Something changed, some synapses snapped deep in the American psyche, when it became perfectly normal to accuse someone who disagrees with you online of being a robot. The breathless, perpetually freaked out coverage of Russian social media spamming before the 2016 election birthed its own cottage industry; technology reporters, cable pundits, and bored Twitter users into battlefield correspondents overnight, deep in tweet-pocked trenches of “information warfare,” “misinformation ops,” and other themes at home in a late-career Tom Clancy novel. A buggy smartphone app, reportedly rushed into use, has been blamed by the Iowa Democratic Party for delaying the transmission of caucus results, expected Monday night, well into Tuesday afternoon. Whatever the screw-ups at the Iowa Caucus may turn out to be — malicious or merely stupid — that botched tallying process, and the loud reaction it has provoked, is indicative of a danger nearly as grave as whatever “cybersecurity experts” say concerns them: When you’re told over and over that we’re at Cyber War, everything is going to feel like an attack.

Using an app in any part of an election, particularly an app rushed together on a shoestring budget, is of course a bad idea. It’s a bad idea because literally anything on a smartphone can be tampered with given sufficient motivation, time, and resources. Any credible expert in the field of voting and electoral integrity will tell you that hardware and software should be kept to an absolute lo-fi minimum, for the simple reason that there’s almost always a way to hack a computer, but it’s quite harder to hack a thin sheet of tree pulp and ink.

But adding computer code to a caucus also allows for an outcome much likelier than a digital intrusion: hysteria, confusion, and civic nihilism. The American public has become so keyed up on reports of “Democracy is being hacked” that it feels similar to what 20 years of war on terror has done to our brains: Every popped balloon, stalled car, and curbside pressure cooker evokes fears of creeping jihad. Now every crummy app failure is going to give us pangs of techno-conspiracy too.