Election lesson: humanity needs to catch up to technology

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the introduction:

Each campaign season I ask myself what I have learned, and this cycle has brought more surprises than usual. Still, one theme encompasses many individual lessons, namely that the Internet as a technology has outraced our norms for using it, understanding it and controlling it, most of all in politics.

And later on:

The murkiness of these [internet and legal] issues to most voters makes it easier for the spinmeisters to turn this year’s debate into a fact-free zone. Even the participants in the election often didn’t understand what they were doing.

And:

I am also seeing friends lose control of their moods, obsessively scanning social media for the latest news or maybe hitting “refresh” 20 times a day or more on the prediction markets. We’re not even good at regulating our own use of online media.

And coming into the stretch, who had expected such a strong fear of an electoral hack by Russia, or that more than 100 pro-Trump websites are being run out of one Macedonian town?

Do read the whole thing.