the failure of disagreement
Before the end of the uncontrolled era, people sensed the onset of intellectual poverty because they felt helpless to prevent themselves from participating in social confusion. In the Digital Age, results-driven communication was preferred over discovery-driven education. News-media conglomerates found it more profitable to market versions of the news that would most reinforce the each niche consumer’s fascinations and opinions, which created a current-events echo chamber in which readership drove itself and the news acted primarily as the yes-man of the ruling masses. Multinational corporations that dealt in people’s private data were the moderators of all public exchange, and tended to drive which topics people should discuss. These factors combined such that the average citizen held most tenaciously to those beliefs that best corresponded to their desires and biases, and became offended by facts that tended to discredit or disprove their desired perception. The multinational information corporations would feed individuals the information most likely to keep the individual believing what the individual already believed, only more strongly. This reinforced the individual’s reciprocal, voluntary offering of free private information to the information corporations. The open-ended truthseeking of the early science-driven enlightenment was therefore, in common dialogue, gradually replaced by a cycle of threat-and-object: any difference of opinion upset the bubble of pleasant opinion reinforcement created by the information corporation by creating a perceived threat to each individual’s desired outcome.
Illustration 1.1:
Author: “Anyone who thinks X obviously wants the calamitous imagined result of X that I, here unsupported by facts or logic, opine that all people who believe X must necessarily want.”
Commenter 1: “I agree. I was once told X and it triggered me so I shamed the person who told me that.”
Commenter 2: “[Sarcasm in lieu of explanation that while Commenter 2 does not think X, Commenter 2′s friends who do think X likely have no desire for the calamity the Author’s imagines.]”
Commenter 1: “[Presumptive insult about Commenter 2, primarily designed to silence people who may hold opinion X].”
Commenter 3: “[Inflammatory sarcastic troll statement].”
[Author deletes comments with which s/he disagrees.]
And so on. In this manner, postmodern civilization utilized unprecedented publishing capabilities to reverse the original benefits of the press.
The resulting adversarial interchange of conflicting, anger-fueled uninterpreted offensives ultimately characterized the inflation of education, and its ironic use as a vehicle of ignorance, ultimately accelerating a social decline worldwide. Such common information hostility was later cited by the Prelates of the Greater Dissolution as grounds for their initially controversial but ultimately efficient global abridgment of malignant press freedoms. Over time, overt opposition to the new regime of content policing was gradually relieved as bureaucrats learned to more effectively utilize innovations in editorial police powers.
