How much do we rely on media information?

First of all, a little disclaimer: I do not necessarily think they are lying about the Corona virus or the fact that we're currently under threat from this pandemic.

But the situation has made me far more aware of how much we rely on the mainstream media, who is often guilty of propagating propaganda.

If they decided to create a false pandemic, could they? Or rather, couldn't they?

We hear about a few people sick in a few places. This spreading virus. Maybe it's a real virus. Maybe it's a real threat. Maybe it's created by something else, like poisonings. Would we know?

Maybe we'd figure it out eventually if they were just poisoning random people and declaring them to be victims of a pandemic. But maybe not, if they were really careful and controlled with specific government workers and keeping outside doctors from learning too much about it.

But really, everything we learn about these situations is from the media, other than maybe a few random social media posts by people that caught it.

But couldn't that be faked as well?

Imagine if they decided to up the panic with the media, talking about some future pandemic, and how big of a threat it is, then they put their social media bots to work on spreading the information as well.

Right now, there are a number of paid actors, from who knows where, spreading information, true or not, on social media. Not everyone is one of these bots. If you were to believe some people, half the population of social media is bots. The reality is that it's been a problem for a long time, either with commercial spam, or someone deciding to spread whatever information. And a lot of people get banned or deactivated by semi-automated services, as bots. Possibly more actual people get banned for being a bot than actual bots. Places like Twitter and Facebook are really quite horrible at detecting them.

But imagine in a few years when the media might be created by advanced AI, and you can't tell the difference between bots and humans online. What if they decided to create a situation to keep people inside. How hard would it really be to slowly move society towards a point where everyone stayed inside and away from others?

To me, it seems like it might not actually be that hard.

I can easily imagine a future where we live in small 6 by 6 rooms, our beds touching either wall and folding up into one, and the walls made of LCD's maybe. Or maybe just one. Maybe we would even have nano-bots in the floor that roll as you walk, to create a sort of personal holodeck where you could walk to your heart's content, in a virtual world.

Going out and meeting people is too dangerous. Humans spread disease. You could get sick and die. Better to stay inside. You can just interact with people online.

Seems a bit crazy today, but I wonder how long until it's either possible, or likely.

The control the information. The conspiracy theorists may be a bit crazy sometimes, but they do have that bit right. They could feed us whatever information they want, and we'd have to either believe it, or risk being labeled one of those crazy conspiracy theorists.

We're moving into a new time, where society is changing massively, and there actually seems to be a massive risk where we could easily fall into a dystopia of many different types.

We're gonna be stuck inside for weeks, or maybe months, or even possibly years. Yes, years. It is believed it will take possibly 18 months to get a vaccine for the corona virus that's causing all this panic. Hopefully it will be sooner than that. But there's also the possibility that it could mutate in some way to no longer be susceptible to whatever vaccine we make. Maybe that's not that likely, I dunno. Maybe we'll be able to quarantine those still sick well enough that we'll be able to start going back to normal in a few weeks. Or maybe because our health system sucks, we'll have massive numbers of people that are sick that aren't even known, and we'll not really be able to go back to normal for a long ass time.

I don't necessarily think it will actually be years that we'll be stuck inside, but I think there's a remote possibility, if the virus mutates enough, and goes back through the population one or more times. The so called seasonal situation. We better hope this shit doesn't become seasonal, or as common as the cold, another corona virus.

There is a likelihood that many more people will work from home in the future due to this though, and the possibility that we'll all be a bit more cautious about human interaction. Maybe wearing masks in public might become more common in America. Maybe we'll continue to see people shopping in masks and gloves in the future.

I'm not so sure that we'll move into a dystopian future where people only interact in very limited ways except online, at least not right away, but this whole situation has made me more aware of how they could create a situation where some threat causes all of society to change, and us all to stay inside like good little boys and girls.

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