“Not so long ago, the dolts among us were free to think their thoughts quietly to themselves, with no easy way to share them. At worst, a person would usually just embarrass himself in front of his own family or bowling team.”

• Lane Brown, in the essay “A THEORY OF DUMB”, in NEW YORK magazine

Now these morons, thanks to the internet, have “the equivalent of their own printing press, radio station, and TV network . . . even those with nothing useful to say can tell the whole world exactly, or more often vaguely, what they think,” says Brown.

Brown cites studies which showed that IQ – otherwise known as the only way we know how to measure brains – actually went up steadily until about the year 2000. And this is despite the fact that social critics had assumed that every advance in communications would dumb us down.

I think what TV and radio and mass market paperbacks and even the early computers had that we don’t have nowadays are editors and gatekeepers.

Like them or hate them, these elites kept us on track and showed us more of the world in a measured, non-hysterical, and often even non-monetized way. The average person became smarter as the 20th century marched along. Movies showed us new ways of living. Radio and records introduced us to new and enlarging music.

Even “I Love Lucy” was a slow, measured introduction to the wider world, hard to believe as it is. So were The Beatles. Or Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. And “Daktari”.

Now, as Brown says, we no longer just know the anchorwoman on our one local TV station, or weatherman Danny Burgess, with these folks watched over by the tender loving care of station managers or advertisers. We hear from every moron, uncensored, with rude abandon.

“In practice, (life today) “feels like a crowdsourced lobotomy”, says Brown.

Studies show that IQ has declined steadily since the advent of the advanced, commericalized, monetized internet and the smartphone. As Brown says, “The stigma that was once attached to ignorance has disappeared, and the loudest and least informed voices now shape the converstion, forcing everyone else to learn to speak their language”.

Our own thoughts are now forced sausage-like through the meat grinders of stupid people.

A friend of mine, Laura Desmond, mentioned that she was having increasing trouble reading serious books. I said I was, too. It’s like we all have to go through an internet addiction recovery program in order to process the world as well as we did during what we thought were the not-so-enlightened 1970’s, but geez, it turns out that those were the golden years of western civilization, “Jaws” or not.

Welcome to brain fog.

Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Lasch, Neil Postman, and other social critics showed us the horrors of mass communication in the 20th Century. As Brown says, it sure would be fun to see what these guys had to say about social media, Moronicity City, and AI.

Speaking of artificial intelligence, whoopee, that will just turn moron sewage into secondhand waste material, and multiply it endlessly.

Anybody who exalts the “democracy” of the internet is wildly mistaken to do so. It’s the democracy of the mob.

It has handed stupid people all the tools they need to be at the foot of your bed and in your head, and it makes you beside yourself. These tools were handed to them by the money-grubbing half-human tech giants, because moron money is money, too.

And you thought Muzak was bad.