Brilliantly said.

In the Good Old Days, part of the role of a good education was to set oneself up to join influential social groups. These groups contained smart, interesting, learned people. They tacitly or overtly selected new members based on how smart, interesting, and learned they were. You can get the grades but remain excluded if your interviewer at Oxford or Harvard thinks you are boring, or the chaps at the Worcesthampton Natural History Club think you’re an uncouth moron, or the managing partner at Wasper & Vanderson LLP doesn’t find you engaging enough. It’s not just these posh elite groups either. Hacker cliques, artists communes, and the like have always focused on cultivating an elite membership on some axis or other through exclusivity that rewarded interestingness.

What is the equivalent nowadays? Are these groups being taken over by fakers who are constantly all pretending to each other, to the extent that the entire ranks fill up with people who can’t spell competence without a computer? If someone makes an interesting remark about a poet or artwork or engineering practice does everyone else excuse themselves for a bathroom break in order to open up Wikipedia and find something interesting to say in response?

Do they actively reward fakers, seeking out their ilk to the point that the most influential groups are the ones filled with the best self-promotion soloists? Or perhaps the whole ideal of influential social groups is just going to disappear?

Society is going to big on IRL communication and activity in my view. It's sort of like office work, anyone who has ever worked in large corporations can spot a faker a mile off. Some people who can wax lyrical nothingness in meetings they've prepared for etc. but grab them unprepared an the artifice is pretty clear. Same thing will happen in wider society because ultimately our existing filtering systems which were kind of outsourced to schools etc. are seemingly in the process of breaking down

I disagree about your final conclusion. To add another aphorism to your collection, "The pendulum always swings back".

Or, "the tide goes out, and reveals those who are skinny-dipping".

In this context, the crisis--brown-outs; natural disaster; political instability--will show who retains enough knowledge or hard-copy references and resources to survive.

I'd love to hear a good argument for optimism if you've got one. I suppose the pendulum thing works sometimes on certain timescales, but for a physical analogy "shit rolling downhill" might be more accurate. Typically doesn't roll back up and momentum builds. Just as "rich get richer" and inequality accelerates, so "bullshit makes bullshit" and things begin to spiral if truth / earnest effort is not even neutral, but now arguably a disadvantage as mentioned in TFA. Small course-corrections seem pretty rare in history or in nature without revolutions or catastrophe

From that one quote alone you can likely tell this was written by AI.

Other comments suggest the same. Ironic, isn't it?

The city I once knew as home is teetering on the edge of radioactive oblivion.

A three-hundred thousand degree baptism by nuclear fire.

I’m not sorry, we had it coming.

A surge of white hot atonement will be our wakeup call.

Hope for our future is now a stillborn dream.

That’s the sort of winner mentality America needs much much more of.

yeah the real war is between people who do useful stuff and the trillion dollar industry which means to displace them.