Episode Details

Before the internet, every town in America had them.

The guy at the end of the bar who thought the moon landing was faked. The woman in the break room who swore the government was hiding aliens. The neighbor who bought every tabloid at the grocery store checkout and believed every word.

Before the internet, grocery stores used to sell these trashy magazines at the checkout counter filled with fake headlines designed to trick stupid people into buying them. Headlines like “Woman Gives Birth to Alien Baby.” And people bought them. Eagerly. Repeatedly. Without a shred of skepticism.

Everyone knew who these people were. They were the gullible ones. Not very bright. Not all there mentally. And most people just laughed it off because it didn’t matter. These people were harmless. They were scattered across the country in random towns with no way of connecting to each other. There was no infrastructure for stupidity. No network. No platform. No way for the guy in Ohio who believed in alien babies to find the woman in Texas who believed the same thing. They were isolated. And isolated gullible people are just local entertainment. Sad, a little funny, and ultimately irrelevant.

Then the internet happened.

In 2001, legal scholar Cass Sunstein at Harvard University published a book called Republic.com that predicted almost exactly what was about to happen to American democracy. Sunstein had spent years studying how people consume information and how groups form opinions. What he found was unsettling. When people have the ability to choose their own information sources, they don’t seek out the most accurate ones. They seek out the ones that already agree with them. And when they find other people who share their beliefs, something dangerous happens.

They don’t moderate each other. They radicalize each other.

Sunstein called it group polarization. The principle is simple and devastating. When like-minded people talk only to other like-minded people, their views don’t stay the same. They get more extreme. The group doesn’t pull people toward the middle. It pushes them toward the edges. The most extreme voice in the room gains the most social currency. And everyone else moves in that direction to keep up. Not because they’re thinking harder. Because they’re thinking less. The group is doing the thinking for them.

Before the internet, this process was limited by geography. You could only talk to the people around you. And the people around you were diverse enough, by accident of proximity, that you were constantly encountering people who disagreed with you. You had to deal with the neighbor who thought your alien baby theory was idiotic. You had to sit next to someone at work who rolled their eyes when you brought up your conspiracy. That friction kept people tethered to reality. Not because they wanted to be tethered. Because they had no choice.

The internet removed that friction entirely.

For the first time in human history, gullible people could find other gullible people instantly, across state lines, across time zones, by the millions. They could form groups. They could create communities. They could talk to each other all day, every day, in spaces where nobody ever disagreed with them and nobody ever challenged them.

And exactly what Sunstein predicted would happen, happened.

They got more extreme. They got more confident. They got louder. The tabloid readers who used to believe in alien babies started believing the election was stolen. The people who used to think the government was hiding UFOs started thinking the government was trafficking children. The scale of the delusion grew because the network that supported it grew. And the network grew because the technology made it effortless.

Sunstein updated his warnings in 2009 with Going to Extremes and again in 2017 with #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Each editi