Divergent Factual Realities: How the Parasite Drives Polarization

I don't understand why you put the URLs in the text, which is ugly and disruptive to reading, rather than putting the hyperlinks behing textual anchors, the way writing for the Web usually works. It's just a matter of moving your double-brackets around.

I think the way to improve this piece is to cut back on the hype-inclusion. "Community Notes" as Wikipedia? That sort of evanescent analogy lasted as long as the thing itself: Community Notes has already failed. The problem is that technical analogy is not cultural similarity.

Instead of links floating by (particularly in the logjam form of URLs embedded in the text) we need clearer analysis. Your version of the parasite is just a metaphor, as your "misinformation" is, or your "media environment." Rather than asking an actual question, "what is happening to the human mind, to the nature of thought?" you ask a question fabricated from the political journalism and media chatter of the moment, "why is there 'polarization'?"

To understand what the actual parasite in our real nervous system is doing to the reality of human thought, start with yourself. You are a highly capable and motivated learner, pursuing a subject that interests you. I have assigned two books, Zuboff's Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Turkle's Alone Together, both of which are directly relevant and indeed provide necessary fundamental components of the ideas you are trying to flesh out. But the text of your draft shows that you haven't been in contact with either. You don't read long books. Reading long involves relationship of reader, time, and text. The required interiority has largely disappeared, like bleached coral, to the attention-grabbing of the parasite. You are conditioned to use reading devices that preclude the relationship between extended text and reader that books, even new but always if used, create. What you use in your writing isn't the depth of your reading---all your resonance of allusion gained over a lifetime of thoughtful reading---but the froth of the current web, the Google first page, the timeline. The cumulative result is the driving out of literary and intellectual complexity: the big stuff never gets read. Despite all the hours consumed, you will never read a fraction of what was the literary, historical, philosophical endowment of a well-read intellectual in the late 20th century. If I don't nag you now, you'll complete the course without ever reading the books assigned, let alone all the other works we and they refer to, or any of what they're based on.

This problem isn't misinformation. It's dementation---the active undermining of our intellectual constitution by the metabolic effect of the parasite on our physical and psychological systems. If its symptoms are to be found even in you, even here, they are far more ramified and more subtle, as well as more powerful, than the epiphenomena of opinion polling.

The way to improve the draft, I think, is therefore to get in touch with the writers who have teaching rather than clicks to offer, and to build outward from the basic issues rather than heading straight for the bubbles on the surface.