There have been reactionary waves before social media was even a thing. The progression of fascism and the rejection of rationality that comes with it are well understood, blaming it all on social media is a little cheap.
If you really want culprits, look at the right-wing populists that have been peddling anti-education and anti-science fearmongering for decades, and the patrons, who finance their campaigns and buy media after media to platform their propaganda.
Its just any dip in surplus supply - leading to a hopeless generation, that leads to a tribal regression. If you have no future, might as well jump the fence and take it. But no matter how in your face the realities and in how many incarnations its visible - even before industrialization, in the ritualized warfare with warchiefs- reality must be denied. The idea, that there are limitations, hardcoded and we are stuck with them for years to come, limiting what humanity can do- is to horrific to be even entertained or accomodated.
It can not even be detached from this racist idea of "only white people can be facist" - as if ISIS, imperial japan or some african warlords are somehow a entirely different level just because they lack the industrial base when society blows up.
Go look up how people reacted to the Spanish flu. Or various religious death cults that pop up with regularity.
This isn’t a modern thing - most people rely on their social network about what is true and those social networks can be infected with cultural disease and rot and die just like the body. The problem is that cultural diseases have impacts to the entire species since we’re social creatures and technology has further shrunk the distance between cultures and the time disease takes to spread making it difficult to contain.
> Go look up how people reacted to the Spanish flu
“The Anti-Mask League was an organization formed in San Francisco, California, United States to protest an ordinance which required people in that city to wear masks during the 1918 influenza pandemic. The ordinance it protested lasted less than one month before being repealed. Due to the short period of the league's existence, its exact membership is difficult to determine; however, an estimated 4,500 citizens showed up to a meeting to protest the second ordinance in January 1919” [1].
I’m not seeing anything comparable, or as epidimeogically relevant, as what we have today. Organic social spread is slow and controllable. Online social media is instant wildfire everywhere.
Yes, the world is one village. But a medieval village.. there is no lasting progress. Just lived experience preventing repetition, until it does not.
Which has major consequences, if you hand something that is prone to "tantrums" ever more powerfull technologies. It will blow itself up! And if you do not hand ever more powerfull technologies, that thing will throw a tantrum!
