Part of the issue lies in the relation between information and the reality it maps. With a profound material complexity in the real world, it requires a substantial amount of information processing, or an incredibly elegant and effective way of organizing and simplifying that information, and oftentimes both things are required to even make sense of that reality.
It is not just the information that is doing the work. The enormous chain of complexity is partially managed through division of labor, both in breadth of occupation and across time. Children are brought up with inherited worldviews and heuristics, which are intimately passed on in the household and in school and in other places, and then the aggregate of this activity comes into contact with media itself, and as the prepared information enters, it is processed and acted upon with the desired result.
This is where information fabrication - or media - comes in, which not only concerns itself with collecting information, but with designing vehicles for distribution and digestion for that information, and with handling the way in which the information is collected and apprehended in the first place, and contending with the pre-cognitive functions, effects, and biases and the like which are cultivated in the greater society.
Our problem is that this information fabrication system is constantly in danger of monopolization and hijacking towards private ends, and so the greater body of average individuals that depend on this system are manipulated back and forth through their dependency towards private interests.
There is a way around this. However, outside of the captured social average, it falls upon the individual - or an association of individuals, with its more limited set of resources - to make sense of reality outside of the captured groupthink. And the individual - or associations of individuals - standing outside must possess a far greater capacity of mental horsepower, so to speak.
This is because to truly understand the nature and dynamics of any given thing, one has to understand all of the mechanics of that thing, and all of the elements outside of that thing which interact with it, and which either compare with it or contrast with it, and bring the nature of the thing into sharper relief as it connects to everything else.
In the mainstream this is handled through a massive interrelated division of labor, but within the alternative circuits, it takes savant-like figures to transmit and understand the information at the scale and sophistication required to successfully navigate the underlying reality and act on it.
The catch here is that savant-like figures tend to be rarer and in a minority, and that the average person - who is dependent on the mainstreaming and streamlining of information which takes off a cognitive load - is far more numerous and more efficacious in a material way. So there is a constant struggle over control of the greater media ecosystem and its effects.
