[cadamsdotcom]

Alignment is fragile; this is demonstrated by how complex society is. One minor perturbations like decreasing police oversight leads to wildly different outcomes on metrics we care about, like not having to be afraid of getting randomly murdered. Our demons must be put down constantly. Nothing about this will ever change, no matter how much we educate the children.

That said I think this is overblown. In 2026 a bunch of awful social media companies dominate the landscape and benefit from the bottom feeders populating feeds with generated content; that’s a big cause of the erosion of trust. In a healthier landscape there would be viable anlternatives and that’d allow experimentation - stuff like attestation of your posts’ provenance, and the like.

We’ll get there, I just think online is in the “robber baron” era, where a few monopolists have captured the market. But you can see the cracks emerging with open source and self hosting and EU regs and EU government procurement and talk of regulating algo feeds. It’s many years away, so your best bet for now is to avoid feeds, touch grass, hang in group chats, and don’t let yourself get too cynical.