Modern platforms enable the rapid and wide spread of information from peer to peer, whether truthful or false. But if foreign provocateurs can successfully sow discord and fan the flames to the point that there's riots in the streets, there are deeper problems in that society that have been lurking skin deep in the minds and fears of the populace, almost always tracing back to economic anxiety, even when masquerading as xenophobia or racism.

These posts about foreign psy-ops are implicitly suggesting that the representative democracy and predominantly free assembly that western states have come to expect is trivially susceptible to DDOS. This is true, but there's nothing fundamentally enshrined in the deep rulebook of history that says big western states must remain organized along such values. A populace not subject to daily economic anxiety is more willing to tolerate less representation in government without there being widespread discontent. It's a false dichotomy that a western state must either be overtly democratic or completely dysfunctional.

The remarkable thing is that mega-states loosely constituted along ethno-national lines, beholden to frequent elections and policy reversals, in a hypercompetitive world with increasingly open borders and stubbornly persistent income inequality, existed with remarkable stability for as long as they did. We've entered a time where the formula is easy to disrupt, and it's up to each state's people to evaluate how to proceed when faced with such a threat, but people worrying about the cost of living will find it hard to think of the big picture.