At the turn of the millennium "internet skepticism" came down to trying to tell people not to trust their own pattern recognition. We were told that scientific controls, formalized in peer review and institutional authority were more rigorous and that hard proof in the form of collected data and evidence was the only true standard for empirically based discovery and truth (to be judged in the open and free discourse of science).

Now the institutions' corruption lays bare. The incentives of peer review are just as clearly malformed. Institutional authority is spent in a void of trust, the methodologies and discourse are often no longer open to the public, and we are even less likely to be free to discuss them online. Now the very "hard" evidence of recordings will be less than reliable and prone to falsification. I think I'll go back to "trusting my gut." This new technocratic rational skepticism seems to me a house of cards.