It's very fashionable, because it has produced jaw-dropping public idiocy with unprecedented immediacy on a huge scale. It has given a voice to the loudest idiots, along with the power of the mob. It has unprecedented power to give people license to denigrate other people and anger them, including people they know or are related to. This only figures, as its viral power comes from precisely that effect. (That effect on our affect, no less.)

Maybe it's just like the stylized mock battles carried out by rival little towns in Tuscany dating from the middle ages and renaissance. Maybe it will just amount to blowing off steam and "local color" in the long view of history. I sure hope that undergrads screaming that Yale is not a place of learning is not a harbinger of the future.

I don't know about that. I mean, sure, it's better to be trolled with tweets than hung, but there is something insidious about the way social media, etc. is changing us collectively. We seem to be getting meaner and more polarized on a macro level. Our interactions are more superficial and staged even.

And, the idiots seem to wield a disproportionate amount of "power" these days. It's like idiocy concentrate.

> the idiots seem to wield a disproportionate amount of "power" these days. It's like idiocy concentrate.

It looks like it sometimes. E.g. worry a lot when I look what is happening in academia. But then again - it's not like there weren't places that were insane before. At least this time I hope nobody gets burned at the stake.

It's basically:

1. now we can vent frustrations publicly more easily, anonymously (this should, I hope, lead to fewer actual violent incidents, sort of like many smaller earthquakes relieve pressure and reduce the risk of a big one)

2. since venting frustrations is very, very public and there's basically no curation for content these days, there's a deluge of garbage that could somewhat be avoided in the past

I think it's a good process since at some point we're just going to get immunized: we'll discover better channels, we'll improve curation and since all the garbage is floating to the top, there's a small chance people will actually notice it and actually act, i.e. try to take care of some of these misguided loonies.

That is, I was referring to the latter, versus suggesting that humans have never done bad things to each another.

I would suggest this causes greater polarisation and less tolerance. This leads to less reasoned discussion to understand perspectives and work out differences. Which leads to more polarisation... etc.

I also agree with you, and furthermore think that we live in the most prosperous and productive period of history and yet we are arguably the most asinine and facile society since the Internet arrived.

-- my grandmother

While it might be true for you and me, it is not true for a large chunk of populace, There is constant war going on in various parts of the world. For example Africa and Middle East is experiencing constant war and loss of lives. Ignoring the civil conflicts, look at the list of countries invaded.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invasions

Well, obviously they just need more social media and wikipedia.

I think that's unrealistic. What group has both the motivation and ability to rally both state governments and a large chunk of the military into open warfare on American soil? Both parties love polarizing rhetoric to keep their base riled up, but they have nothing to gain and everything to lose in an open civil war. Various militias, "patriots," and racial and religious warriors can occupy some government buildings, kill some cops, and provoke disastrous police standoffs, but have no ability whatsoever to prosecute an actual war.

Well, the media us polarising as well only in more subtile ways -- for example by throwing paranoid pro-Trump comments in an article about Wikipedia.

> we can take some comfort that, for example, war between two German provinces, or a North American civil war, are remote possibilities compared with 150 years ago.

What about the Yugoslavian wars? Or wars orchestrated by the US in the Middle East. If it's peaceful in your zip code it doesn't mean there's peace in Israel for instance, a country that has been in a perpetual state of war since it came to be.

[1]: http://en.itu.dk/About-ITU/Press/News-from-ITU/Danes-are-rel...

Any actual evidence for this? Or do you just mean the most peaceful for Western countries time in human history?