> And even if you ignore most of human history and focus just on the period in liberal democracies immediately preceding 2016, the best explanation of the good old days is a bad memory—in this case, a strange amnesia about truly shocking epistemic failures.

> Consider, for example, the role of falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda in the invasion of Iraq or the role of false theories about economics and finance in the global financial crisis several years later.

We had a different name for this: manufactured consent.

Owing to the government's outsized control of the media, both through the "five filters" as well as a strict broadcast censorship regime constitutionally justified through scarce airwaves, the US government had incredible leeway to push their narrative. The Iraq war was itself an echo of the Vietnam War; except in Vietnam the US government was far more blatant about the lies and it was far harder for Americans to get an alternative perspective. At least with Iraq, America could point to a giant smoldering pile of rubble in the middle of lower Manhattan to justify arbitrary invasions of hostile Middle Eastern dictatorships, even if there was no evidence of Saddam actually trying to buy nukes. In contrast, Vietnam involved, among other things, the US government claiming a second destroyer attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that never happened.

This kind of manufactured consent is arguably harder to pull off today, for a few reasons. You can easily read other countries' newsmedia now, something unthinkable pre-Internet. US and UK media was hellbent on selling you a second war in Iraq when every other country was reporting on how shoddy the evidence was[0].

On the other hand, people born into a heavily censored media environment have terrible news literacy and will believe anything once that censorship ends. This creates a new avenue for manufacturing consent, much like how republican and egalitarianism in 18th century Europe deposed hereditary nobility only to be co-opted by political extremists and conquesting dictators. If the powers that be cannot impose their own reality upon us, then they'll shatter reality, by proposing so many more alternative truths than the average person can ever hope to validate.

Speaking of the War on Terror, let's go back to the other war - the "good" one. Afghanistan is a country that is uniquely cursed with being in the way. Anyone with eyes of conquering Asia has to eventually contend with this completely worthless patch of sand in the middle of a desert. As a result, the average Afghan lives in a nightmare of having their government being completely upended every 10-20 years. America tried building a western democracy on it, but it collapsed, because nobody trusted it. Nobody trusts anything in Afghanistan, except their local warlord, who only trusts the Taliban, who only trusts God as depicted in the Quran and interpreted by extremely regressive religious scholars eager to undo the last century or so of modernity.

The "truth era", or the manufactured consent era, was one of mostly true information and people mostly willing to believe it. A heyday for lying politicians. What we did with the Internet, and in particular social media, is create a machine that can provide really high quality information, but more likely spits out random garbage. This lowers the average - we enter the "eating The Onion" era where people get pranked by obvious satire because they aren't discerning information consumers. But people don't want to start being picky about their media diets, that takes time and effort. They instead learn to distrust everything. Now we enter the Talibanization era, where people trust nothing, except their local politician, who only trusts their megadonors, who only trust God as depicted in the Bible and interpreted by extremely regressive outrage pundits eager to undo the last century or so of modernity.

[0] I suspect this is also part of why certain old monarchist anti-Americanisms have persisted in Europe.