This was not an impediment to liberal democracy.
I am as concerned as the next guy but throwing the towel already seems a bit premature?
You can run a web server by responding to every request by hand-typing the response, too. But you couldn't realistically run one-one-millionth the modern Web that way. You can't have global-scale e-commerce that way, et c. Some things that technically could work that way, can't actually—it's too slow, too expensive. This is very much one of those "quantity has a quality all its own" things. Increase the productivity of every astroturf-poster or propaganda-front-news-site manager a few hundred times and that's a big difference.
> I am as concerned as the next guy but throwing the towel already seems a bit premature?
Where'd you get throwing in the towel? I do think we're (especially the US) really unlikely to do what we need to in time, in part because measures that are probably necessary to defend against this are themselves risky and rather unappealing. But we might.
If you don't trust anything, you ... don't trust anything.
How can institutions survive? We're already living through a moment where large swaths of the population cannot get a fix on the same reality as their neighbors.
I would argue that this is happening precisely because the gullibles are being led into playing skeptics.
I believe this phenomenon was way more severe in the past. The reason you notice it now is because these meme cones are rubbing up against each other in public forums. In the past, isolated communities wallowed in their own wacky shit totally unchallenged. Pick any major religious movement of the 19th century and tell me they had a firm grasp on reality?
Take this site, even. Ok, it's less cult-y as more people learn of it, but in the past there wouldn't have been anything close to the sort of community you can run into here. Maybe I've run into one, two people in real life as "in the know" as what you typically find here...
> The reason you notice it now is because these meme cones are rubbing up against each other in public forums
Yeah, it is true the amplification effect makes crazy stuff like the church of Scientology public knowledge, but there's also just that there's too much noise to keep track of all the special little brands of cult-ish "crazy". It's really hard to gauge the effect here, unless you have a study perhaps you could link? That would be quite on topic here.
1. AI lets you generate an enormous number of lies, but what is really dangerous is one well-placed lie within a trusted stream of many truths. CNN will retain a power to mislead far in excess of Twitter bots.
2. Democracy averages over everyone's confusion, which means lies are only dangerous when large numbers of people believe them at the same time. Hordes of bots generating spurious lies won't move a democracy in any specific direction, but again, mass media will retain its power to mislead everyone at once in the same, effectual, direction.
3. People have never respected the veracity of random tweets. In the same way that trust in mainstream media outlets is reaching record lows due to their consistently biased reporting (they might not all have the same bias, but I can't think of any I'd consider free of bias), everyone will learn to adjust their incredulity to match the true quality of random tweets.
4. Companies like Twitter and Google are known to be shaping their results and algorithms according to their own "political views" (broadly construed) so at worst this would represent a partial shift of power from the old masters to new masters quite like them (social media companies). In many ways trimming the front page to reflect editorial opinion is echoed in the way Twitter trims its feeds to reflect their own editorial opinions.
All taken together, it seems like the media is afraid that equally large companies with similar business models (content, attention, advertising) might end up eclipsing them. The same old model where the TV station is afraid to upset its advertisers, thereby giving a voice to business interests, is well-recorded in the recent history of YouTube. Not so much will change, although seeing it in its old and newer forms might shed light on how it works.
The major mistake here is thinking that these two things are mutually exclusive competition. They're not.
In 2015, an internet rumor started spreading that Obama was going to invade Texas. This rumor was based on the fact that there was a routine military training exercise taking place in Bastrop called Jade Helm. It started on Facebook and was quickly picked up by the mass media. These rumors became so viral that the Texas governor activated the Texas State Guard "just in case".[1]
Later, the US government alleged that this was a planned disinformation operation carried out by the Russians and was a precursor to later operations.[0]
Twitter and Facebook started the conspiracy, but mass media laundered it and made it look real enough to get a governor to act.
0: https://www.kut.org/politics/2018-05-03/jade-helm-conspiracy...
1: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/russians-sowed-di...
If you cannot distinguish reality (well), and in fact it becomes possible that most things you see do not exist, then there is nothing to stop a bad actor from producing a fake version of events in which they are elected, control everything, etc.
So, democracy would cease to exist, because democracy relies ultimately on a choice - if you have no choice then you do not have democracy, only a dictatorship.
If I see a photo in the Guardian newspaper (or any other reputable news outfit) I'm going to presume it's real, and I expect journalists to verify that for me. If I see a random photo that doesn't look quite right on a 4chan, I'm not going to immediately assume it's news.
Scale, cost, and reach.
I think it could be claimed that we're clearly in the process of learning to distrust. People distrust media more now than ever [1], because they've demonstrated, again and again, that they can't be trusted. Trust in institutions are down to new lows [2], because they've also shown that they're untrustworthy and/or incompetent. Everyone is shouting "disinformation", "misinformation", and "fake news" constantly, because nobody trusts anything anymore, and rightfully so in many cases.
1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-di...
2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-...
People already have trouble telling propaganda from fact. That has been going on since forever.
At the end of the day I don't see this being a game changer. If anything, now video and photos are less evidence for/against something as the potential falseness becomes well known. Congressman X: "no, that wasn't me you saw leaving the hotel with the prostitute, my slimy opponent obviously is deep faking stuff".
And people will continue to believe what they want to believe, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, just like they do right now.
An environment in which 90% of the information is adversarial is really bad. It's a severe problem and very challenging to navigate. An environment where 99.9999% of it's adversarial and it's even harder than before to sort truth from fiction, functionally no longer has any flow of real information whatsoever.
Maybe liberal democracy is not the final outcome of human civilization. You like it and I like it (presumably we were both raised to believe this way) but perhaps it's not really true.
Just to question a base assumption here.
It seems to me, if all the things that are claimed to threaten liberal democracy actually do, liberal democracy might be much less robust and long lived then previously believed.
[EDIT] One thing I no longer think has any realistic future is the open, semi-anonymous Internet. We're either losing it because despots take over and definitely won't permit that threat to remain unfettered, or we're losing it (in perhaps a gentler-touch way) because we have to to prevent authoritarian take-over and vast civil strife. I don't think we're getting to keep that no matter what happens.
Even the "good guys" will call emergency that will never end.
Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. An intellectual Cambrian explosion. And all that porn!
On that note: I can't wait for the resulting proliferation of photorealistic tentacle hentai. Imagine the possibilities!
Then everyone quickly realizes it's all garbage. The bigger danger is when people think garbage isn't possible, which has been the case since Stalin erased people from photos 98 years ago.
Otherwise, I fully agree with your point.
Even if this is released quickly, the internet would be flooded with crazy images, and people would quickly learn to have a critical eye to the media that they see, which should already be the case, because photorealistic fiction is already possible, as everyone experiences with every blockbuster movie. Only a slight shift in perspective is required to realize that every image and video you see aren't any different than frames/clips of Thor: Love And Thunder.