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“Not so long ago, the dolts among us were free to think their thoughts quietly to themselves with no easy way to share them. At worst, a person would usually just embarrass himself in front of his own family or bowling team. Bad ideas had a harder time scaling and reproducing, so lots of stupidity stayed local, and everyone else could happily overestimate the average person's intelligence because they saw less of it. But then we connected everyone on the planet and gave them each the equivalent of their own printing press, radio station and TV network. Now, even those with nothing useful to say can tell the whole world exactly, or more often vaguely, what they think. . . . In theory, this is the democratization of expression. In practice, it feels like a crowdsourced lobotomy. [from "A Theory of Dumb" by Lane Brown, New York Magazine, November 17 - 30, 2025]” — Lane Brown