I feel like in 30 years (if we're all still alive by then) we're gonna talk about like FoxNews and Facebook like cigarettes or amphetamines. This is an observable phenomenon.

I sure hope so. It's exhausting pushing back against the "it's just entertainment; entertainment has no effect on me" mantras of those consuming it. No one is immune to propaganda, least of all those who believe that they are immune to it.

Older folk slammed face first onto the internet in like 2015, without the decades of acclimating to it.

Facebook went public in 2012. There's always going to be a lag with this kind of thing. Immediately before, Facebook was strictly for young people, mainly students. It was an unspoken rule that if older people or non-students joined, you didn't friend them. That changed quite quickly, really.

Fast forward to 2015. FB shareholders are only in it if it makes bank. And the interested security services partners are only interested to control the narrative. So they've opened FB to everyone. As you say, it's the first time the older generation has used the internet for fun.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some level of orchestration to make sure those new users hit a curated wall of propaganda from the get go. Because it guarantees an audience, which can be sold to advertisers. And it guarantees that the audience isn't going to move away from terrestrial and cable TV to consume anything wholesome. It's slop or nothing. So not only were they not acclimated. They never got a chance to become acclimated to anything that looked like reasonable discourse.

They did the same with streaming. Until around 2013 if you wanted to stream music or videos you went on YouTube or heaved ho and hoisted the skull and crossbones. Then came Netflix, which made the risks of the high seas disproportionately risky. So the same generation that ran head first into the FB wall started treading water in media libraries curated by the secret services on behalf of the haute bourgeoisie. They didn't stand a chance.

I'd like to be around when the records of 2010–2020 are made public in the FALCSRs of, say 2035 (too optimistic?), so I can read the books that come out revealing exactly what we've been up against.

I think part of it is that for white boomers, both the USA and Canada offered a reasonable quality of life. You could own a home, 2 cars, and raise a family on a single income and a 40 hour work week. Neoliberalism (and the fact that this was unsustainable due to its reliance on imperialism) made this impossible for gen X. But at the same time, gen X was raised on red scare, anti-communist propaganda. They're unable to reconcile with the fact that the problem is Capitalism. And so they turn to the reactionary propaganda, because they have to blame something or someone for this decline.

Facebook fucks with people's heads even when they're not super conservative. Facebook liberals are low key insane too, just less aggressive

we're gonna talk about like FoxNews and Facebook like cigarettes or amphetamines

1,000%. My dad is usually just sitting and watching Fox News/Fox Business half the day. But there are times where for one reason or another, he doesn’t watch it for weeks. There is a marked difference in his demeanor in the two situations. He’s happier, less angry, and more apathetic (in a good way) to politics when he’s not watching. There’s something to the addictive quality of those things.