> All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks the

> All this to say, we can be adults and let everyone get the same information and make their own choice, or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me. This is a false dichotomy and a rather romantic notion. Independent adults rarely, if ever, make their minds from first principles. They do already cluster around people who think/convince others that they know better. So few of what we’re talking here is original thought, we are mostly riffing on what we’ve read elsewhere. And that’s OK. That how distributed cognition saves us a lot of time, when working correctly. But distributed cognition of independent adults get to super irrational conclusions too, I don’t need to list past atrocities based on ridiculous ideas. So while the failures and wins of distributed cognition is yet to be understood properly, it alone is not the culprit nor can be corrected via the virtues of atomized individualized cognition. One thing is clear, ideas distributed over ad fueled companies’ screen estates conform to a particular topology and a particular objective function. The normativity of engagement is not that of reality. And the irrationality of those systems effect us even from afar, permeates into our culture and even into non-ad based forums like this.