Comment by bsder
16 hours ago
Most of the evils of the modern internet trace back to the fact that the default access device became a phone without a keyboard.
Using a phone automatically puts you in "low interaction passive consumer" mode. Once you concede that, you are now 3 steps behind the 8-ball permanently.
The evils of the internet are just the evils of humanity scaled. The village brawl before the tavern was always more interesting then work or a difficult discussion of unemotional stoic elders.
How do you know that? From the way you're talking about "taverns" and "elders" it sounds like you've read a lot of fantasy books and not a lot of history. You're projecting an invented past for polemical reasons, because you have no evidence either way.
Sorry to come at you so hard, but I see this behavior so commonly and it drives me nuts. I sometimes suspect that if you polled people on what aspects of contemporary society were novel and which were not, most people would have a less than 50% hit rate. Because what drives the categorization is ideology.
There's arguing from fictional evidence[1] and there's being "driven nuts" by the suggestion that more people are entertained by fighting than by stoic political discussions. Look at current day TV and stadiums (boxing, wrestling, glatiators, Mixed Martial Arts, martial arts generally, action films) and audience sizes (and engagement) versus how many people go to local council meetings, it's hardly an extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/generalization-from-fictional-ev...