons. For people like this, Trump’s lies don’t really matter because they know that people have talked down to them all their lives, and they believe that these media gatekeepers often lie to support their agendas so it’s no big deal if someone on their side evens the playing field a little. It’s payback. It’s also nihilistic. It ignores the difficult job of sifting though a torrent of information to cull the truth, preferring to label anything that one disagrees with merely fake news.
The silver lining is that, freed of the reliance on established media sources, more and more people are able to aggregate quality information and discuss methods of minimizing their own biases. The discussion, often taking place in the blogosphere or other less-traveled corners of the internet, is usually technical, sometimes uncomfortable, and designed to minimize aspects of clickbait which make them immediately palatable to the human mind. Here the commenters begin by saying ‘I’m probably wrong…’ instead of ‘I’m obviously right’, and I find myself avoiding them because they may slaughter yet another sacred cow I didn’t know was grazing in my mental backyard.
But we know all that, it’s the informational equivalent of eating our veggies. The latest Trump outrage is a bottomless bag of chips by comparison, and it’s hard for me to refrain from chowing down. Perhaps more discipline is needed…