Threads

In every century, a new medium discovers how easily it can puppet the collective mind. The printing press made possible both Luther’s Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War; the telegraph and newspaper incubated nationalism; radio begot the theater of fascism; television normalized consumption as faith—and vice versa. Each era mistakes its medium for enlightenment until the circuitry begins to speak louder than meaning. Populism is simply the echo of that overamplified signal—a high-gain feedback loop of psychological fear and tribal familiarity dressed as freedom. What passes for political movement is often just modulation through an ever-more efficient channel.

The current American descent into authoritarian spectacle is no exception. The devices are new; the operators are ancient. Algorithmic mediation (commercially) rewards emotion over reason, outrage over reflection, volume over truth. Technology did not corrupt humanity; it revealed how shallow our defenses were. We built mirrors and recoiled from the image. The lesson is not political but civilizational: tools evolve faster than character. Until consciousness learns the value of recursive self-reflection—how to see itself seeing—the pattern will repeat, each time more efficient, more total, more precise in its ruin.

Technology rapidly and once again changed but, given globally high levels of gullible susceptibility to predatorially opportunistic influence campaigns, we humans may (collectively) not have.