this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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Up until the 2000s, it looks like the autocratization trend line follows the democratization line with a 15-year delay. If that pattern continued, autocratization should have peaked around 2010 and declined ever since.
So what broke the pattern—the internet? The end of the Cold War? Climate change?
My vote goes for the internet.
Politics really started to get noticably crazier and less grounded in reality around the time everyone started having access to the internet in the palm of their hands. I've been online since 97 and the internet used to be less populated, more informative, and more fun. Around the time smart phones became a thing the internet started morphing into something else. A lot more misinformation. A lot more anger. A lot more stupid.
Humans simply were not equipped to handle the internet and social media. We don't have the educational background to navigate it responsibly. It became the greatest misinformation/propaganda tool in human history and we weren't ready for it.
I think it was when the internet was corporatized. I remember back as a kid browsing around the internet and I laughed my ass off that Colgate had a website. My early 90’s teenage brain could not figure out why toothpaste would need a web presence. I fired up a browser and I looked at what other brands that I figured would never need a website.
If I’d had a credit card that day I’d be a multimillionaire. Sadly domains were still crazy expensive and I was 13.
Short story long, it wasn’t much longer before the internet became essentially a giant ad machine/captive social media network.
The Cold War never ended.
In some ways, sure—but having grown up in the Cold War, things certainly feel different now. (For one thing, the party that was once the most rabidly anti-Soviet is now the most pro-Russian, with all the foreign policy realignments that entails.)
If Russia is truly as corrupt as the news implies then that's on brand for current day Republicans, they'd want to emulate that as much as possible (see: attempts to privatize all public services in the US). Russia isn't communist anymore so there's no reason for them to be universally hated by capitalist interests, they got what they wanted.
because the former KGB agent didn't change his enemy, just his political stripes.