At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell delivered a ray of hope. Losing an argument to a 12 year old is sort of on-brand for Mike, given his non-consensual relationship with reality and enthusiastic disregard for personal credibility. Mike mainlines social media election misinformation like Neo learns kungfu and he was caught on camera aggressively ejecting his latest meme-load into the face of a child . * That social media actively floods our modern attention, discourse and culture with the most antagonistic, inflamatory and misleading content is, of course, widely known. As Stephen Fry recent put it , Facebook and Twitter … “are the worst polluters in human history. Worse than any chemical plant ever. You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of our world” * While channeling this
Last week, Stephen Fry called Zuckerberg and Musk the "worst polluters in human history", but he wasn't talking about the environment. The self-professed technophile, who once so joyfully quarried the glittering bounty of social media, has turned canary, warning directly and urgently of the stench he now detects in the bowels of Earth's digital coal mine: A reek of digital effluvia in the "air and waters" of our global culture. The long arc of Fry's journey from advocate to alarmist is important. The flash-bang of today's "AI ethics" panic has distracted our moral attention from the duller truth that malignant "ethical misalignment" has already metastascised into every major organ of our digital lives. * In 2015, Google's corporate restructure quietly replaced the famous "Don't be evil" motto with a saccharine, MBA-approved fascimile. It seems the motto was becoming a millstone, as it allowed critics to attack