I see a fork ahead, as I’m sure you do. The fork, as always, is whether the better angels of our nature win the latest battle, or we descend into chaos.

Essentially, as I see it, we will, on average, eschew the garbage information that we are now presented with in the same way that the Enlightenment overthrew millennia of utter bullshit.

Or, we will, on average, succumb to technological fabulism on a grand scale.

If I were to bet, I would lay my chips on the truth if for no other reason that contemporary civilization requires systems of knowledge that yield predictable outcomes. 

We are so far down the path of predictable outcomes that fabulism cannot last long. 

Fabulism may work in the short term, but the window of fabulism is quite short–about half the wavelength of the economic cycle.

When things go really wrong economically–and those in thrall of fabulist world-making discover that their bad ideas yield bad economic outcomes, they snap to pretty quickly.

There hasn’t been a bad economy for nearly ten years. When it happens again, all of the fluff about alternative facts will be wiped clean. At that point, America becomes nothing but pragmatic.

The other fork, though, may suck us under is if a shocking event akin to 9/11 happens before the economic downturn. If that happens, there’s no stopping the fabulists.