This entire question to me seems really philosophically confused. The article already leans into the Darwinian framing of communication. i.e. "memetics", "the m

This entire question to me seems really philosophically confused. The article already leans into the Darwinian framing of communication. i.e. "memetics", "the marketplace of ideas" and so on. I don't even know what's there to discuss, if that's how you have already agreed to see communication, then it's self evident that it doesn't produce anything good, or virtuous, or if it does at best coincidentally. Evolution and rabid competition, in any market, nature, information spaces doesn't have some Pollyannaish direction, isn't on some path to a truth or what have you. Memes aren't good, they're fit by definition. In a way this is just a really strange Anglo-American thing because there's this ideology of being both committed to civility and virtue but also unconstrained free markets and it doesn't really make much sense. This utopianism always had to come apart because there's no commitment to reason, truth, virtue inherent to "mimetic reproduction" and if you're willing to talk about it that way you should already know that to be the case.