Political movements today often spring from communities with legitimate grievances, but the translation of hardship into narrative rarely follows truth. Instead, it flows through the machinery of technology, where statistical effects drive visibility and outrage. What begins as frustration becomes restructured by algorithms into repetition, amplification, and distortion. This environment does not reward accuracy but circulation, ensuring that even falsehoods gain traction simply by persisting across networks.
Here the old maxim becomes structural rather than moral: when good people do nothing, the precondition for the flourishing of evil is satisfied. Inattention, withdrawal, or silence leave the statistical field open to those who flood it with noise. Platforms, optimised for engagement, translate that noise into apparent consensus. What emerges is a politics of frequency over fact, where myths dominate not through persuasion but through accumulation. This is the statistical consequence of entropic diffusion: as systems drift toward equilibrium, it is the most dissonant communicative and ideological artifacts that rise to prominence. Narratives which seek to harden identity or defend boundaries against uncertainty only secure their own fragility, guaranteeing the insecurity upon which they feed. The paradox loops unnoticed—few care, but they should.
Daedelus Kite 