G.U.T. CHECK

How did we get here? (You know what I mean.)

I have a grand unified theory, or at least a unified theory.

1. The internet happened. Before the internet, all information was centralized in institutional places like libraries, newspapers, home reference books, three or four over-the-air television networks and one cable news channel. You had a pretty good feeling that the information you read or heard was true, because it had gone through the layers of checking that these institutions provide (sure, there were some urban legends floating around, but nobody put much credence in them and they were repeated mostly for entertainment value). Suddenly, all this previously accumulated information was readily available at a moment's notice from a wire.

2. Quickly, every single person who had internet access began not only reading the information that had previously only been available from institutions, but also creating information for others to read and reading others' created information. Since the information created from individuals or small groups of entrepreneurs or non-profits wasn't being checked by layers of fact-checkers, it wasn't always accurate. In some or even most cases, it was willfully and intentionally misleading or outright false to advance some money-making scheme or political view. The bad information was formatted in such a way as to look exactly like the good information. People had almost no way to tell the difference.

3. Eventually, many of the purveyors of bad information grew and prospered. The Drudge Report was an early example of this, and that site begat so many other outlets. Left-wingers, right-wingers, sports columnists, business people, scientists, and pretty much any niche group saw the power of bad information and took to it readily. It was easy to create, easy to post, and easy to get in front of people, and lucrative to do so. People swallowed it up heartily.

4. The online experience eventually became very easy to curate. You could set up your online day to read only what you wanted to read from the sources you agreed with and/or trusted. Friendster and Myspace started the trend, and then the invention and widespread use of RSS led to a proliferation of feed curation applications. Facebook took over for Myspace and solidified the idea of a daily feed of personally hand-picked news sources. Twitter was another shot of adrenaline that baked in the feeling of instantaneous reaction to news from people who shared your point of view and reinforced it in real time.

5. All throughout this process, information was becoming less and less institutionalized and the bad information was far outpacing the good. After all, 7 billion people could now create bad information while only a relative handful of institutions can create good information. Certain people, many of whom had done well but were getting older and saw problems ahead, or who had lost a good-paying job to globalization, or who were stuck in some remote backwater, or who were simply predisposed to the concept because they were brought up in religious and/or conservative households, started to buy in to the idea far more than others that the old institutions were feeding them lies and that this new age of information, mostly bad information, was the real truth. The bad information, designed and chosen especially for them, felt so good, while the old institutions were always telling them what seemed in contrast to be bad news.

6. The last presidential election where good information was supreme was probably 2000, although we started to see rumblings in the widely reported lie that Al Gore had claimed to invent the internet. Quickly after that election, the horror of 9/11 happened and people rushed to fill in details of the attack with bad information from the internet. The George W. Bush administration was more than happy to supply them with plenty of it as justification to invade Iraq. As Bush's first term was ending, Karl Rove fully harnessed his delivery system of bad information to engineer the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, a diabolically named organization that all but sunk John Kerry. This was the first and most egregious example of a decent, reasonable, and worthy politician being completely undone by lies proliferated by the internet. It set a template for the next decade or so where anybody who actually wanted government to accomplish something or had even the mildest of "progressive" ideas could be undermined by the most tenuous of fabricated bullshit. Of course, the internet also served to upend people like John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer who had it coming. It became very easy to decide that every politician was a traitor, a liar, a bum, or an adulterer because of how easy it was to expose them, whether it was true or not. Faith in government itself began hitting record lows, and a completely avoidable housing crisis and recession accelerated people's anxiety.

7. In 2008, the bad information on Barack Obama was staggering in its scope and depth. The fact that he was African-American split the electorate along racial lines, and those who could not countenance a black President began retreating almost solely into this new avalanche of bad information in addition to the enormous cache that they had been slowly and methodically accumulating for themselves over the years. Obama won only because these folks were in the minority in the large states where the Electoral College votes are most numerous, but their numbers were growing. So was the bad information, day by day, month by month. One of its leaders was Donald Trump, who championed the pernicious idea that Obama was born in Kenya.

8. Prior to the 2010 election, the rise of these bad-information-only voters was given a name: the Tea Party. Using their bad information and the social networking capabilities that went along with it (smart phones became commonplace and you could take your bad information with you everywhere), they were able to organize all across the country. Opportunistic business people who saw the power of the Tea Party, like the Koch Brothers and others, bankrolled and focused the group to take down politicians in local and state elections to give the GOP the majority in the House and in state houses, which enabled the GOP to gerrymander congressional districts after the 2010 census. Their power increasing, and the bad information on which they relied to sway others swelling exponentially, the Tea Party continued to grow and win huge victories like Citizens United that opened the floodgates to corporate political donations. They failed to take down Obama in 2012, mainly because the GOP nominating process favored the "next man up" mentality that had been in place for decades and which resulted in a milquetoast candidate, Mitt Romney. Romney didn't win, but the Tea Party made it closer than 2008 had been.

