I write from 2023; it is December and the world feels a much scarier place in some ways than it appears.

We have had an incredible growth in the adoption of digital technology in all aspects of our lives, and a critical threshold has been reached that may cause untold harm to be hidden and tucked away beyond all consciousness of our human civilization.

A recent epidemic caused the world to run indoors, where we got used to our lives in our hidey holes and homely pleasures. While we returned back outside after a year or two - the intervening time made us make a critical switch to receiving and consuming information about everyone and everywhere outside our immediate homes and surroundings through digital media and social news platforms.

For too many of us, even those who are reporting on 'news', the source of our information is from one digital source or another. While real journalists are still zipping about doing their work, often at peril for their lives, their voices are easily and often drowned by thousands of other voices of people who are themselves confused, uninformed, or reactive. It is hard to know what's true and what's not when all of it sounds the same - our news from social media, social platforms, and other digital sources is all too easily hacked through malicious technical, behavioral, and socially-engineered moves.

Some of our recent technology even allows offloading amazing amounts of what sounds like so much work off to an artificial intelligence software tool that is freely available on the internet.

Our social and political systems are not prepared to handle what this may mean when some of the people enjoying this technological marvel are not so nice.

Bad people (those rascals are always there and they have always been cleverly looking for hacks) have found out that:

The vast majority of human beings on the planet have access to very little actual information about the outside world because they are constantly drowned by information of all types from the most trivial to the most complex
Digitally obtained information has become the default for all information (as opposed to going over somewhere and talking to someone, or hearing it from that person there who went over and talked to someone, etc. - i.e. old school journalism and first-person in-field reporting)
Access and distribution of information on digital platforms is amazingly flexible, though regular people have hardly the time and interest to look into how easily flexible it is to do some pretty nefarious stuff: for instance it's remarkably easy today to craft some digital information (e.g. some very bad thing that someone is about to do) and manage the distribution and reporting of that information so well that any information can be suppressed, routed, or unreasonably enflamed for any group of people within digital platforms

This means that for anyone (even those in leadership positions of the world political system, national security teams, etc.), it is possible to throw bad information at such variation of volume and subtlety, that they can get confused. This is delaying individuals, governments, and entire bureaucratic systems from filtering through the head-fakes and noise to get to the information they need to get them to take any action by the time atrocities are carried out the world over.