The Exhaustion of Modern Discourse

Conversation in the twenty-first century is sometimes exhausting and often maddening,

not only between experts and laypeople, but among everyone else, too.

If in a previous era too much deference was paid to experts, today there is little deference paid to

anyone at all. Even among laypeople in their daily interactions, disagreement

and debate have devolved into grueling exchanges of contradiction, random factoids, and shaky sources

few of the participants themselves understand. Years of better education, increased access

to data, the explosion of social media, and lowered barriers to entry into the

public arena were supposed to improve our abilities to deliberate and decide.