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Hot take: I don't think social media made people dumber. We've been dumb this whole time. It's just that you used to have to have a job that people sent their dumb letters to, to notice. This made "Engaging with fools" an occupational hazard rather than the 24/7 experience it is presently.

And surely many jobs like customer service, medicine, phone operator, bus driver, etc also exposed people to strangers acting like idiots. Especially domestic service. Maids had to be seeing some stuff. Foolishness comes out in real life, not just letters. Of course.

And if you had a job with high exposure to other people's stupid, you went home at the end of the day.

To be clear I do not yearn for the days before social media. It was very difficult to move info. That helped a lot of bad things go under the radar. I'm just saying... it's ok to log off sometimes.

I often think about the one conspiracy weirdo in the pub trying coming out with wild theories and getting roundly told to stop talking nonsense. Now he can be part of a global community of conspiracy weirdos all telling each other how smart and right they are, a self-reinforcing paranoia machine.

Oh yeah. I used to work the front desk of a small town library, and I often think about how we used to have the guy who would come in and talk to me about chemtrails and how the government was spying on him, but now he can just connect to other people like him.

As many issues we still have, and many issues just evolved rather than solved, I think our current state of Feminism and LGBTQ+ rights would be worse without. Womens stories aren't gated behind cable news, and LGBTQ+ folks are connecting and sharing with others in the community, and with allies.

Haha you are making a hilarious, yet very serious, observation. People in service jobs have known this for centuries; having to engage with fools that were never weaned off of attention seeking, is a serious job hazard. Now millions do it for free!

Follow-up: I don't think we ever before had such an extensive "prior literature" of casual thoughts and amateur attempts. Like, "what if atoms are tiny solar systems" or "here's me trying to sing the latest pop song" or "I got excited to write a story, here is my first attempt ever."

I think this is also why so many prominent people nowadays (actors, musicians, etc). are awful people when it seems like it didn't used to be. It probably always was the case; it's just that before the internet, we mostly didn't know what they were like.