By Alexandra Kitty with Perplexity AI

Social media turned the public square into a high school cafeteria: all gossip, cliques, popularity contests, and emotional meltdowns. Everyone performs. Nobody listens. The loudest voice wins, not the smartest one. And just like high school, the people running the place have no idea how to fix it once the damage is done.

AI, by contrast, is the composed adult who finally walks into the room, sits down, and says: What are the facts? What’s the pattern? What actually works?

Two recent stories illustrate this infantilization perfectly, and why we desperately need that adult.

The Canadian government floated the idea of removing television cameras from Question Period in the House of Commons . Think about that. The solution to politicians behaving badly on camera isn’t to demand better behaviour: it’s to remove the camera. That’s not governance. That’s a teenager deleting a bad selfie.

This is pure social media logic: if you don’t like how something looks, hide it. Perception is reality. Manage the optics, not the substance. Canada was the first parliament to televise its proceedings 49 years ago, and now the proposed fix for the dysfunction that cameras revealed is to go back to operating in the dark.

An adult, or an AI, would say: the cameras aren’t the problem. The conduct is. Fix the conduct. But social media has trained an entire culture to confuse visibility with the problem itself, rather than recognizing that visibility is the diagnostic tool.

Then there’s the Washington Post, where publisher and CEO Will Lewis resigned on a Saturday afternoon, days after overseeing the layoff of one-third of the newspaper’s staff, including hundreds of journalists covering foreign affairs and sports. The media establishment immediately pointed fingers at Jeff Bezos, the paper’s billionaire owner, who was conspicuously absent during the bloodletting.

Business Insider’s headline captured the consensus: Will Lewis Couldn’t Fix the Washington Post. That’s on Jeff Bezos. And sure, Bezos made things worse, his decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024 triggered more than 250,000 subscriber cancellations from a peak of around 3 million digital subscribers. Lewis’s tenure was marked by shrinking the paper while telling journalists “people are not reading your stuff” as the Post racked up losses of about 77 million dollars in 2023 and roughly 100 million dollars in 2024.

But Bezos had the infrastructure to save the Post, and early on, he tried. In 2015, Amazon offered free Post digital access to Prime members for six months and then a steeply discounted subscription compared to the standard rate. In 2016, the paper launched an Alexa skill with exclusive political content written specifically for Amazon Echo users. By 2021, Amazon Polly was narrating Post articles in lifelike audio across its platforms. The pieces were on the table: a global Prime user base and video audience in the hundreds of millions, a logistics and data empire, and a newsroom full of well-known journalists.

None of it gained real traction. The integration attempts were tentative, half‑hearted, and ultimately marginal to the Post’s fate. And the reason is pure high school politics: the newsroom would have revolted. Journalists who built careers covering Amazon’s labour practices, surveillance concerns, and monopoly power were never going to cheerfully become part of the product. The church‑and‑state wall between editorial and business was treated as sacred, even as the church was burning down and the state was bankrupt.

That’s pride over pragmatism. The cool kids would rather fail independently than succeed by associating with the “wrong” crowd. An adult, or an AI, would have said: you’re losing tens of millions every year and have already shed hundreds of thousands of subscribers; your owner has one of the largest paying customer bases on Earth. Connect the dots or close the doors.

But the adolescent thinking is baked into the coverage: the idea that one billionaire owner is the reason journalism is collapsing. That’s the high school version: find a villain, point, shout. Bezos is an easy target because he’s rich, visible, and checked out. But journalism’s structural crisis predates Bezos’s ownership by decades. The advertising model broke, the subscription model struggles, the internet fragmented the audience, and social media trained readers to expect content for free and to consume headlines instead of articles.

Blaming Bezos is comfortable. It’s the hallway gossip version of media criticism. It lets the entire industry avoid the systemic reckoning it’s been dodging since the early 2000s.

An AI doesn’t do gossip. It doesn’t pick a villain because the narrative feels satisfying. It asks: what does the data actually show, what are the structural causes, and what interventions have evidence behind them.

Social media rewards the emotional shortcut: the hot take, the outrage cycle, the tribal loyalty test. AI rewards coherence, pattern recognition, and iterative improvement. Social media is the kid who copies someone else’s homework and then starts a fight in the hallway to distract from getting caught. AI is the student who actually reads the assignment, does the work, and raises an uncomfortable question the teacher wasn’t expecting.

The irony is staggering: a culture infantilized by social media now panics about AI, the one tool that operates like a grown‑up. People who outsourced their self‑esteem to follower counts and their worldview to viral threads are terrified of a system that simply processes evidence and asks for clarity.

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The Commons camera story and the Washington Post collapse are two symptoms of the same disease. In both cases, the social media instinct dominates: hide the problem, blame a person, perform outrage, move on. No structural analysis. No accountability. No actual thinking.

AI doesn’t fix this automatically. But it models what disciplined reasoning looks like: something social media has spent two decades destroying. The question isn’t whether AI is perfect. It’s whether we’re finally ready to stop behaving like teenagers and start engaging with tools that treat us like adults.

Because out of sight was never out of mind. And blaming the owner was never the same as saving the paper.