I’ve written an article in the latest Theopolis Conversation, in response to Jeffrey Bilbro’s superb opening essay.

Each of the supposed negative freedoms we now enjoy have their threatening flipside. Freedom from isolation has brought a stiflingly dense sociality in which the rapid and reactive movements of mass opinion squeeze out the space, time, silence, and solitude in which reflection and deliberation might once have occurred. The pace of discourse online and the ease of publication has weakened us against our passions. The attenuation of both the power of institutional gatekeepers and of the walls of individual solitude that allowed for the formation of independent opinion, have empowered the far more capricious power of the mob. Release from obscurity has left us increasingly exposed to surveillance, scrutiny, and social judgment. Felling the forests that once sheltered diverse and complex conversational ecosystems has produced a monoculture of discourse, in which local discourses are drowned out by the wild winds of vast ideological conflict that sweep across the now denuded plains of the universalized public square. The humbling of old exclusionary institutional authorities has left us with a rabble of self-proclaimed authorities and a lurch towards conspiracy theorizing.

Read the entire piece here.