So, as per my recent post, she didn't make it by a hair's breadth, but lost by less than that. Fuck.
We have seen quite an acceleration of my (Grand?) Unified Theory since Dipshit's election, as almost every major media outlet has decried the end of facts. With a Strongman in power, we will see an end to democracy maybe before 2020. I don't really see any other way. No one can agree on anything, and conspiracy theories are being accepted almost literally as gospel on a daily basis. No government by/for/of the people can possibly exist that way. The basis of such a system is actionable information that connects to reality in some tangible way, and if the National Security Advisor is convinced that Hillary Clinton is running a child pornography ring out of the non-existent basement of a pizza joint in DC, and millions of citizens agree with him, the system is irrevocably broken.
To expand on my theory and to explain it in a different way, I came up with a corollary regarding information as it relates to the act of publishing. To begin, we look at the pre-Gutenberg era of human history. In this era, information was either passed down orally or, later, written down in longhand on papyrus and laboriously copied by monks or other learned folks. The information consisted largely of folklore, origin stories, or religious texts. The Greeks, Romans, Chinese and others also did amazing work in math, science, literature, and philosophy that lasts to this day because of the vast reach of their empires. After Rome and its final ancient worldwide empire fell, there was a period of 1000 years of the Dark Ages where relatively few new published manuscripts appeared and a great deal of information became lost to history (fortunately, some of it survived). The nature of information during this period was such that if it appeared in a text, it was generally thought to be true, even though a lot of it was completely fabricated, and most people didn't have access to the rare scientific or mathematical texts. People did have access to the religious texts like the Torah, Koran and Bible and fervently believed the religious texts and considered them the words of God. For any information not covered by the texts, they believed whatever they experienced in their own lives or were taught by leaders in their community.
In 1439, Gutenberg invented movable type and ushered in the next era of human experience, the Renaissance. With the printing press, anyone could publish information, but there was a significant barrier to publishing. You needed to have money or backing from a group of people to pay for use of a press and there had to be a compelling reason for the information to be published, that being either a profit motive or because the information was deemed too important not to publish. The Renaissance proceeded apace as this torrent of new information came into being and people spent the next few centuries sorting it all out and creating new technology, with each advancement building on the last. During this period, information that was published was generally accepted to be true because of the inherent barriers to publishing. This will probably go down as the "Truth Period" in human history, since this will be the only period when such barriers existed and the technology was sufficient for widespread dissemination of information.
Then, in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web bringing us into our current age, which we have deemed, almost ironically at this point, the Information Age. The Web and the greater internet led to the ability for anyone to publish anything that could be accessed by anyone else in the world. The inherent barriers to publishing had been lowered significantly, and became increasingly minuscule over the next 25 years, to the point where anyone with a cell phone could publish in real time. In effect, and to almost everyone's surprise, the internet has now created a new "Dark Age". The old Dark Ages were characterized by a lack of good information due to the limited ability to publish. The new Dark Age is characterized by an overabundance of trivial, maliciously fabricated, or simply wrong information that completely overwhelms good information, and which is caused by the fact that anyone can create information at any time.
So, what next? Unless this new Dark Age is reversed, the world will go back to the old sacred texts, or possibly new superstitions that have arisen since the previous Dark Ages. This is why we are seeing right-wing parties taking over in Europe and the rise of Mr. Disphit in this country. The only things people can rely in in this new environment are religion, folklore and their own experience, which includes outrageous conspiracy theories pushed by bad actors that reinforce their worldview. Just as in the original Dark Ages, xenophobia and isolationism will take root and flourish. The institutions of international trade and cooperation will gradually, or in some cases suddenly, be dismantled. Wars, as we saw in the previous Dark Ages, are almost inevitable, and now that we have nuclear weapons and all manner of powerful conventional weapons at our disposal, they will be infinitely worse than before.
What can be done? One solution could be as simple as creating a new domain name for legitimate journalism, say ".jrn." Just as governments only get .gov, militaries only get .mil, and colleges only get .edu, ICANN could develop a system where only legitimate news-gathering organizations that follow strict fact-checking, correction, and journalistic ethics guidelines are allowed to get a .jrn domain. This domain would signify to all users that certain barriers have been overcome for this information to be published. Obviously, some bad actors would get through, but ICANN could set up a feedback system so that any .jrn organizations who violate the rules will have the domain name stripped. Also, as we've seen, those who are prone to propagating and believing conspiracy theories will simply deem this scheme as part of the conspiracy, but since a vast majority of people aren't prone to this thinking, it will be a way to isolate and minimize the effects of the tiny minority that do. In addition, Google, Facebook, and Twitter could play a huge role by blocking or algorithmically downgrading links from non-.jrn news sources.
It's not the answer but it's a small step in the right direction. After that, I have no idea.