The rise of big tech and social media presents a series of difficult, perhaps intractable problems for Western societies

 
"Our internet behemoths are effectively immense media companies pretending to be neutral platforms, feasting on the revenue that once sustained the old media ecosystem while disclaiming normal forms of editorial responsibility. Their key products are agents of decentralized suspicion, generating information overload and feeding both populist paranoia and centrist hysteria. Meanwhile, their leaders run transnational pseudo-governments, exerting traditional political powers — cultural censorship, political banishment, the structuring of vast marketplaces — without clear lines of political accountability.

Figuring out how to cope with these challenges is a generational political project, and there’s a reasonably strong possibility that the Khanate of Facebook and the Most Serene Republic of Amazon will defeat the efforts of merely real-world republics to restrain their power.

A key problem with social media isn’t just its online-ness but its scale. As Chris Hayes puts it in a recent essay for The New Yorker, the contemporary internet universalizes “the psychological experience of fame” and takes “all of the mechanisms for human relations and puts them to work” seeking more of it. But that happens in a much more profound way on a network like Instagram, with all its teeming millions of users, than it would in a message board or chat room for some specific niche identity or interest."