Rich and powerful people read and watch the exact same slop everyone else does.

There isn't a better, smarter news that doesn't lie to them or make stuff up or hide the most important thing on the ninth page. There is no TikTok for rich people that hasn't got any brainrot on it. Their YouTube recommendations are full of crazy people.

There may have once been a clean separation between the propaganda that was pushed out for normal people and the things that clever, in-the-know people believed, but it's basically gone now. Everyone in charge, everyone who matters, thinks that the version they see on TV is the real thing that really happened, even when the news is lying. What people say happened matters more than what happened.

When we're lucky, people in important positions are more like your smart friends than your dumb friends, and maybe have a little more information about the parts of things they are personally involved in. When we're unlucky they are likely worse off than any random person off the street, because people make millions of dollars by telling them what they want to hear or just lying to them to scare them and to sell more consultant services.

Newspapers really can just tell the government what to do. Official government announcements are 4chan-style meme videos that smell like NFT marketing, presentations at policy conferences are full of pokemon and 2010 blogger beefs. If you want to know which major leader is going to do what, you can actually just figure they'll do whatever the most podcast for someone like them says to do, and you'll usually be right.

We say that "the internet is real life", and among other things this means that the information environment is almost completely flat. There is public information, slightly less public information that you might have to bypass a paywall for, and then niche subculture information that only a few thousand people know, but those few thousand people are scattered across the Earth and at least a hundred of them are children.

Flow demands I have a closing here, but I really don't. This comes up all the time because people seem to imagine that the things they say and do don't matter, that someone somewhere is better informed and knows that the complete bullshit that's everywhere is bullshit. That isn't real. There is every indication that every stupid thing that's popular on the internet is likely to be government policy. You should take them that seriously.