It Just Introduced Them to Each Other.
Going around on threads ….
A teacher once told me:
“Being hated by idiots is the price you pay for not being one of them.”
At the time, I thought it was funny.
Then social media happened.
The internet did something humanity had never experienced before.
It gave every bad idea a search function.
For most of human history, the village idiot was limited by geography. They could annoy a few neighbors, embarrass themselves at family gatherings, and occasionally yell something ridiculous at the town meeting.
Then we invented comment sections.
Now every conspiracy theory, every scam, every piece of misinformation, every grievance, every prejudice, and every wildly incorrect opinion can instantly find thousands of people willing to reinforce it.
The internet didn’t create stupidity.
It created networking opportunities for it.
That’s why so many things feel crazier than they used to.
The loudest voices are no longer filtered by expertise, evidence, experience, or reality. They’re filtered by engagement.
The more outrageous something is, the more attention it receives.
The more attention it receives, the more people see it.
The more people see it, the more likely it is to find others who already wanted to believe it.
Suddenly isolated bad ideas become communities.
Communities become movements.
Movements become political platforms.
And then the rest of us are forced to spend our evenings explaining things that should have been settled in middle school science class.
Being hated by idiots doesn’t automatically mean you’re right.
If it did, every conspiracy theorist on the internet would be a genius.
But there is something revealing about living in a time when facts, expertise, and evidence are treated like optional accessories.
The real challenge isn’t avoiding idiots.
It’s avoiding becoming one.
Because the same algorithms that feed them are feeding us too.