The toxicity of social media is that it plays into the darkness of our cognitive process and hightens tribalistic thinking. And in the article about social media, instead of recognizing this, the author chooses to use social media as a jump off point to pseudo intellectually glorify his tribe while bemoaning the oposite tribe. It's re-hashed fox/cnn with longer words. As someone who is non-affiliate to either tribe and finds the tribalism silly, the conceited sound of the article is jarring. I'm pretty sure the inspiration for South Park's smug alert episode was based on people who write this stuff.

The author talks about the good of social media as such:

> street uprising of the late spring felt like its joyous opposite—a future in which platforms were responding to and being structured by the events on the ground, rather than those events being structured by and shaped to the demands of the platforms. This was something worth our time and devotion... As people in the streets toppled statues and fought police...

And talks about the perils and evils of social media as such:

> promoting people who exist only to be explained to, people to whom the world has been created anew every morning, people for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political argument of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation. These people, with their just-asking questions and vapid open letters, are dullards and bores, pettifoggers and casuists, cowards and dissemblers... That we get some kind of fulfillment from tedious debates about “free speech” and “cancel culture.” ... why not spend a few decades of it with a couple New York Times op-ed columnists, rebuilding all of Western thought from first principles?