I've said a lot about this before but I honestly do not understand anymore what the basis there is anymore for the contemporary counter-disinfo project

I see endless reports about coordinated hashtags on social media and such. Meanwhile the President gets up on stage and says "2+2=5" all day long.

Furthermore, little things like "how safe is it to go outside" become complicated things to adjudicate both because of scientific uncertainty and the demonstrated willingness of public health organizations to ineptly lie to us

I think @CybereVitas put it best when she said that she doesn't really know what if anything counter-disinfo is trying to protect. There is little sense of an overarching goal that was present in equivalent orgs during the Cold War.

In the absence of that, there's simply a robotic pattern of reacting with alarm at an endless series of communication outrages -- the latest of which is apparently the far right using Amazon self-publishing to write books

It's not like the invention of the printing press led to total anarchy, it also created a formidable centralization of information in and of itself that reached its apex in the mid-20th century. But there is no going back to the world before it

and the particular status hierarchies that are being implicitly referenced in that meme

Dave Karpf is correct here about the sort of missing theory of victory https://mediawell.ssrc.org/expert-reflections/on-digital-disinformation-and-democratic-myths/

But what I think I would add is that the gap in a credible theory of victory led to some fundamentally bad wagers being taken out

and almost all of these wagers, as Karpf implies, have to do with taking what the propaganda makers say at face value. People are too stupid to sort true from false. Giving them more options to sort through only will result in disaster. They have to be controlled.