Is activism completely useless though? I do think most of it, in particular group-focused preaching is probably very close to religion and soccer teams in engag

Is activism completely useless though? I do think most of it, in particular group-focused preaching is probably very close to religion and soccer teams in engagement, with little critical thinking. However, there is probably a role for voicing opinions and even stating publicly (as in "the emperor has no clothes"). Not everyone is fully informed and those networks of opinions can have a significant/important impact I imagine. Then again this occurs inside close circles. As mentioned elsewhere, I think by far the greatest threat to democracy is groups enclosing themselves, forming rigid identities like has happened to right-wing (and some left-wing) groups in the West: this makes them far easier to manipulate (by tying propositions one wouldn't accept together with the collective identity). This effect has been amplified massively by technology. You can stay insulated by exactly what you want to hear by visiting certain sources exclusively, or worse -- most people are being isolated automatically. The solution to this seems quite obvious: if technology is fostering isolation, it could instead foster contact with distinct ideologies, by default. Give more weight (through visibility) to long, well thought out arguments instead of short quips and 'likes'; have some kind of diversity bonus (where people a certain 'ideological distance' away are not given lower weight). The problem is enforcing this kind of structure on social networks. If most people get a large chunk of their information from social networks, we're being controlled by an obscure algorithm that's probably not in our best interest (instead simply driven by simple profit measures). Given how large and impactful Facebook (and Youtube, Twitter) is, I don't think it should be out of question to regulate those algorithms somehow (given repeated failure to self-regulate). We should have a right for seeing the algorithm implementation, have an option to upload a curation algorithm (given some specified API), and if we want select from a few sensible options, like simple chronological ordering, to the aforementioned civil-discourse-promoting ones (which should probably be the default).