Right. It’s hacking something (the collective half-consciousness?), but not the election. I happened to be browsing my server logs at work the other day and at least half our traffic is Russian script-kiddies just tacking the likely directories of known-to-be-vulnerable wordpress plugins onto urls. We block IP addresses where we can, but we still report those numbers to our funders as unique visitors 
We’ve all grown accustomed to adjusting for inflation when seeing dollar amounts for historical costs. We need a meme (in the general sense) similar to that reaction when reading about social media support for ideas.
To me, all this points to the need for a Renaissance of responsible journalism, hopefully of the model of Propublica, but I won’t hold my breath.
