I don’t think it’s so much that people have gotten dumber, there’s always been dumb folk, but the age of social media has made them less fearful of looking stupid.
It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.
As I tend to say: before social media every village had a village idiot. Now the village idiots are connected, more easily to find and spreading their lack of knowledge.
There was a ton of stupid conspiracy theories around the whole clones sheep thing back then. I think looking back on that time period (like two decades ago, not one) the dumb conspiracies were forgotten as they didn’t lead to anything outside of fearmongering.
Same for the moon landing, there are still conspiracies that it was all faked.
I don’t think it’s so much that people have gotten dumber, there’s always been dumb folk, but the age of social media has made them less fearful of looking stupid.
As I tend to say: before social media every village had a village idiot. Now the village idiots are connected, more easily to find and spreading their lack of knowledge.
There’s also the compounding effect of being able to hear more voices from around the world thanks to the internet.
Every village has an idiot. These days you don’t need to visit the village to run into their idiot.
And now that it’s easy to do so, they’re banding together to form entire metropoli of only idiots.
There was a ton of stupid conspiracy theories around the whole clones sheep thing back then. I think looking back on that time period (like two decades ago, not one) the dumb conspiracies were forgotten as they didn’t lead to anything outside of fearmongering.
Same for the moon landing, there are still conspiracies that it was all faked.