I've been doing some learning on digital media—graphics, video editing and so on. There's tons of money going into this stuff because we're all being made to interface with the world through what academics call Computer Mediated Communication.

There's some more spooky angles to this—people in developed countries are being physically isolated (remember "(deep) social distancing") from another and asked to get all of their information through digital channels such as news websites, YouTube, and so on. What this means is that we are expected to trust a description of reality based on second-hand sources. Truly, we don't know that the things we see on TV or in the movies are as they are presented to us.

Researching advertising or "how to lie with statistics" or even magic (as in showmen/illusionists) will show you how a lot of deception is done at scale.

To better understand stuff, an approach I've been taking is to see how stuff is done. So for example, you might here all this hype about "cloud computing". Anybody can go look up information about how this stuff is actually put together and see behind the corporate buzzwords.

This is real education—learning how things work so you can properly discern what is legit and what isn't.