Opinionrot: Toward a Theory of Collective Reasoning Decay in the Age of Synthetic Consensus

This article introduces the concept of opinionrot to describe the structural erosion of collective reasoning within contemporary information systems. Rather than treating post-truth politics as a failure of individual rationality or as a decline in information quality alone, the article argues that public reasoning is increasingly shaped by infrastructures that capture attention, monetize cognitive bias, and automate the conditions under which claims become visible and credible. Methodologically, the article proceeds through a conceptual-historical reconstruction, tracing how persuasion became institutionalized, platformized, and increasingly predictive. It identifies three mechanisms through which opinionrot intensifies today: cognitive capture, infrastructural decay, and discursive saturation. The framework is illustrated through debates over equality and affirmative action, showing how communicative infrastructures can transform contested political concepts into predictable and polarized semantic routines. By shifting the analysis from discrete falsehoods to the conditions under which public judgment is formed, contested, and revised, the article offers a diagnostic vocabulary for studying how information infrastructures increasingly convert deliberation into statistical efficiency within contemporary economies of attention.