Thoughtful piece by David Wallace-Wells on the conspiratorial and paranoid turn of American society:

But what happens when history starts to resemble myth, when the inconsistencies reveal themselves not through deep study but in the most superficial scroll of our phones?

The new age of political paranoia obviously reflects a toxic efflorescence of grass-roots distrust, not to mention the structural pathologies of a new information environment. But sometimes I wonder whether we’re putting too much emphasis on those structures in trying to make sense of that paranoia. Is conspiracy theory downstream from culture, in other words, or from history? Is it a question of how information flows to us or what flotsam is coming our way? Probably the influence doesn’t run in just one direction, however comforting it may be to believe a less polluted information environment is just a few design tweaks away.