"Like baseball, everyday reality is an adventure that begins and ends at home base, where we are safe."

"No society can police everything all the time, least of all a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a deviation and what is normal. We venture out from the norm, but we know the difference between the outfield and home, the reality of everyday life. Without that, as we have now experienced, things fall apart.... Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree. Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue. Social media’s no-longer-young men defend their chaos machines with a twisted rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction. For many who hold freedom of speech as a sacred right, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States is a touchstone. 'The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,' he wrote. 'The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.' The corrupt information that dominates the private square does not rise to the top of a free and fair competition of ideas. It wins in a rigged game. No democracy can survive this game."

A very small sample from "The Coup We Are Not Talking About We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both" by Shoshana Zuboff, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School (NYT).

The "coup we are not talking about" is the way internet companies have engineered "surveillance empires" with "unaccountable power" —"a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup."