Welcome to Good Faith§

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Let me tell you some assumptions I have about you that are totally based on the unfortunate fact that you are a lot like me: you’re an idiot. (I mean this in the nicest possible way.) You’re dumb. You’re less informed than you think you are. You’re more biased than you think you are. You are more guilty of the things you judge other people for than you know. Speaking of which, you are more judgmental than you know. You are less deliberate than you realize and also less deliberate than other people think you are. Most of the things that you do, you just do unthinkingly.
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When God wants to punish us, he gives us what we desire most. And so, verily and merrily, he gave us Facebook.
We’re a decade deep into the social media era of American journalism, and the whole population has internet poisoning. Internet poisoning is when someone spends so much time online that they come to believe that real life is as warped and strange as the internet. It’s when you become addicted to connectivity, consumption, and distraction. It’s when you post pathologically. It makes you sadder, more outraged, and more pessimistic because the internet is a contagion.
It’s a pyramid scheme of emotion and grievance. At the top are media personalities and politicians with direct interests in it. Every following level decreases in participation until, at the bottom rung, you have people who are caught up and consumed in it but don’t have really any true agency in it.