Alternatively:<p>"We have created an abusive society. We have normalized, regularized, and routinized abuse. We are abused at work, by the very rules, norms, and expectations of our jobs, at which we are merely “human resources”, to be utilized, allocated, depleted. We are abused at play, by industries that seek to prey on our innocence and literally “target” our human weaknessses. And now we are abused at arm’s length, through the lightwaves, by people we will never meet, for things we have barely even said. We live in a society where school shootings are the rule, not the exception, where more people will have taken antidepressants than not…and now one where nearly everyone will have been abused on the web…for a random, off-hand, throwaway comment, an idle thought, something trivial, unremarkable, meaningless."<p>(And on for a few more paragraphs of existential malaise. I do not use that term sarcastically.)<p>Consider that this is mostly not true. Real society has mostly not changed. Consider that the next level down of causation is that Twitter <i>convinces</i> you this is the truth, and that's the real problem... who wants that?<p>I've made a hobby of sort of studying how community structures create patterns of interaction. There's a sense in which Twitter just thrusts too many people too closely together... it isn't quite fair to say it's a "zero-dimensional space" since there is structure in who is following who, but it is pretty densely packed. Combined with the characteristics of tweets enforced by that brutal character limit, and Twitter is just a terrible place for building a community, and a terrible way to get news about the world. It may be useful for other things, but not those.<p>The Internet at large can cause the same problems, but in general it disperses people a bit more.