A headline about a new education policy flashes across a news-aggregation app. Within minutes, the comment section fills: one reader suggests the proposal has merit; a dozen others pounce. Words like idiot, sheep, and propaganda fly faster than the article loads. No one asks what the commenter meant. The thread scrolls on — another small fire in a forest already smoldering.

It’s a small scene, but it captures something larger: how the public square has turned reactive by design. The digital environments where citizens now meet were built to reward intensity, not inquiry. Each click, share, and outrage serves an invisible metric that prizes attention over understanding.

The result isn’t just polarization — it’s exhaustion. People withdraw from civic life not because they’ve stopped caring

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