I’ve always thought we made a mistake as a people when we collectively chose to answer the phone with “Hello”. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he pushed for “Ahoy” as the standard greeting. What a missed opportunity, that. Our gradually progressing aversion to phonecalls as a communication mechanism probably has less to do with the proliferation of online service equivalents, and more to do with the complete and utter lack of nautical nonsense.

For instance, we could increase frivolity several factors by writing, “Ahoy, Sailors!” instead of the much plainer, “Hello World”.

A small misstep, in hindsight.

But I think at some point in the future, when the history books have been written about the age we live in now, they will be written in the ink of these small missteps. If with each misstep we stray further from the golden path, over time we may find ourselves on another path entirely, confused as to how we arrived there. One need only look around to get a sense of the big mistakes being made currently; but I think it’s worth reexaming a few smaller missteps that have had outsized effects on our world today.

Killing the fairness doctrine was a mistake. Not classifying social media as a publisher was a mistake.

Individually, these are small missteps. But they compound with each other, and with the myriad of other small missteps we’ve been making in our journey to adapt to a global, digitized world.

The stratification of our news media, and the illusory class war that it conjures before millions, was only possible at scale because of the internet. Web tracking and analytics enabled targeted content and advertisement to a level of precision that TV and Radio could not even dream of. It enabled any opportunistic capitalist to propagandize his own countrymen in the service of capital growth. And it’s presented a golden opportunity for the power-brokers.

By funnelling everyone into a small handful of walled gardens, and ensuring that discovery heavily favors these gardens - a solution the free market achieved organically - all but the most diligent of internet users are kept in a bubble. The internet as people use it is a propaganda machine. The most effective one we’ve ever created. This is a globally-applicable sentiment, but it is especially pertinent to America in 2025.

Through this propaganda machine, we’ve made ourselves vulnerable to influence by hostile actors - both foreign and domestic. And those vulnerabilities have been exploited to radicalize the American people against their own interests by diverting attention away from the real problems: growing wealth and income inequality driven by de-regulation and globalization. The capitalists have been plundering the American people for years. And when, in the course of their plundering, they’ve caused massive damage to the entire economy (read: 2008), they’ve gotten away with it.

They’re in the act of getting away with it now.

Because a disheartening percentage of the country believes that their enemy is the Left. They’ve been sold a grandiose strawman - an amalgam of everyone with a college degree, or earns a salary, or works indoors, or wants healthcare reform, or believes in reproductive autonomy [etc, etc,] - that is colluding to undermine Their way of life. Their values. Their ability to be prosperous. Their ability to attract a suitable partner. And if they only put their faith in a team of facists iron-handed, decisive leaders, they will be rewarded with a return to the good ol’ days. The days of postwar prosperity when food and housing were cheap, culture was homogenous (driven by TV and Radio), and their entire community was local.

They’ve been sold this fiction because our journalistic and media outlets are owned by billionaires, captured by capitalism, and are stuck in a feedback loop that responds only to money_up or money_down. A feedback loop that is allowed to perpetuate because there is no fairness doctrine to curtail it.

The decline of journalism in America, and the radicalization that it enabled, started with the death of the fairness doctrine. It was amplified by social media, which managed to escape regulation by hiding behind the aegis of The Algorithm. We’re paying the price for it now.

One small misstep for man…one giant blunder for mankind.