It’s an education and channel incentive problem. Our kids’ literacy is crashing [1]. And most Americans get their news through channels that are incentivised by selling ads.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Living/us-students-reading-math-s...
The literacy crash is alarming, and is no doubt agitating this situation in a major way. However, I think what we are experiencing is something like a kind of siloing of private realities. Not the pearl-clutching 'echo chamber' discourse from 2019. But an increasing lack of social competency amongst younger people that is disallowing them to be present others in the world itself.
This is why I still think it is a power problem. Government, however incompetent, still has the monopoly on control and policy. They have experts yelling at them everyday about these problems. But their answer does seem to be more censorship and surveillance, rather than addressing the causes of these problems. As I mentioned, this only exacerbates the problem and makes it more socially dangerous.
The power hypothesis doesn’t explain Flat Eartherism. That’s just stupid people believing what I cannot imagine started as anything but a tantrum.
Incorrect. As with most if not all conspiracy theories, flat-earthism incorporates anger at "the establishment" because "the establishment" is hiding the truth. And this is the hook. If you can be convinced that a secret cabal is manipulating all science, controlling all governments, censoring all media and filtering all information in order to keep the basic nature of reality hidden from humanity - which flat earthers do believe - then you're susceptible to someone suggesting who that cabal might be. You know who.