Exactly. Why is it people don’t talk to each other? Why do they choose to have all of their discussions on the world’s largest and most powerful surveillance instrument?

It’s actually not that hard to go to places where phones, cameras, and internet access is banned or heavily discouraged, and guess what? It’s just people talking to each other, like we did up until the mid 90s. Just providing a technology free context is enough to get people to talk to each other.

I am a huge technology freak, but I can’t reasonably deny what I see, and that is that communications technology, in its present form, has been a terrible disaster for human communication because it made it effortless.

As it turns out, making it effortless also made people not value it at an interpersonal level, and to lessen the value of all of the cultural machinery that hinges on communication ( and the effort of it) as a central pivot.

Every step that makes communication more instantaneous and effortless undermines the value of character, honesty, and accountability.

Follow this and you can see how this has brought us to where we are today, step by step, starting with the telegraph.