This is a really measured and insightful piece! Favourite part:

These ideological debates you see so much of within partisan politics are innately nonsensical. Big government vs. small government, libertarianism vs. socialism, capitalism vs. communism; America has never seen a trace of any of those things in living memory, so nobody has a clue what they’re talking about or what relevance those ideas would have to America today. All any living American has ever known is a nation in which powerful moneyed interests prop up and expand the powers of government in exchange for beneficial arrangements.

This is something that doesn't get said a lot. We just don't know what any of that would look like, so it's a tug-of-war which balances out with very little change in either direction.

I've said it elsewhere, but I think that Facebook really is a media company though (as @krnel reminded me) they operate as a kind of news market. It's really this structure that allows them to side step the kind of responsibility that the press have always had to the public. It's mostly cat gifs on Facebook right? 🤤 🤥 Because it's not the fact that they are a private company that keeps them at arms length, it's this misclassification.