T. M. FUCKING I.

I'm awestruck by something Marshall McLuhan said years ago (he died in 1980, over a decade before the internet exploded into our lives) that predicted the horrific nature of our public discourse today: "When people get close together they get more and more savage, impatient with each other. The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations." As the N.Y Times book review said of this quote: "Placing that in a more contemporary milieu, what happens now that everyone is a broadcaster? Ubiquitous, cheap technology (digital cameras) and a friction-free route to an audience (youTube) means that people might broadcast images of their closeted gay roommate having sex and that the unwitting star of their little network might subsequently, tragically, jump off a bridge."   

This led me to the conclusion that when we know everything about everybody, everywhere, all the time, we are bound to consume one another at the same rate we consume the information we get. Or, to put it non-electronically, a wildly overcrowded room inevitably leads to wild altercations