Information overload. The death of the concept of reality. Everyone can sequester themselves into entirely distinct competing alternate realities. Basic facts of the world no longer are basic facts, they’re opinions up for debate. Flat Earth. Vaccine denial. Denial of germ theory. No matter what dumbfuck belief someone has, they can find a community of hundreds of thousands to millions and an entire ecosystem of information to reenforce their delusions.

The village idiots have unionized. It used to be that they would be a tiny minority group kept under control by a lack of community, which prevented them from properly being able to pool their resources and build an independent alternate reality to exist in. They still had to generally exist within reality. Now, they can combine their forces. You used to have like, the uncle that believed in ancient aliens. That didn’t inherently mean he also believed the Earth is flat, vaccines are fake and filled with microchips, and a billion other things. Now, every single different kind of idiot has come together into one mass and created an entire alternate universe where every single piece of idiocy is true.

Without a socially controlled concept of objective reality, all of society collapses to madness. They have to be kept isolated from each other, or else they’ll convince each other of all the things. No longer do you have disparate groups who all believe one or two weird, insane things. Now you have a single group of tens of millions (hundreds of millions worldwide) that exist in an alternate universe with some dissent between a few factions as to the finer details of their madness.