Brexit, Trump and a post-factual world

The most upsetting trend that started with ‪#‎Brexit‬ and culminated with President Trump is what I call the post-factual discussion era. The technology you have in your hands today has opened up the world’s information to a level never previously imagined. It truly allowed us to be more open and connected, but it has also trained our brain to reward two behaviors.
The first is what I call instant gratification information (we prefer to read short bits of information instead of spending time on more insightful reading that takes longer to process).

The second is to seek confirmation bias, a strong tendency to only read what agrees with our previously conceived point of view (there is so much access to information and people that we chose to follow the ones that don’t challenge our point of view). These are huge downsides of social networks and free unlimited access to the world’s information.
Post-factual discussion leads to politics that appeals to the most basic of human nature. It’s a lot easier to run an entire campaign appealing to “fear of immigrants” on short, sweet soundbites that is actually to discuss policy intricately.

As a result, I predict a very tough future for some of the western democracies. For years, we’ve trained our brains to seek only the immediate, not to dig deeper, to just crave that instantaneous release of dopamine. Some politicians know this and are leveraging it to access power with a very dangerous agenda and rhetoric.

There is one positive side that I see: now the world’s elites know that it is possible for a nation to vote against itself. This will significantly increase the amount of empathy towards less developed countries which in turn will create stronger bonds in the long term.

Democracy is, by nature, imperfect. We are just witnessing her make one of the biggest mistakes possible.