“I have considered the costs and benefits,” he said, “and I have firmly decided that I’m not going to be held hostage to that stuff anymore.” Why not? “The chief reason is not that people are ill-tempered or dim-witted—though Lord knows one of those descriptors is accurate for a distressingly large number of social-media communications—but that so many of them are blown about by every wind of social-media doctrine, their attention swamped by the tsunamis of the moment, their wills captive to the felt need to respond now to what everyone else is responding to now.”
