This Is How We Radicalized The World

This is a long read but well worth your time. I've never before seen one story that brings together all of the political shifts that we've seen in the past few years around the world. My only gripe is that he doesn't go into why this is happening, though that is perhaps best dealt with in a separate article, or discussion from this one.

As I've documented in the American Intelligence and Election Hacking topic, organizations like Cambridge Analytica and Fancy Bear/Internet Research Agency interfere in elections in multiple countries; this problem is not exclusively ours. But, it's one we need to address starting with ourselves and on up to holding our representatives accountable for their words and actions, and regulating the social media giants that don't protect our data or our exposure to hate speech, threats, and doxxing. Civility is not a weakness, nor is it "politically correct."

This Is How We Radicalized The World
On Sunday, far-right evangelical Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. The era of being surprised at this kind of politics is over. Now we have to live with what we've done.
Ryan Broderick, BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on October 28, 2018, at 6:35 p.m. ET

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — From the balcony of BuzzFeed’s São Paulo office right now, you can hear screams of “Ele Não” echoing through the city’s winding avenues. It’s the same phrase I’ve seen graffitied all over the city this month. The same one I heard chanted from restaurants and bars all afternoon. It means “not him” — him being Bolsonaro. But his victory tonight isn’t a surprise. He’s just one more product of the strange new forces that dictate the very fabric of our lives.

It’s been a decade since I first felt like something was changing about the way we interact with the internet. In 2010, as a young news intern for a now-defunct website called the Awl, one of the first pieces I ever pitched was an explainer about why 4chan trolls were trying to take the also now-defunct website Gawker off the internet via a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. It was a world I knew. I was a 19-year-old who spent most of my time doing what we now recognize as “shitposting.” It was the beginning of an era where our old ideas about information, privacy, politics, and culture were beginning to warp.

I’ve followed that dark evolution of internet culture ever since. I’ve had the privilege — or deeply strange curse — to chase the growth of global political warfare around the world. In the last four years, I’ve been to 22 countries, six continents, and been on the ground for close to a dozen referendums and elections. I was in London for UK’s nervous breakdown over Brexit, in Barcelona for Catalonia’s failed attempts at a secession from Spain, in Sweden as neo-Nazis tried to march on the country’s largest book fair. And now, I’m in Brazil. But this era of being surprised at what the internet can and will do to us is ending. The damage is done. I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that I’ll probably spend the rest of my career covering the consequences.