[hudsonjr]

>"Extremely online" people have found an endless spring of resentment, fear, and totalitarian thinking welling up from some place inside themselves, an ancient and primal source that you can read about in sociology or cultural anthropology textbooks.

>Social media takes the whole world and puts it into one village, one city-state, one tight ball of low-friction engagement-optimized information flow.

These are very good points. There's kind of a "tree in the woods thing", but people can now hear every tree falling everywhere 24/7.

I think there is also a recency bias creeping in about "things that have never happened before". "Never before" can mean: since the advent of social media or since the internet has been used widely. There's probably also a hole in the pre-DVR or VCR era where things happened, but were not recorded/saved by the normal populace.