6 March

The problem isn’t that people are stupid. We’re all stupid in areas we know nothing about. The problem is that people now get a say in all of those areas they know nothing about. Social media did that. We forget that in our own lifetimes, there was a time that didn’t happen. We paid no attention to most of the things we know nothing about. We left those things to people who did know about them, and got on with our own lives. The greatest symptom of the probably terminal damage social media has done to our civilisation is that everything now is an endless argument. Because everybody is an expert on social media, on everything. It destroyed centuries of hierarchy of expertise and experience. Those hierarchies are what created social progress and peace and prosperity. Social media replaces all of that with eternal violence.