9. Which leads us to 2016. The Tea Party was not happy with the choice of Romney in 2012 and agitated from the beginning of the process to put a more conservative candidate on the ticket in 2016. Into the breach stepped Trump, long a darling of the bad-information-only crew because of his tireless "birther" movement against Obama. Trump was a perfect fit for the Tea Party, with his bluster, his talk of "draining the swamp", his contempt for women and immigrants, and his almost overt white supremacist leanings. Despite all the major media institutions predicting that Trump could never be nominated, the Tea Party pushed him to the top in state after state, and he ultimately won enough delegates.

10. Here we stand, the day before election day. Hillary Clinton is yet another target of a tsunami of bad information, perhaps at an order of magnitude worse than Obama, from Whitewater to Vince Foster to Benghazi and the endless self-inflicted saga of the e-mail server, plus all the bad information generated against her husband and the Clinton Foundation. The previous institutions, such as the New York Times especially, have done their best to expose Trump as a liar, a serial sexual assaulter, a deadbeat, and a terrible businessman, and they seem to have made some traction. However, the election is certainly much closer than it should be and closer than 2008 or even 2012. Clinton may get through, but only by a hair's breadth. We'll see.

Where do we go from here? Let's say Clinton wins, for my own sanity. The Tea Party will be strengthened by the closeness of the result. Bad information and the methodology to share it will continue to increase. I see no way the bad-information-only Tea Party, now often lumped together with something similar called the "Alt-Right", egged on by the GOP big donors who seek to exploit it, won't eventually take over all three branches of government. They have already cemented the House, and may keep the Senate in 2016 and will definitely improve their advantage there in 2018. In 2020, unless Clinton manages some kind of economic miracle in four years, the forces that are allied against her will have solidified, and if the GOP can find a decent human being to run against her that checks off all the Alt-Right boxes (a big if, to be sure), she will lose handily. Soon after, the Supreme Court will be the final branch to succumb to the Alt-Right. At that point, there will no check or balance against bad information. The entire government will be reliant on it to stay in power, and worse, may actually believe it. The slippery slope to a decade or more of policy dedicated to protect the wealthy at all costs, which has always been the GOP's ultimate goal, will surely ensue. I can't imagine the super-wealthy will allow large clamps on immigration or restriction of trade deals, because they rely on these for their wealth. More likely will be a reduction of taxes on billionaires and the imposition of austerity measures on the poor and middle class, with border control being stepped up and made more visible if not any more effective. Climate Change will continue to be ignored and subsidies will flow to the entrenched energy providers over new renewable players, which could set back that movement for decades. Healthcare will continue to get more and more expensive until good care will only be affordable to a tiny minority, while the rest pay very high premiums and very high deductibles and get sicker, or simply go without and risk destitution for any mishap. Our infrastructure will continue to collapse, with politicians spending on it only when a crisis occurs, and always favoring cars over public transit. We will likely see a reversal of Roe v. Wade, gay marriage and women's and LBGTQ rights in order to mollify the Alt-Right and keep them engaged. We'll put ground troops in Syria and Libya, and once again in Iraq in an effort to stomp out ISIS while trillions in poorly accounted-for cash will go to defense contractors. Essentially, we'll see the policies of the George W. Bush administration on a far more ambitious scale and much more difficult to unseat.

I really fear the complete loss of the previous institutions. Libraries and newspapers are already dying. Television is becoming so fragmented that in ten years, there may be no national over-the-air networks, only niche cable/streaming channels that exist only to tell special interests what they want to hear. With all of that fact-checking gone, all we will have is each other for our news, and the world will become a giant game of telephone. Each retelling of an event will become more and more sensationalized and removed from what actually happened. At some point, truth will be completely fungible, different for each person, each version recorded somewhere in the cloud so that each of us can remember the past however we want to remember it, or if we can't find a memory, we'll have our memories sold to us by the most effective salespeople. This will inevitably lead to the end of democracy because no large bloc of voters will ever be able come to a consensus on what is real. Then the strongmen will swoop in to fill the vacuum and decide what is real for everyone. We're talking some serious Orwellian/Black Mirror shit here.

Of course, I'm posting this on the internet, so it's probably all bullshit, too, and definitely just my opinion. Don't forget to vote!