Detroit, February 16, 2026 --  

Social media's populist nonsense poisons the stupid while staying invisible to smarter humans.

As British Prime Minister Kier Starmer faces calls to resign over a deputy's involvement in Jefferey Epstein scandal, many educated Britons are gripped with fear. If a general election were held today, the populist UK Independence Party would likely come to power. Brexit may have been just a preview -- electing UKIP would send the UK down a similar dark path as Donald Trump's America.

Just as educated and more liberal minded Americans blamed its electoral disaster on mindless disinformation from social media, their British counterparts are now doing the same. The Labor government need not call a general election until 2029, so another Labor leader will likely take Starmer's post even if he is forced to step down.

But that only buys the UK three years. Unless something changes, nativist rule will soon spread to the UK from America. Is social media really to blame?

Fears of political and social devolution are hardly new. In the 1990s, the increasing popularity of trash television and the election of pro-wrestler Jesse Ventura as Minnesota Governor caused similar fears of devolution. A common theory back then was that humanity would become dumber as smart people had fewer kids than dumb people. Popular shows like Beavis and Butthead and movies like Dumb and Dumber and Idiocracy were partly inspired by such ideas.

But back then, there was no social media to blame -- Facebook would not exist until the late 2000s. The perceived demon of cultural downfall was cable television with hundreds of channels, many filled with low-brow reality TV shows filled with sex, violence, and dramatic confrontations.

The dystopian movie "Idiocracy" (released in 2006 but based on a screenplay from 1996) showed humans 500 years in the future glued to trash TV as low-intelligence society began to collapse under a dim-witted pro-wrestler US president.

But is today's junk on social media really that different than low-brow content on 1990s cable TV? Perhaps the biggest difference is the breadth of information. Cable TV brought hundreds of channels that diluted programming budgets until they could only target the least common denominator. But hundreds of channels is nothing compared to the breadth of the Internet and the countless voices delivered via everyone's own social network.

It is a lot easier to push disinformation through manipulation of everybody's idiot cousin than even the dumbest of a few hundred cable channel programming directors.

So, yes, the Internet and social media have proven worse for dumbing down society than cable TV and probably has accelerated the trend.

But there a bigger difference. At the peak cable, it was impossible for smart people to ignore all the stupidity and trashiness as they flipped by dozens of low-brow channels to find something decent. They would see with their own eyes -- even if it was just a split second before the flip -- that things were going bad.

The Internet and the rise of streaming services changed that. Now smart people can go directly to websites and streamed shows catering to their interests -- no flipping through TV trash required. For smarter folks, this technological change largely hid the fact that the society continued to devolve.

Many of these people were shocked when a reality TV star was elected president in 2016 and mortified when re-elected in 2024. Mike Judge, who wrote and directed the movie Idiocracy about 500 years of devolution, told Time magazine in 2016 that he “was off by 490 years.”¹

Fortunately for Britain, their devolution hasn't quite arrived yet. But that's little solace if they have just three years to go.

Notes:

1. Time Magazine, We Have Become an Idiocracy, May 16, 2016