Eric Weinstein lays it out succinctly for you, no matter what your political persuasion. These entities need to be regulated or we need to create public equivalents. If only we could trust our politicians to step in and protect free speech across the board . . .
When I was growing up in the 60's-00's, we all used to run to pick it up the ringing phone to say "hello." Those days are now gone. My quest in modern times is to only get calls (and emails) from those from certain people and not from anyone else. It's a tricky task. I do know a list of friends and family I want to hear from and I use my DND exceptions list to allow only those people to get through. But there are also those other people I want to hear from, but I don't know who they are. They include potential new clients for my law practice, old friends and all the people in the "miscellaneous" category. My phone greeting invites all of these people to leave messages that I screen periodically and this approach works fairly well. The reason for this approach, as many of you are doubtless experiencing, is that leaving my phone wide open would result in dozens of robocalls and unwanted solicitations every day.
I was provoked to think these thoughts as I read an article on the evolution of phone usage, "Why No One Answers Their Phone Anymore: Telephone culture is disappearing." Here's an excerpt:
No one picks up the phone anymore. Even many businesses do everything they can to avoid picking up the phone. Of the 50 or so calls I received in the last month, I might have picked up four or five times. The reflex of answering—built so deeply into people who grew up in 20th-century telephonic culture—is gone.
Telephone exchanges of that era were what the scholar Robert Hopper described as “not quite ritual, but routine to the extent that its appearance approaches ritual.” When the phone rang, everyone knew to answer and speak in “the liturgy of the national attitude.” Now, people have forgotten how to pick up, the words, when to sing. There are many reasons for the slow erosion of this commons. The most important aspect is structural: There are simply more communication options.
Here's a resolution to consider The Solomon Asch conformity experiments should be taken seriously by all of us throughout 2021. You need to be the one to tell your favorite and coziest groups of people that you disagree whenever you disagree. To do otherwise will guarantee continued social dysfunction and misfiring communication for the next year.
Phil Zimbardo describes Asch's experiments in this short video.
The legal proceedings regarding Keira Bell are forcing the reluctant news media to begin discussing this serious issue regarding a vulnerable population of teenage girls being cajoled into harsh medical treatment for undiagnosed gender dysphoria. The silence of the news media has found synergy with bad science and dangerous medical practices. Here's an excerpt from Quillette article titled "Like It Or Not, Keira Bell Has Opened Up a Real Conversation About Gender Dysphoria":
The policy reckoning we are now beginning to observe has been a long time coming. And Ms. Bell’s role is an important one, as trans activists have long sought to discredit or ignore the growing ranks of desisters—those, such as Ms. Bell, who once presented sincerely as trans, but later reverted to an identity consistent with their real biological sex. Even media that formerly had toed the progressive line on the issue of gender dysphoria are now finding the courage to run articles about vulnerable girls—many of them autistic, depressed, or socially insecure—who suffer regret after a period of trans self-identification.
There's a very good chance I like this illustration:
