The New Inequality Is Judgment
The modern information crisis is not simply that there is too much false information. The deeper problem is that the cost of producing bullshit has fallen almost to zero, while the cost of judgment remains high.
For a long time, newspapers and traditional media functioned as central institutions of public knowledge. But it would be too nostalgic to say that the old media environment was necessarily more truthful. It was often more controlled, more limited, and less competitive. Its authority came not only from verification or neutrality, but also from scarcity. There were fewer channels through which ordinary people could compare, challenge, or reinterpret what they were told.
The internet changed that. Social media changed it even more. Information became more democratic. A person with enough curiosity and discipline can now access lectures, papers, foreign newspapers, expert discussions, primary documents, and alternative interpretations that would have been difficult to reach in the past. In that sense, the new world is not only polluted. It is also more open.
But every expansion of freedom creates a corresponding expansion of disorder. When the cost of distribution approaches zero, valuable information spreads faster, but so does nonsense. A half-true sentence, a misleading headline, an emotionally satisfying accusation, or a simple phrase that explains a complex event can travel further than careful analysis. Not because it is true, but because it is easy to repeat.
This is why bullshit is more dangerous than ordinary lies. A lie still has a relationship with truth; it knows what it is trying to hide. Bullshit is different. It is often indifferent to truth. Its goal is not accuracy, but effect: attention, anger, belonging, confidence, and the feeling that one has understood something difficult.
Many people are not attracted to bullshit because they are incapable of intelligence. They are attracted to it because complexity is uncomfortable. People fear not understanding the world, but they also fear appearing ignorant. A simple, forceful sentence resolves both anxieties at once. It gives the speaker something to say and the listener something to believe. It turns uncertainty into posture.
This is where the danger lies. Without training, much of what people call “their own opinion” may be repeated language borrowed from the crowd. This is not limited to the uneducated. Even professors, doctors, and experts can mistake absorbed interpretations for truths they discovered themselves. They may imitate without recognizing the imitation. Intelligence does not automatically produce judgment, and status does not guarantee truth-seeking. Judgment has to be trained.
The task, then, is not to doubt everything. Cynicism is not critical thinking. To reject every claim is no better than believing every claim. The harder task is classification: to ask whether something is mostly true, conditionally true, unknowable with available evidence, knowable only after serious effort, or mostly false. Good judgment does not stop at suspicion. It tries to locate the epistemic status of a claim.
Even that is not enough. Information becomes valuable only when interpretation turns into insight, and insight turns into action. In a world where everyone can access information, access itself is no longer the main advantage. The advantage belongs to those who can evaluate information, connect it to reality, and act before the crowd finishes repeating the slogan.
The age of information democratization is therefore not only a crisis. It is also a sorting mechanism. It exposes who merely consumes information and who can metabolize it. It rewards those who can resist the instinct to imitate, the desire to sound certain, and the comfort of simple explanations.
The old world allowed many people to outsource their judgment to a few institutions. The new world does not permit that luxury. In a world where bullshit is cheap, good judgment and insight become rare assets.