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There is one answer and only one answer to this problem.

Intellectual self defence.

Problem is, it's the worst possible answer for those in power.

Because if we the people can defend ourselves against foreign state actors trying to rip up our democracy, we might conceivably start defending against threats closer to home.

Agreed 100%.

And the fact that in a democracy we are ok to becoming an idiocracy for our temporary comfort indicates we are already an idiocracy perhaps -- hopefully untrue and just a joking statement.

I personally think people get the movie Idiocracy wrong when they see it as a warning of what could happen. I personally take it as a story of how, if you took someone 100 years ago and moved them to today, they would feel very much like they were already in that world. The movie is just using even further exaggerations of what America has become today, in order to shine a light on what's already happened: we've become idiots in many ways. Idiocracy is already here, we already do a ton of useless crap for comfort and aesthetics, but we all just got used to it and don't see how fucked the country has become. We've already gotten to the point where adding classes pre-college about dis/misinformation would probably be considered indoctrination of some kind, so we kinda lost.

I agree with your synopsis. Idiocracy is allegorical of now.

And you're right that one would meet stiff resistance broaching the matter head-on. Misunderstanding, offence, divisions and accusations of indoctrination would surely fly.

So I tried a different approach, some of which is mentioned but not documented in detail here [1]. The discussion of art and literature as a method can be extended from digital self defence to a more general "intellectual self defence".

The long and short of it is that this has all happened before. Great civilisations have fallen into the intellectual doldrums. That's why we have literature, poems, plays and songs. The Arts are there to rescue us from this sort of nonsense when we reason ourselves into the corner of stupidity.

[1] http://www.icicte.org/assets/icicte2019_5.4_farnell.pdf

Would agree that we are totally screwed now. I tend to wonder sometimes if we've actually always been this dumb, but now that we are connected enough we can see it better. And this phenomenon seems to amplify not only how dumb we are, but for people to act even more dumb.

I love the internet, but a great experiment IMO would be turning it off for three to six months just to see what would happen. I know it's not possible, but the idea still runs through my head here and there.

> Intellectual self defence

Can you explain what that is, I'm not familiar with the term?

It's a fancy-ass way of talking about education.

You might call it "streetwise" education - but that wouldn't quite capture it, because it's more about spotting a bad argument or con artist. The kind of education that creates robust citizens (as opposed to the 18th century dogshite we teach kids today to keep them dumb).

Here's a link to how the Finns approach it [1].

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/how-finland-can-help-us...

Ah thanks. This solution does seem to have a bootstrapping problem, especially since "critical thinking" is already a hot potato.

> Everytime you've got a non US citizen or resident tweeting, retweeting, and other such about US political topics, that's state warfare

I am sorry, but that makes no sense.

Is there some reason to think that the DHS policies described in the source article are limited to or even targeted at non-citizens? It really doesn't seem like this is what they have in mind. If they were concerned about foreign influence of domestic political discussions, wouldn't they be focused much more on Tiktok ownership and relationships with hostile foreign powers than misinformation on Covid-19?

DHS is trying to justify their existence. It's the old "self licking ice cream cone" situation.

What does ownership have to do with misinformation? A hostile power can spread misinformation through services owned by them or not.

Owning a major communications service allows them to spread misinformation that's not popular enough to go viral normally, as well as suppressing true information that they find inconvenient.

Agreed, used to be outlandish and questionable content was relegated to known publications such as the National Inquirer (a weekly purveyor of alien, crop circle and 90 year old grand mothers giving birth) in the US. Nowadays with the decline of journalism, and decrease in editorial objectivism, it's almost impossible to know what information can be trusted. It's a sad state of affairs.

I think there will always be this conflict between the state and the open internet. The state is an institution of the past, and the internet is an institution of the future that transcends any state in particular

The critical question is this: how can we preserve an open internet without opening the door for foreign governments to wage psychological warfare?

This doesn't ring true to me. It's like saying "roads are an institution of the future". The internet is a set of technologies, not an organization or community with any particular purpose or creed.