There are always malevolent people in the world. They simply lack the means of acting. Raising an army is actually quite hard. But we dont need to raise armies any longer.
We celebrated the benefits of literacy. But we celebrated literacy among our culture of truth telling. We did not account for the misuse of literacy, the misuse of printing, the misuse of education, the misuse of radio, television, and film to construct elaborate lies. The most important was, to justify lying.
The abuse of information systems whether it be the pricing system, or the education system, or the media, has been just as damaging as any war or plague – perhaps more so. We have survived the thirty years war. The world war. But we did not survive I suspect, a century and a half of lying (pseudoscience).