🔗 the writer type: I deny that I’m in an echo chamber, and so do the voices.:
The stark truth is that far from cocooning us, social media exposes us to a wide variety of previously unencountered people and opinions. These people are invariably weird, and their opinions are horrible. What pundits fail to take into account – but is obvious to normal people – is that it’s nice to be in a bubble. It’s only natural to view those who don’t share your beliefs as intellectually defective and morally degenerate, and to avoid them at all costs. Who wants to spend time arguing with a bunch of idiots?
I think I kind of agree with this.
Sure—in the 1990s and early 2000s, a bunch of people thought the jnternet and then the web was going to democratize society but that was because most of the people they could see and hear on the internet were just like them.
But now we have mass social media with their global scale and perverse incentives to amplify and monetize the most corrosive forms of expression and interaction. As long as the model exists whereby they are able support themselves and generate profit by exploiting user data to sell advertising, there will be no unwinding any of this.
I think I fundamentally do not believe that it is healthy or practical for us as humans to routinely have to interact with more than about two pizzas’ worth of people. It is certainly not healthy for any of us to be constantly exposed to the acid bath of millions of other people’s thoughts and opinions, especially when the intermediary platforms are doing their best to elevate and accelerate the incendiary stuff.
We were all better off when the weirdos were limited to handing out their grubby mimeographed Lyndon Larouche flyers out in front of the local post office.