Próximo futuro distópico dos EUA, onde desinformação desenfreada destruiu a "verdade"

Parece uma seção do livro de Neal Stephenson Outono; ou, esquivar no inferno. Nem todo o mundo está cheio de desinformação, mas grande parte do coração americano é. A cidade que desaparece também é um ponto importante da trama. De Revisão do The Guardian:

Meanwhile, in the “meatspace” of our world, life goes on. Shortly after Dodge’s death a midwestern town called Moab is destroyed in a nuclear attack. This is quickly shown to be a hoax, orchestrated via faked online video, massively coordinated misinformation and a few holographic special effects, but when the truth is revealed many people refuse to accept it. Fall is, among other things, an interrogation of our lamentably post-truth world, and Stephenson rolls history a couple of decades into the future to depict a US completely unmoored from factual reality. ... The way Stephenson tells it, there was a 300-year period in human history when folk by-and-large found themselves able “to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible to them”. This collective consensus peaked during what he calls “the Cronkite era”, but then “dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the internet came along”. Post-truth turns out to be a grim sort of place to live, although Stephenson’s characters aren’t ones to let the digital grass grow under their virtual feet.

O livro foi publicado em junho 2019, e Stephenson é um conhecido escritor de SF, de modo que se encaixa com "Há alguns meses, ouvi uma emissão de rádio introduzindo um novo livro de um conhecido autor de ficção científica".

Este poderia ser The Jazz (2000) de Melissa Scott?

Remember those commercials at the height of the dotcom boom, the ones that showed these amazed, enthusiastic people demanding "are you ready?" in an attempt to lure you to the Internet's supposed wonders? In Melissa Scott's version, people are, but it's hell (many form nostalgiac gated communities just to avoid it). The book is set in an indefinite future America that seems to be a generation or so from now, where most of society seems bent on amusing itself to death, especially people who "play the jazz."

And the people who play the jazz in Scott's world don't have saxophones; they have web equipment, and the idea is to spread chaos through rumour. (Anyone whose first wakeup call to the dark side of the Internet occurred on the day they received their first e-mail warning about the Good Times virus will quickly get the idea.) In one sequence, in order to create a diversion at one point the heroine, Tin Lizzy, creates chaos at a shopping mall by sending out false rumors of a new product. But let Scott tell it herself, regarding the ultimate jazz her heroine "Tin Lizzy" plays: "this was something people wanted to hear, and this one, too, was picked up and repeated."

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