We will remember the 2010s as a grifter’s paradise. These were the years when our collective sense of objective reality totally fell apart and when politics, business, technology, culture and even ordinary life fell fully under the sway of a new breed of swindler, huckster, influencer, troll and hacker .

Scams and fakery were not just ascendant this decade — they were often the dominant story line. It was a time of “life comes at you fast” and “milkshake duck.” The primary feeling of the 2010s was one of punch-drunken disorientation, of always having the rug pulled out from under you. And this was the big lesson of the 2010s: Almost nothing is as it seems. Doubt everything. Trust no one.

Not that this idea works very well: Doubting everything may be a workable plan for individual survival in a fracturing media universe dominated by algorithms and digital media of dubious authenticity, but pervasive doubt could just as well bring on civilizational ruin. Getting through modern life seems to require adopting a corrosive view of society that makes a hash of our fundamental ideas about the value of cooperation and trust among our fellow humans. We’re bringing on a death-spiral of distrust — and I fear that in the 2020s and beyond, grifters peddling alternative facts may come to suffocate us all.

The most obvious example of the huckster’s rise was, of course, Donald Trump. When Trump announced his bid for the presidency in 2015, much of the political and media establishment, including many leading Republicans, thought the idea of a self-dealing, conspiracy theorizing reality TV star winning the White House was a pretty funny joke. Few of them understood Trump’s effectiveness at hacking the news landscape to command our attention completely. Few of them could have guessed that rather than the establishment foiling Trump, his slippery style and overwhelming blizzard of lies would so fully alter political and media culture that by the end of the decade, members of the G.O.P. would be embracing and echoing his conspiracy theories as a way to forestall his removal from office.