Written 2026–10–24.
Had a thought that’s perhaps worth thinking out loud. There’s this idea of like, people are toxic on the internet because they lack empathy with the people they’re communicating with. People driving in their cars have a similar problem.
There’s a clear difference, in that communication between cars has an incredibly low bandwidth generally. Online communication has a relatively high bandwidth but clearly still has this empathy problem.
The internet puts this empathy barrier between them, or rather, it lacks an empathy channel that exists in typical face-to-face communication. In the same way, our cars, designed quite intentionally to make us feel safe, invisible, and hermetically sealed off from the outside world have this same effect, for the same reason: there’s no empathy channel.