I also love this essay, but I think there's a much larger, scarier breach in the magic circle.

We humans consume information on the Internet, it changes our ideas, and those ideas directly inform our very physical and material behavior. We ourselves are essentially 3D printers for our thoughts, running 24/7.

Flashmobs, scenic spots that get overrun with tourists after an Instagram post goes viral, teens eating tide pods, adults failing to cure COVID with Ivermectin, fashion trends, everyone kind of getting into sourdough during the pandemic, Kate Bush making almost half a million bucks in two weeks because of Stranger Things, the death of Payton Isabella Leutner, millions of people protesting for Black Lives Matter, and thousands more are real-world events that would not have happened without the Internet infecting brains.

Elections are decided based on what people learn online, and those elections have world-sized potentially catastrophic impact when you consider things like climate change policy.

I fear there is no meaningful separation between the digital world and the physical world, because it's really about the separation between ideas and material reality. Living beings exist entirely to span that bridge.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was published in 1841, though the internet amplifies everything (including rationality).