Marshall McLuhan, using his theory of media, was effective at diagnosing the downsides of social media decades long before it became the dominant medium through which our worldviews are shaped.

I don't think Tim, nor anybody else in the tech industry* was listening when McLuhan claimed "peer to peer electronic media" would bring out our tribal impulses, but here we are. The internet is a bunch of identity groups, each working with distinct sets of facts, all of them suspicious and distrustful of the others, who enjoy beating on one another for sport.

Of course, humans are inherently tribal, and civilization is a hack. For it work we have to suppress, and find safe outlets for our basic tribal impulses.

*Zuckerberg has claimed to be a McLuhan fan, but if he actually understands what McLuhan was saying, then he's straight up evil.

The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities."

- Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What it Really Stands for" (1917);