I was reading The Week today and came across a stat: “The average American kid gets her first smartphone at age 10.” That’s a pretty liberal-leaning move, to make the default noun “her.” It struck me that, in previous eras, we probably would have been blind to maneuvers like this. The media just got more liberal (or conservative) surreptitiously. You couldn’t tell because there was only one source of truth. Now, everything is being cross-examined by everything else.
I wonder if this has been one reason we’ve stalled social progress: that we’re deliberating everything on a very granular level.
Is this good or bad? It’s good from the perspective of open debate. There are important conversations happening outside the Overton window now that would never have been broached in the mainstream had there not been a popular request to have them. Race science, for example, is trending. And there’s an answer to it, but we haven’t had to litigate this in quite a while. So that’s nice — it’s transparent and it results in more solid building blocks for the next consensus. But it’s bad from the standpoint of progress, of technocracy. We’re moving slower than we could, only because every bit of difference from the past is exposed and opened up for scrutiny by the powers of reaction.
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