Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

Destructive cherry-picking spreads fear and pessimism, and over the past 20 years, it’s been steadily on the rise.25 In political media, this can have especially dangerous consequences. Geographic sorting means many people barely spend time with anyone on the other political side, so the only information they have on what those people are like come

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Social media algorithms identify our politics and then shepherd us into a hermetically sealed bubble, framing our worldview through a window of rage and extremism.

“This is an essential part of our story. Americans now bear such animosity toward one another that it’s almost as if many are holding up signs saying, “Please tell me something horrible about the other side, I’ll believe anything!” Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and f... See more

The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal s... See more