I agree on all counts.

People misunderstand “we need to chill out” to think it means being a total dick is ok. Obviously it’s not, and we need to be careful as human beings to recognize cognitive biases including overbroad generalizations about people based on any attribute (and to give the devil his due, that includes generalizations that all generalizations are always wrong!)

That being said, there’s people who fell down the rabbit hole years ago, and it makes me so sad because there are so many people who were fun, intelligent, funny, creative, evocative people and artists who could make themselves and the world happy and actually improve the things they care about, but traps like Twitter have them screaming at paintings on a wall for years and years.

But pathogens that big spread, and even people not looking at the paintings are in some way corrupted because it sure looks like those people screaming at the wall are screaming at them! Then some people scream back and soon everyone is screaming and saying terrible things they think they mean but if heads could cool a bit they’d realize they don’t really mean and it’s just been a long escalation of screaming at each other.

Speaking to another of your points, I think it’s naive to think this outcome was an accident. Seeing the levels of civilizational unity I’ve seen in my life (in a friendly way, not a “everyone chanting ‘Hammer! Hammer!’” way), it makes a lot of sense that powerful people would want to drive us apart because once everyone lines up behind a common vision they’ll start to ask hard questions about why our leaders arent delivering on promises. “Say… You spent a lot of our money in the past 20ish years. Why are we all doing so much worse and your buddies are doing so much better?” Or alternatively, because it’s in social media companies best interest to turn the world into the Jerry Springer show and either paint monsters or find them (and in the process help create them) and match them up with enemies through the algorithm. Finally, it’s in political parties’ interest to hammer on wedge issues because the more you think the people you vote for are your only hope to save the world the more likely you are to vote for me and not vote for him.

I really like my fbxl social because it lets me just scroll past people I disagree with, and if it’s someone I fundamentally won’t get along with I just make sure I don’t follow them so I stop seeing it. Fight averted. Algorithms will either say “we need to give this guy more of that!” Or “we need to give this guy the extremist opposite of that!” But in the real world you see people you don’t care for every day and it’s just a matter of figuring out how to coexist.

(Anyway, I gotta stop wall of texting … But I like writing to help figure things out sometimes)