> But in fact I had not intended to cancel Harris; I hadn’t intended anything at all. I would have attacked him, physically, had he been present, over a pure delusion, which I say with shame I can’t put into words. But I was not thinking that I would hurt his reputation. I was not thinking of cause and effect in any conventional way. I was not in a mental state where I was capable of understanding long-term consequen…
As an analogy, I consider photosensitive epilepsy. It is unlikely that the genetic cause of epilepsy is somehow a recent mutation; we can assume that an average human a thousand years ago would have been approximately as susceptible as a human today. But for nearly the full history of humanity it would have been relatively rare for someone to suffer an episode of photosensitive epilepsy, because of the lack of environmental triggers. It's not impossible for a flame from a fire or a candle to trigger an episode, but the irregular frequency of the flickering flame means the risk is much lower. It wasn't until electric lighting, and later television, that the environment was suddenly primed to interact with a condition that had quietly existed in humanity for untold ages. To some degree, the modern prevalence of photosensitive epilepsy was a direct result of technology.
So it may be with social media. I wonder if there was some predisposition to madness that had lain dormant in human brains for thousands of years, and is only now coming to the fore as a direct result of the environment that we have created with our technological advancements.