The Internet, in allowing people to trace historical documents and connections, has led to a new form of collective detective work. We think about crowdsourcing maps and so on. But people are crowdsourcing history and politics.
A measure of this is wild conspiracy work. But a lot isn’t. It’s a new form of historiography, and it’s changing how people explain the past to each other. It’s also revealing connections between people and organisations that were previously opaque.