Last year just made us meaner — to shop clerks and flight attendants, teachers and nurses, election officials and our fellow citizens — really anyone forced to leave their foxholes. We fought over everything, including why we fight so much. We thought we were liberated from the pandemic, only to be tackled and dragged back into its cages; we were chased from Afghanistan; we watched lawmakers fall down and flounder as if their shoelaces were tied together. Every day was a feast day for the outrage industry, for candidates and cable networks and platform companies that we learned for years gave five times the algorithmic weight to posts that set us off. We’ve apparently developed a taste for bile.

Source: Washington Post January 03, 2022 21:44 UTC