Jon Haidt in his Substack, After Babel:
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I’ve found for making sense of the momentous sociological, cultural, and epistemological changes that occurred in many nations in the early 2010s, which gave us the chaos, fragmentation, and outrage that began to set in by the mid-2010s. There are many causes of the transformation, but I believe that the largest single cause was the rapid conversion, after 2009, of the early “social networking systems,” which made it easy for people to communicate with others, into “social media platforms,” upon which people stand and perform in pursuit of publicly quantified prestige and influence. There was a sudden increase in shouting and a decline in listening. There was a loss of shared stories, shared meanings, and human relationships.
More here.