Thread by @SethAbramson

All this is wrong—the initial line of thinking and self-correction; wrong historically and wrong conceptually—and I aim to write a RETRO article on this soon. The main thing is that the phenomena Rosen identifies are pre-internet, and digital hyper-atomization poses a *solution*.

https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/1584023104527159298

Teaching journalism at UNH, I saw that much scholarship in the field is turgid because it engages digital-era infrastructure but not digital culture, and is insufficiently interdisciplinary. The internet remains our best hope for beating autocracy—but not in the way most suppose.

Digital culture both supersedes and organically erodes digital infrastructure—this is #metamodernism at work—so those still grappling with the latter are ill-equipped to even enter (let alone start) a conversation about how digital *culture* will be the final arbiter of this era.

In other words, it’s not about what the internet lets people do—but how it enables them to feel and relate to themselves and others. The former is a bounded set, the latter unbounded. Looking only at the former makes the future seem inevitable; the latter, perpetually transitory.

Just yesterday, Liz Cheney, who follows this feed, echoed something I wrote years ago: Trumpism has initiated the end of the Republican Party. The question was always how dangerous things would get during the variably long period in which this happens.

It remains a key question.

Yes, of course the internet renegotiates our relationship with reality. That is banal. But that renegotiation preceded the internet, and in fact the internet operates as a quickening that hurries us *past* the growing pains of this process faster than would otherwise be the case.

The question is not, is the internet changing us, or could we have avoided that change, or how destructive will that change be, but will digital culture—chaotic as its transitions are—be *efficient* enough at hurtling us through this period of human evolution, or linger overlong.

One can get discourse on this phenomenon as easily from academia alone as one can learn about both sides of the Force by speaking only to a Jedi.