[noduerme]

I nodded to the Concorde because HN feels anachronistic in that it's still trying to maintain modes of dialog that are no longer widely understood. I'm not saying there isn't going to always be somewhere like that, at the edges; and as long as there is, I suppose there's hope. But to me, it's terrifying to see what's happening to society. If it was just the subjects or the windows of dialog that had shifted, I'd agree that this was an interim step, or a pendulum swing. My main concern is that the capacity for moving the window back toward comity, humanity, mutual understanding and dialog is being damaged to the point that we'll need to start much, much further back in time. That we may need to re-invent the Enlightenment over many generations when this system collapses. Because the framework for intellectual curiosity and logic in interpersonal relationships is now being hijacked by systems beyond most people's comprehension - which may now be beyond the control of even the people who created those systems.

I do like your optimism. But I grew up in the America that embodied the outside culture which managed to penetrate the closed, totalitarian societies which without outside influence might well have entered a permanent state of "1984". Who will be that for us? I'm pessimistic not because I assume that these systems will continue to evolve as fixed & far away masters forever, but because they don't need to. Like Uber; once they control the market (in this case of thought), they can drive every alternative out. Here, their functionality is distorting the aspirations and dialog of whole generations of humans who will have to rediscover how to think and speak for themselves, if that's possible. And they've so embedded themselves in governance that alternatives might as well be illegal in many places.