I say that if the news needs a user’s manual, then the news needs repair.

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”33

For half a millennium, the mediators of media—editors, publishers, producers—controlled the public conversation. Now we may break free of their gatekeeping, agendas, and scarcities—while at the same time risking the loss of the value these institutions have brought in recommending quality, certifying fact, and supporting creativity. What must we cr

Since the rise of Trumpists, Brexiteers, and populists around the world, huge resources have been poured into hiring tens of thousands of content moderators, writing machine-learning algorithms, passing laws, and building regulatory bureaucracies to rid the internet, if not the world, of lies and idiocy, fake news and disinformation. What a fool’s

I propose to shift our focus away from the conversation we do not want to the conversation we do want, a conversation that finally includes those who had been excluded from mass media’s version of public discourse.

The old medium is always the solution to the problems the old medium says the new medium is causing.

Democracy is designed for disagreement; the question is how effectively we debate and deliberate.

Realize, too, the damage media have done to the public conversation, setting us at each other’s throats, pitting red vs. blue and black vs. white, simplifying the debate, erasing nuance, damaging communities, and amplifying the already powerful.

McLuhan’s questions were generally more interesting than his answers.” And that was the point of him.