This is the same kind of sentiment that nobility and clergy had when the printing press was invented. Society as a whole, and democracy, will be fine. The privileged status that several people enjoy in society today will not be fine. In a few places in Europe, the upheaval was bloody because the nobility and the clergy turned to violent means to keep their power.
I am guessing, since we are on HN and you hold this set of views, that you, like me, are part of the modern "clergy" class. Most of HN is, as well as much of silicon valley. The discourse has so far been controlled to your benefit by people who are your peers, and you are looking at the uncertain future of your own status and thinking that the entirety of democracy is falling. The reality is that our position as arbiters of speech is a distortion of the democratic system, and the immune system of democracy, speech, is coming to fix that.
This distortion affects your definition of "signal" and "noise." It is a lot easier for us to see things that benefit the cathedral as signal, and things that don't as noise.
Most people can tell the signal from the noise just fine. The problem is that for tech folks, the signal we want them to receive isn't always the signal that they want to receive. It often isn't noise or disinformation, just signal that is inconvenient for us.
If you look at provably false conspiracy theories (eg flat earth or chemtrails) and cults, there are very few people who believe them despite the noise level they put out and the amount that YouTube promotes them. In comparison, something like 70% people believe one or two conspiracy theories that are hard to disprove (eg things about the JFK assassination, aliens, or the CIA). It turns out that this is mostly harmless - the worst that happens is that it leads to distrust of government, which happens to have earned a lot of distrust.
If you look at other inconvenient things that big tech has suppressed, like the news about Hunter Biden's laptop, you will find that this is important signal that may have swung the election, not misinformation. The problem is that it would have swung the election the wrong way, so the cathedral (in this case, the FBI, Google, Facebook, and Twitter) kept it off the modern airwaves, proclaiming it to be "noise." Unfortunately, this was signal for most people - a later survey said that a decent fraction of Biden voters would have voted differently if they had known about it - and our collective filters caught it because it was inconvenient for us.
People are not bad critical thinkers: they can figure out what is relevant signal for them. After getting out of school, they understand how to think critically well enough to find the information that is relevant and not false. It just isn't leading them to the information that we think should be relevant to them.
Democracy is fine. In fact, it may be healthier when the censorship regime that we have collectively imposed is gone. The control we have over it is going away, and that is a good thing.
> The reality is that our position as arbiters of speech is a distortion of the democratic system, and the immune system of democracy, speech, is coming to fix that.
I don't know how to square that view with the observation that in the United States, an attack on Congress was perpetrated as a direct result of a runaway lie regarding the integrity of the election process. That's not free speech protecting democracy; that's a mob riled up by unchecked lies directly, physically attacking the mechanisms of their representative democracy.
Believe me, if I was observing free speech bringing truth to power and undermining, for example, the lobbying infrastructure, or the massive consolidation of power in megacorporations, I'd be thrilled. The cathedral needs to be corrected if not taken down. But that's not what I'm seeing. I think I'm mostly observing the rich and powerful using their ability to buy content on the various free channels of speech to rile mobs with lies. They're trying to cut the structural constraints on their piece of the cathedral and turn it into, if you will, a High Tower.
I'm not thinking about Biden's laptop; I agree with your assessment of that. The amplification of lies about the structure of US elections threatens to undermine the democratic process, and if it crumbles now it's most likely to be replaced with a fascist autocracy.
I am guessing, since we are on HN and you hold this set of views, that you, like me, are part of the modern "clergy" class. Most of HN is, as well as much of silicon valley. The discourse has so far been controlled to your benefit by people who are your peers, and you are looking at the uncertain future of your own status and thinking that the entirety of democracy is falling. The reality is that our position as arbiters of speech is a distortion of the democratic system, and the immune system of democracy, speech, is coming to fix that.
This distortion affects your definition of "signal" and "noise." It is a lot easier for us to see things that benefit the cathedral as signal, and things that don't as noise.
Most people can tell the signal from the noise just fine. The problem is that for tech folks, the signal we want them to receive isn't always the signal that they want to receive. It often isn't noise or disinformation, just signal that is inconvenient for us.
If you look at provably false conspiracy theories (eg flat earth or chemtrails) and cults, there are very few people who believe them despite the noise level they put out and the amount that YouTube promotes them. In comparison, something like 70% people believe one or two conspiracy theories that are hard to disprove (eg things about the JFK assassination, aliens, or the CIA). It turns out that this is mostly harmless - the worst that happens is that it leads to distrust of government, which happens to have earned a lot of distrust.
If you look at other inconvenient things that big tech has suppressed, like the news about Hunter Biden's laptop, you will find that this is important signal that may have swung the election, not misinformation. The problem is that it would have swung the election the wrong way, so the cathedral (in this case, the FBI, Google, Facebook, and Twitter) kept it off the modern airwaves, proclaiming it to be "noise." Unfortunately, this was signal for most people - a later survey said that a decent fraction of Biden voters would have voted differently if they had known about it - and our collective filters caught it because it was inconvenient for us.
People are not bad critical thinkers: they can figure out what is relevant signal for them. After getting out of school, they understand how to think critically well enough to find the information that is relevant and not false. It just isn't leading them to the information that we think should be relevant to them.
Democracy is fine. In fact, it may be healthier when the censorship regime that we have collectively imposed is gone. The control we have over it is going away, and that is a good thing.