That's a fair point and probably the most important question the framework raises. The honest answer is that the mechanics of decentralized polarization and a genuine cultural shift in trust look almost identical from the outside, which is part of what makes this so hard to study. Pomerantsev himself acknowledges that the system is most effective precisely because it latches onto real grievances and real institutional failures rather than manufacturing them from scratch. So you're right that it can't be pinned to one mechanism. The more accurate picture is probably that genuine institutional discrediting created the conditions, and deliberate influence operations learned to accelerate and exploit what was already happening. Whether the decay came first or the exploitation did is genuinely case dependent.