> Is this really the way we’re wired after thousands of years of evolution?

No, and we're certainly not wired to have TV or radio being broadcasted in our homes - or sitting still and silent on a bench for the most of our childhoods having to listen to some screeching fool having their weekly psychotic fit.

There will never in history be anything more extreme than the government broadcasts, urging young people to go and die in hopeless wars in the most painful and pointless ways we can think of. Whether that's a screeching priest in the pulpit, a psychotic school teacher, some demon at the radio microphone, or reptilians in the TV studio.

I agree with your points, but also think you're jumping over an elephant if you compare pre-broadcast days with today, while ignoring the decades of non-social broadcast we had before Facebook and Instagram and such.

Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?

> Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?

The Internet itself is just a way to transfer information. Humans are the ones manipulating that information for commercial and ideological reasons. I would say as several posters above have implied we have not evolved filters that protect us from this manipulation. Quite the opposite we have biases baked into us that are being actively exploited.

What we have done wrong is not find a way to manage this for the benefit of society rather than its harm, sadly that describes much of human history. When an environment exists that amplifies self serving behavior and concentration of power it is not surprising to see it come to reflect the worse rather than best of humanity.