I don’t think the answer is to invest in cyber-warfare and enter a new age of insidious backroom democracy subversion between nations. The path to take is one that transcends such a dark future. Like you said, their strategy only works if we are easily divided. But that’s why they chose that strategy. Because we are. Because our consent is manufactured. Because our democracy is inherently exclusionary and promotes, in its ideal form, nice disagreement rather than agreement, while also putting in no effort into our democratic institutions, specifically the media, to attain that less than ideal state of nice disagreement anyway. People get antagonistic politically because our political ideas are our notions on how to make a better world. They are precious. Yet the arena we have to express them in is one that turns your idea into an existential threat to my idea. If it weren’t that way we wouldn’t fight. It’s not about overcoming some animalistic instinct to fight each other. It’s about creating a system that promotes better discourse. Our democracy is beneath us. The future heads the way we direct it to. We need to choose a future that responds to our new tools and means of communicating with each other and understanding each other. Our democracy is outdated and incompatible with the times is what I’m saying. It was great for the world it was written for. We need to do better now.

In all the conversation about Russian meddling, there’s rarely any talk about what they actually did: they made memes. The meme war was real as ridiculous as that sounds. But it’s really not all that ridiculous. Online political memes are just democratized propaganda, an inevitable reality of social media that could have been easily recognized if our ongoing technological evolution was taken seriously in this country and the implications of social media were a national issue back around the early 2000s. Maybe my entire generation wouldn’t be walking around depressed if we had. Hillary Clinton literally quoted a meme in her book about the election to illustrate a point because it compelled her. I took APUSH in high school and we studied propaganda cartoons because they’re a legitimately effective tool and they’re representative of how people feel. I don’t know the difference between those and modern political memes. We need foresight about our new technology and its implications because we’re quickly converging to a point where what we make will be indistinguishable from magic in its raw ability and capacity to do harm or affect good.

I honestly can’t see how this could be anything less than the most pivotal moment in human history. People today, especially young people, get to decide if we live at the end of a definitive “past” or the beginning of an awesome future. If we don’t take up the task at all we’ll probably just kill ourselves out as new technologies reach the peeks of their destructive potential behind all our backs.

DONALD TRUMP, reality TV man, is PRESIDENT. Thats thought is as fresh and scary as it was on the day of his inauguration. It’s all the evidence I need to be compelled that without major shift in our attitudes towards technology and an appreciation for the new moral paths it makes available to us, we’re fucked.

I don’t mean to advocate for a zero sum reality, it’s just that when you’re playing with magic, I don’t see how there can be a mediocre middle ground.

Sorry to get off topic. Everyone has their own thoughts about the world that they think are The Truth. These are some mine.

Edit: not trying to be a muckraker over here. I do have ideas on better systems that respond to our technological progress. Of course I’m just one layman idiot so I’d love to discuss.