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I agree it was happening before COVID. I think the internet could be part of the problem. But it wasn’t freedom of choice that caused the problem, which is what you claim. There’s much less freedom on the internet now, and if anything it’s much worse. If we’re going to blame internet then blame ads and big tech. Don’t blame people for watching cat videos, that’s absurd.

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I’m not blaming anything. But it’s my theory that whatever consensus we enjoyed in the past was due to the information landscape of the time - where information was controlled and curated by a dozen or so centralized entities and their affiliates.

The internet though is mostly chaos. There are gatekeepers, e.g. Google, but they don’t curate much - using a blacklist approach rather than whitelist - and instead just organize the information making it findable.

Niche ideas get air time and now compete in the market place of ideas.

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