Good read, but I think the author touched on something that is way more troubling. Sure, you can get reliable information from regular people who are living in other parts of the world, but spreading that information with any kind of veracity is almost impossible due to the collapse in public trust of mainstream media.

If I say something with any degree of authority or confidence, someone in the comments will inevitably chant the ancestral magic spell “Source?!” and suddenly my evidence of a conversation with a stranger on the internet is reduced to merely anecdotal at best. Able to be dismissed outright without thought or care.

However, if I post a link to some legacy media rag, existing in the modern day as a mere husk being puppeteered by corporate oligarchs, wearing the skin of a legitimate and trustworthy news source, the credibility of the information is then called into question by anybody reasonable - knowing full well that right-wing governments have managed to capture most of the remaining independent reporting, or at least have threatened them with who-knows-what in an attempt to influence their press releases that would otherwise paint the government or any of their cronies in a negative light. If someone decides that the provided source doesn’t line up with their narrative, it’s hilariously easy to attack the reporting itself as being “fake news”.

The brain shuts off, and information gets siloed. Objective reality is no longer shared. We are still living in a state of simply believing whatever we want to believe and the few people who are able to break out of that are not going to be influential enough to have an effect on anything. We can pat ourselves on the back for not being a group of people concerned with being brand-builders, I guess, but in the end it’s a meaningless victory.