Maybe the abnormal thing was the century or so we had of papers/radio/TV guided by ethics or professionalism or some delicate trustworthiness-equilibrium.

And now we have returned to a state where humanity is guided by inventive stories and manipulated by propaganda.

This implies that the period with massively more centralized control of information had a truer consensus reality.

That seems… unlikely?

It was better than the illusion of freedom of information a lot of people have now. In reality mass manipulation is happening on a global scale at unprecedented levels.

At least they mostly felt the need to pick a single consensus reality to approximate. How well it represented common experience, well...

It wasn't that centralized (many many independent newspapers and such).

And then "information" is doing a lot of work when you start talking about social media.

You know what the weirdest thing about that century is? The Soviets.

A sort of seemingly valid communal society seemed possible so all the other capitalism based ones had competition and as a result were trying to improve the life of citizens.

I'm starting to become more and more convinced that as real fear of Communism disappeared at the top, our systems are regressing to the mean.

It wasn't predicted because freedom of speech is generally considered a good thing so its darker aspects were never considered.

Same reason adtech has free reign to bring down society.