> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.

This was always true, right? With enough $, you can employ N writers. But the constant factor is smaller than it once was.

Only for relatively low values of N. It’s really difficult to scale organizations up and down for election cycles.

Historically you’d quickly reach a point where each additional writer was more expensive than the last.

There were times and places in history where truth was valued, respected, and rewarded.

You could not employ N writers even if you had the money, because there were not enough good writers. And they needed to care about remaining adjacent to reality, or their reputation would (rightfully) be ruined as a fraud. Things were slow enough that the average person could see that they were being bullshat. These were the golden ages of human progress.

It's not the world we live in today.