> There is now a near-consensus – at least among those who are not completely steeped in social-media propaganda – that the current public sphere does not serve

> There is now a near-consensus – at least among those who are not completely steeped in social-media propaganda – that the current public sphere does not serve us well. I mean, is there? There's near-consensus that the current public sphere has some significant problems. It doesn't follow that the old sphere was actually all that great, or that the Internet is a failed experiment. Are there really people who would seriously advocate that life was better before the Internet? Did none of these people grow up in a rural area? While I'll be the first to pile on companies like Facebook and Twitter, and I'll be the first to say that I don't like the general direction the Internet is going right now, my goal isn't to regress back into isolated pockets where fewer people have voices. It's been an interesting experience recently to find myself regularly needing to defend an idea that I figured was self-evident -- that it's good for people to be able to communicate with each other. > But as the Internet began to spread to each household and then to each smartphone, fears about the danger of an “eternal September” have been confirmed. I'm relatively young, but I'm still old enough to remember some of the more toxic gatekeeping arguments I heard in Open Source/gaming/general "nerd" communities, and it's really weird and uncomfortable for me to hear people today so easily reference the same phrasing as if it was entirely prophetic, rather than deeply problematic.