I will second this.
We in the younger generations are fairly spoiled when it comes to information. While I can still criticize prior generations for not being more inquisitive - the fact remains that I have, in my pocket, access to almost any piece of information human beings have with a few taps of my thumbs.
It has gone from "how do I go about finding information" to "how do I sift through all this information?" People used to spend days at the library to find a tiny little snippet that would be a subsection in a Wikipedia article.
People assume the cabal are a bunch of intelligent people who plan things out exceptionally well and have control over everything. This is only partially true. They are social predators who build special clubs of influence. When you have human agents, you can have a great deal of influence over everything humans do.
But this doesn't make them geniuses or particularly alert to how changes in the dynamic play out for them. The internet was this thing they thought would work out like everything else - make sure that people of wealth and influence were blackmailed by or part of the club, and the simple peasants will have no choice but to dance to the tune. Then people started learning things and talking to each other outside of their regional bounds. Computers went into our pockets and it became profitable to spread unauthorized media content across channels that were difficult to monitor and control.
These people are stupid. They only know social manipulation at their core. They have no tools but to double down. Their instruments of market and national controls are simple predators of their own domains, also lacking much creativity or ability to think outside their role. They have no thought but to double down and operate as if they still have the upper hand.
They relied on the basic assumption that all people are generally good and that our nations are staffed with good, if misguided people. The socialists and the communists are just stupid and not consciously setting out to massacre everyone for not giving Kimmie his sandwich. Why attribute to malice what is explained by incompetence or error?
But once this belief is sufficiently betrayed and questioned… There is no going back. You can shut down the internet, you can turn the media propaganda up to Max…. You can't convince people that they were never betrayed or that it was all in their head.
At this point, shutting down the internet might actually work against them. We would start to talk to people around us, to begin trading and socializing locally. We would start being more independent of 'the world' and begin utilizing our own resources toward what we learned while we had access to the tree of knowledge.