In another age, not so far in our past, if you wanted to talk to the world, you wrote an editorial or a letter to an editor. You generally wrote in standard English. Once written and sent, an editor at a newspaper looked at what you wrote and determined whether your missive was topical, thoughtful and worthy of being printed for its readership to see.
If you were a fascist or some other kind of political lunatic, your letter usually went straight into the waste basket. Likewise, if you you held opinions which slandered, denigrated, or otherwise lacked in reasoned thought. In other words, language—and how we used it—was important.
Today, there are no barriers to free speech. Thanks to the internet we write without penalty in what we say, and now the entire planet, Musk's "public square," is a cacophony of hurtful phrases, accusations, lies and other falsehoods hurled in limitless numbers, so that what we have is an underlying "hellscape" (as Musk would say) of poisonous white noise.
Fathers and sons can no longer talk to each other. Young chldren, left to their own devices by parents too tired to oversee their own kids, become as monsters toward each other, glued to their iPhones from sunup to sundown. Civility in word and deed has been relegated to quaintness. Unlimited pornography in equally limitless availability cheapens human relations.
Just 30 or 40 years ago, the internet was being hailed as being as important as the invention of the wheel, and it may be so. But to what end? Will all this "freedom" to do and say what we want to millions at a time be the ultimate destroyer of civilization? Have we finally reached the point where we can agree on nothing and now literally attempt the lives of leaders with whom we disagree? How is it that we elevate a psychotic to the highest political offine in the land? Trump would have been nothing if not for Twitter and the internet and the legions of crazies which see their chance to take down the nation, thanks entirely to the internet.
It's time to clip the wings of the internet. It's killing us. I may have 25 choices in what kind of coffee I prefer from Amazon but meanwhile, some blogger just tried to kill the Speaker of the House of Representatives.