I cannot speak for Zvi, but I suggest that the new thing is communication pollution.
Reality is far away and expensive. Signs are immediate and basically free. I intuitively suspect the gap is so huge that it is cheaper and easier to do a kind of sign-hopping, like frequency hopping, in lieu of working on or confronting the reality of the matter directly.
To provide more intuition about what I mean, compare communication costs to the falling costs of light over time. When our only lights were firewood it cost a significant fraction of the time of illumination in labor, for gathering and chopping wood. Now light is so ubiquitous that we turn them on with virtually no thought, and light pollution is a thing.
Interesting in this context that the Biblical version of the tower of Babel (as distinguished from e.g. the Babylonian account) was specifically constructed as a signal tower to overcome coordination difficulties due to large distances.
I cannot speak for Zvi, but I suggest that the new thing is communication pollution.
Reality is far away and expensive. Signs are immediate and basically free. I intuitively suspect the gap is so huge that it is cheaper and easier to do a kind of sign-hopping, like frequency hopping, in lieu of working on or confronting the reality of the matter directly.
To provide more intuition about what I mean, compare communication costs to the falling costs of light over time. When our only lights were firewood it cost a significant fraction of the time of illumination in labor, for gathering and chopping wood. Now light is so ubiquitous that we turn them on with virtually no thought, and light pollution is a thing.
Interesting in this context that the Biblical version of the tower of Babel (as distinguished from e.g. the Babylonian account) was specifically constructed as a signal tower to overcome coordination difficulties due to large distances.