30 December

Social media floods the world with shit. ‘Misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. But that’s only a symptom. Its real destructive power is to destroy trust. To encourage everybody to think they’re an expert on everything, and to stop trusting all of the hierarchies of expertise that humanity has established over millennia. Opinions are like faeces. Everybody has them. Nobody cares what you think. All that matters is which of those thoughts are actually true. Social media’s method of deciding what is true is who gets the most likes and followers. Populism. That’s a fast-track to civilisational collapse. Classrooms are organised with a clear hierarchy of expertise, with the teacher at the front embodying centuries of hard-won wisdom. Social media turns the classroom into this image. Classrooms are a microcosm of society itself.