Mistakes and Memes

The end result is a world where the ability for anyone to post any idea has, paradoxically, meant far greater mass adoption of popular ideas and far more effective suppression of “bad” ideas. That is invigorating when one feels the dominant idea is righteous; it seems reasonable to worry about the potential of said sense of righteousness overwhelmi... See more

To oversimplify, here’s where we ended up. The Internet really did bring new voices into a national discourse that, for too long, had been controlled by far too narrow a group. But it did not return our democratic culture and modes of thinking to pre-TV logocentrism. The brief renaissance of long blog arguments was short-lived (and, honestly, it wa... See more

So much genius and trickery and money have gone into a mistaken metaphor. The competition to create and own the digital square may be good business, but it has led to terrible politics. Think of the hopeful imaginings that accompanied the early days of social media: We would know one another across time and space; we would share with one another ac

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People who scapegoat Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg miss a fundamental truth. Twitter didn’t happen to politics. Facebook didn’t happen to politics. The internet happened to politics. The shifts are structural and until we understand that, we can’t have an intelligent conversation about the state of the world. The common narratives, which are exag... See more