George makes a case, but not entirely sure if I agree

George Will, who retains at least some credibility as a conservative due to his anti-Trump attitude, makes an interesting comparison between the technological changes that sped up communication in 19th century America (rail and the telegraph) and internet communication today.

I had missed this about Lincoln (my bold):

In the 1850s, the rhythm of Abraham Lincoln’s political career had been quickened to what he called the “eloquent music” of railroads that whisked him around the North and into the West. And as telegraph lines marched six miles a day toward the Pacific, the velocity of news — and fake news about Washington burning, enslaved people rebelling, President James Buchanan resigning, Republicans sharing their wives, Lincoln being a cannibal — increased exponentially.

Will's conclusion:

Today, the Internet and social media enable instantaneous dissemination of stupidity, thereby creating the sense that there is an increasing quantity of stupidity relative to the population’s size. This might be true, but blame it on animate, hence blameworthy, things — blowhards with big megaphones, incompetent educators, etc. — not technologies. Technologies are giving velocity to stupidity, but are not making people stupid. On Jan. 6 the Capitol was stormed by primitives wielding smartphones that, with social media, facilitated the assembling and exciting of the mob. But mobs predate mankind’s mastery of electricity.

Humanity is perpetually belabored by theories that human agency is, if not a chimera, substantially attenuated by the bombardment of individuals by promptings from culture, government propaganda and other forces supposedly capable of conscripting the public’s consciousnesses. A new version of such theorizing is today’s postulate that digital technologies are uniquely autonomous forces in need of supervision or even rearrangement by government because they rewire the brains of their users.

Like railroads and the telegraph, today’s technologies have consequences about how and what we think. They do not relieve anyone of responsibility for either.

Maybe Zuckerberg encouraged him to write this column?