We're all used to the obvious rot and see it every day; Advil's Black Pain Equity campaign, pronoun sections on corporate meeting software, "safe injection sites" funded by municipal governments being a hot bed for drug abuse. That stuff is so brazen that anybody with a brain and without an agenda will be repelled immediately.
But what about the subtle rot? I'll use the Onion as an example. Perhaps its a bad example since they are a good showing of obvious rot, but I just learned that they purged their old African-American neighborhood terrorized by ask murderer headline and it happened with no fanfare at all. A slow purging of old material deemed ungood; a memory holing except for the fact that the Onion used to be printed on paper and people just took pictures of the old headline. But the point stands -- I had no idea it was purged until I deliberately went looking for it, and its the only old "edgy" Onion headline that appears to have been purged in this fashion.
What else have others observed?
At work today I mentioned in passing that it was the Ides of March when Caesar was assassinated. One of the Zoomers I work with, aged maybe 20, had no idea who Julius Caesar was. This is no diversity hire: he's a white kid.
The rot, fundamentally, is made possible by ignorance, and we've created entire generations of people who just. don't. know anything.
I was shopping for a modem online and found the one I wanted at my local Target, so I scooted over there and asked the kid in the electronics department where the modems were kept.
"What's a modem?"
"...are you serious?"
"I don't know what that is"
I'm not one for disparaging people but I didn't know how to continue that conversation diplomatically. The heart of modernity in every house is unknown to the people trying to distribute them.