Alexandros Melidis

… perhaps it’s a machine for disappointment and envy, a window into lives better lived than our own. It’s likely that what social media does for us personally is a deeply idiosyncratic question, dependent on our own lives, psyches and decisions, better discussed with our therapists than spoken about in generalities.

…rosperity come from? It comes from people investing in one another. Let me give you a few examples. Antibiotics. The polio vaccine. Chemotherapy. The world wide web. All these things were created only because of social investment — at universities, labs, institutes, with public funds, by public employees. They would not exist without social investment — and our lives would be immeasurably poorer. So whi…

…raging us to participate well in democracy, thus disincentivizing and disempowering us politically. Democracy is a process, a way, , and social media is a kind of perfect hyper-real counterfeit of it: it lets us think we’re participating in democracy, the act of self-governance, at the precise moment that we are not.