As the internet has changed all our lives, I'm curious in the modern history of the internet if anyone saw this coming early on. Here is an example of what I am talking about:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/01/far-right-conspiracy-theory-us-civil-war?CMP=fb_gu
Is there a particular thinker that gets credit for predicting this phenomenon?
Perhaps, earlier work pre-internet about the correlation between easier dissemination of information and the rise of conspiracy theories would be insightful as well.
Thank you, /AskHistorians
Check out these Quotes from David Brins ,,Earth" and ,,The Transparent Society (published in 1990 and 1999 respectively) as well as William Gibsons ,,The Road to Oceania"
*[George] Orwell's projections come from the era of information broadcasting, and are not applicable to our own. Had Orwell been able to equip Big Brother with all the tools of artificial intelligence, he would still have been writing from an older paradigm, and the result could never have described our situation today, nor suggested where we might be heading.
That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or, increasingly, government control.
It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.
In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.
I say ''truths,'' however, and not ''truth,'' as the other side of information's new ubiquity can look not so much transparent as outright crazy. Regardless of the number and power of the tools used to extract patterns from information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or another. A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what's going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll agree about it any more readily.*
-William Gibson, The Road to Oceania. The New York Times, June 25th 2003