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No cups. Fire hose fed by pipes made of lead, rotting wood, and bisphenol plastic, and filtered through other people's kidneys.
Is it inherently bad? Out of control? Something else?
It's a mix. The amount of information coming at people is vast, so much so as to be impossible to fully manage. It's also tainted in various ways to various degrees. Some forms of misinformation are simply caustic, destroying the individual as they ingest it. Some is ideologically carcinogenic, creating harmful lumps that slowly choke off the host. Some is intentional, taint added by malicious actors. Some is negligent, added by those who don't know or don't care that it does harm. Some is well-meaning, impurities added because the adder likes them, regardless of the other effects it might have. And some is just there from sources long dead, still circulating because the filters haven't caught it all. You can try to filter it but it's a firehose. It's nigh impossible.
It could be inherently flawed. We look at a picture or a symbol and pretend it's real. That's insane. I mean, I know that's kinda how it works, but still. Insane.
Or maybe it's imprecise to call it a flaw. Maybe call it a trap, to be careful of. But nobody's careful. (So that's maybe an "out of control" situation)
(I know I'm not. I mean case in point. I'm watching this movie "don't look up" right now and I'm getting all teary-eyed and stuff. It's a fucking movie. An illusion of flickering images and bullshit. I know with great certainty that it's just a fantasy but I'm still having this reaction. So that's insane)
Believing illusions is much older than photography. People went to plays and laughed and wept before anyone ever thought of how to capture it for replayabiliy. It seems to be an inbuilt function of human compassion or sympathy.
Taking a step back, one can also realise even the 'real' events are illusion. The Case Against Reality is a reminder the human mind doesn't have privileged view of reality, and never did. Existence monism, or the oneness of being, erases the lines we draw to make maps of reality. It's all just sensory data. ...But, that's a deeper rabbit hole than I feel like diving into just now.