I think you've actually touched on something more interesting than you might realise. Prior to around 2000 we didn't have the internet and there wasn't close to as much transparency in society about how the mechanics functioned.

We've seen a collapse in respectability of politicians, for example. Not because the politicians have changed even slightly, but because we have much better visibility into what they're actually like and how the political sausages are made. Pre-internet I'm not even sure how I'd be supposed to get my hands on things like the Hansard records. Billionaires are under similar pressure, look at the difference in image of Musk vs someone like Gates who was world's wealthiest before the internet got big.

I don't think the fairytales of entropy, randomness and incompetence exist. But I do think there is an excellent reason for that - up until around 2000 almost nobody knew how big a factor those things were. The discourse was gummed up by propaganda which was mainly myths of competence in the halls of power and it wasn't feasible to pick apart the mess because communication was hard.

2000 is also the year the Supreme Court decided the presidential election and by 2002 we were invading Iraq and Afghanistan. That I see as a big turning point.

for me, the turning point was 1981 when the US conservative lying machine really got traction. (the power people were mostly bridging late greatest generation to early boomers, the rest of us were ignorant fucks) then came the neoliberal brainwashing. the rest, as they say, is history

I wouldn't argue your turning point at all. Reagan and deregulation is what I believe touched the current greed mentality. I think that it does lead to the conclusion that it has been one distorted view and effort since at least Nixon...

I can’t rant about Reagan without pointing out he created homelessness as it exists today. One of his programs emptied out many of the institutions that housed people that couldn’t function.

Reagan (and Thatcher) also amplified that attitude that “freedom” means I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want, and to hell with society! An attitude you can even find in the comments here today. This “toxic individualism” has gotten worse over the decades, noticeably worse during COVID and has culminated in our current political climate where some people’s entire political outlook can be summarized with the middle finger.

> Prior to around 2000 we didn't have the internet and there wasn't close to as much transparency in society about how the mechanics functioned

[Citation needed]

Investigative journalism existed, stuff like "manufacturing consent" was published in the '80s, and I'm pretty sure you could always obtain records of parliament sessions, I know in Italy they were all broadcast on the radio (they still are).

Things are easier to access without intermediation but it's not such a qualitative change, IMO.

> I'm pretty sure you could always obtain records of parliament sessions, I know in Italy they were all broadcast on the radio (they still are).

Are you joking? The quality of that is nowhere near what we have today. I can't very well ring the radio station up to ask them to broadcast a speech I'm interested in from 3 months ago on my lunch break or stick to a specific candidate's record for an evening peruse. Even if they were willing to the scaling properties of that approach are unworkable.

> Investigative journalism existed

Assange dumped more information in a fortnight than an investigative journalist could cover in a decade. We're talking orders of magnitude improvements here.

If you're not seriously interested in politics I can see how nothing much has changed, but for anyone taking a deep interest the world is completely different now.

Gaining access to vast quantities of raw information while as the same time losing the addition of analysis by experts, verification of sources and empirical facts, and the context those can provide (rather than complementing them) is in most respects a large net negative to real knowledge in a society.

Over half of people get information from algorithmically driven and typically anonymous human-curated feeds of stories and opinions, and for a major portion of them, this has displaced journalism entirely -- with the notable exception of anyone claiming to blow the whistle which in itself has been perverting incentives.

Expecting people to read beyond the headlines has always been a tall order, but the practice is currently facing extinction while media quality is in a race to the bottom competing for the same attention.

One could for instance be dedicated to events and anecdotes by or about the dozens of people struck by lightning every month and present a credible-seeming case that lightning strikes are escalating and now an eminent danger to people at large. The reality of this has been happening across the board for even much rarer events in the last few years, in a way that some might say exploits confirmation bias.

Maybe it's a pendulum swing that will return, but at the moment the long term trend is towards a return to oral tradition and a pre-telegraph level of shared common knowledge of current events, recent history, and so on.

We definitely have more data which can be useful, but the signal-to-noise ratio has quite possibly gotten worse.

Indeed. If anything you're understating it.

I think the difference is the speed at which we arrive at the societal consensus. Case in point, recent debate. The thing had real time memes and reactions ( including BPU one ) and immediate damage control on various fora ( and fascinating stuff on reddit where stuff is already prone to be an echo chamber ) and all of that coalescing into the meta-conversation we are having today mere days after a, I would argue, a big political event, whose waves are yet to wash ashore.

Manufacturing consent helps to understand the mechanics of how it works, but it did not really change; it just got quicker.

> We've seen a collapse in respectability of politicians, for example. Not because the politicians have changed even slightly, but because we have much better visibility into what they're actually like and how the political sausages are made.

Some of that, perhaps, though I suspect most people don't care too much — most people don't read beyond the headlines, from what I've heard.

I'm assuming you mean US politicians in particular? Because in the UK, Johnson and Truss were genuinely exceptional in how bad they were. (And I'm currently living in the half of Berlin which used to be DDR, which had a government so bad the country stopped existing independently).

For the USA, I remember mocking GWB when he was your president (I even got quoted on the radio for it); the political Overton window I grew up in doesn't, can't, include either of your main parties, but even so, Trump does seem evil compared to GWB's nice-but-dim Forrest Gump.

> look at the difference in image of Musk vs someone like Gates who was world's wealthiest before the internet got big.

Late 90s, I was a teen, friends were talking about how evil he was, sharing pictures with Gates' face pasted onto WW2 dictator's rallies, etc.

> Because in the UK, Johnson and Truss were genuinely exceptional in how bad they were.

How are you measuring that though? What about the politicians that managed to set the British Empire into terminal decline? In hindsight they must have been a bit below average. It isn't crazy to say that the least competent politicians turn up at the nadir of the UK's international importance, but logically speaking the people who mucked up at the peak were probably making worse decisions.

Fair point, but I'd counter two things:

First, that most of that decline is relative power rather than absolute: the UK is no longer astride the world, but because so many others have gained power to kick my parents and grandparents' generations out of their countries, not (in all cases) because the UK became objectively weaker.

Second, that the politicians who caused the decline were doing a lot of smaller mistakes over a longer period.

Those other politicians probably were indeed as you say below average, but Johnson and Truss weren't just scraping the bottom of the barrel, they were the wood of the barrel itself and the floor underneath it.

I'm not sure if politics and media have changed all that much. Is it a possibility that your perspective has changed, now that you are wiser and see more than before?

I was using the internet in the early 1990s (I can still find stuff archived on the web dated 1991).

I was involved in party politics in the 1980s and I saw how the sausage was made. I can tell you it's not like you see on the web today: there a lot more information available today than there was 30 years ago and it's of orders of magnitude lower quality. Don't confuse more crap with better crap.

Prior to the waves of garbage fed the masses by the internet almost everyone knew how big a factor things were. Now, discourse is gummed up by propaganda which is mainly myths of inhuman incompetence or else extremely competent conspiracy and it's not feasible to pick apart the mess because communication is hard.

Too much information make communications as difficult as too little.

There should really be a course or a way to prepare you to deal with the incompetence. I was incredibly lucky not to have to deal with the incompetence at the workplace for the first 10 years of my career.

But at the current job, it's everywhere, and I don't know how to properly deal with it. I'm thinking of leaving, despite having an excellent compensation package.

Back when comp.lang.lisp was a thing, I once misread a post by Erik Naggum to state that incompetence should be punishable by law. I'd love to live in a world like that.

Fairytales do a good job of conveying entropy imo. See Brothers Grimm.