Inter alia, I particularly liked the following, for e.g:
1) “The digitalrevolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those brokenpieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, andit’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other andliving in bubbles of one sort or another.”
2) “Second, thedart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremeswhile reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority.”
3) “Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recentgenerations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; lessunsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of theseshifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed foreffective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free playis nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’llneed as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat. A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the “art of association” that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed “a serious threat to liberal societies.” A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and would suffer from a “coarsening of social interaction” that would “create a world of more conflict and violence.””
4) “The most important change we can make to reduce the damagingeffects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passedthrough puberty. Congress should update the Children’s Online PrivacyProtection Act, which unwisely set the ageof so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies cancollect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 backin 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The ageshould be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible forenforcing it.”
