After the pandemic, the public didn’t “lose trust.” That makes it sound accidental. Trust was **burned to the ground** by institutions that demanded obedience while visibly having no idea what they were doing. COVID ripped the curtain back. Experts contradicted themselves with absolute confidence. Politicians treated emergency powers like toys. Corporations hoovered up bailouts while small businesses were fed into a wood chipper. Media outlets screamed certainty today and quietly memory-holed yesterday. And when people noticed, they were told to shut up “for the greater good.” Nothing enrages humans faster than being lied to badly. The real sin wasn’t being wrong — uncertainty is unavoidable in a novel crisis. The sin was pretending uncertainty didn’t exist, enforcing policies as moral law, and then acting shocked when people remembered. Add in elite rule-breaking, selective outrage, and zero accountability, and suddenly the phrase “trust the experts” sounded less like advice and more like a threat. Then along came Twitter and later Nostr, and the priesthood lost the keys to the church. For the first time, people could watch experts fight in public instead of behind press releases. You could read the data yourself. You could see credentialed geniuses say dumb things and random anon accounts make devastatingly good points. It was chaotic, unfiltered, sometimes insane — and infinitely more honest than the curated bedtime stories on cable news. Legacy institutions called this “misinformation.” What they meant was **loss of narrative monopoly**. Were there bad takes? Mountains of them. But here’s the dirty secret: bad ideas die faster in open sunlight than in sealed rooms guarded by fact-checkers with political incentives. At least on open platforms, you can see the arguments, not just the conclusions someone decided you were allowed to hear. The pandemic didn’t make people anti-science. It made them anti-bullshit. Authority without accountability stopped working. Credentials without humility stopped impressing anyone. And media outlets that acted like compliance departments for power burned their own credibility and then blamed the audience. So now we live in a world where information isn’t certified by institutions — it’s stress-tested in public. Where trust isn’t granted by title — it’s earned by consistency and intellectual honesty. That terrifies the same people who spent decades insisting they were the only adults in the room. Too bad. The adults are watching now. Welcome to the era of open epistemic combat. You don’t have to like it — but you’re not getting your monopoly back.
