Quantity and access to information is only one side of the equation. The other side is relevance and the meaning that information affords us. If it doesn’t help us orient ourselves better in the world, if we can’t make sense of it, that information is useless, or even harmful. Decohered is the right word, but I don’t think it is only a product of the drastic increase in virality of memes. It is also our sense-making apparatus being broken or hugely behind the information influx that is created by the platform. This like informational obesity, influx of calories that can’t be translated into nutrition. Right now youtube’s policy layer and recommendation algorithms are the only machinery for deciding relevance and sense making on this exponential transfer of information happening. A black box machinery built for maximizing ad revenue, will naturally fall short on making us wiser, relevant or coherent. In fact, it is more natural for ad revenue maximizing to align better with us being more consumptive, polarized and addicted.
But long term you get things like multicellularity, complex nervous systems, the scientific method, civilization and art. The road may be rocky but I see no reason for it to be any different here.
What we're seeing is the breakdown of consolidated narratives. It used to be that people's beliefs were all wrong in the same way. You'll note that this looks basically identical to everyone being well informed.
Now that we've moved into a regime of information abundance it looks like the world's gone crazy, when really it's just decohered.
That said, youtube as a vector is spreading the most virulent memetic viruses we've ever seen. Hard to say how it shakes out though, memes aren't all bad. Everything good we've ever done started off as a meme too.