The internet of us

There is a great deal of hullabaloo and fear around the influence of internet and social media on us these days, and not without reason. New regulations are proposed to let us drill down on who paid for Facebook ads and what else they paid for, blah blah blah, as if that was going to solve the fundamental problems that have caused things to go awry.

I doubt it. People will learn to game that too.

The main, underlying problem is that we aren't well grounded, don't have a shared set of values based even on a broadly founded conception of who the other is. Everybody is scared of rapid change, and we go about expressing it in different ways. Some brandish every larger guns and drive ever larger vehicles, others institute trigger warnings and safe spaces.

Everybody huddles amongst their own, when they should be out talking to others and listening. But that is the hardest thing of all to do, in our era of profoundly assortative huddling, facilitated by online communities and the home delivery of everything.