It's a hard question: What can we do when hardly anything can be done?

I think there's a lot that big media could do better. They continue to frame stories as legitimate disagreements between two reasonable sides. We readers can also change the way we interact with big media to demand something different from them, I suppose.

And I suppose we can change the way we use social media—or even "drop out" of social media entirely, to use a '60s term. The system is playing us, but we don't have to get played by it. Lots of people are half-quitting or entirely quitting Twitter now that it's so explicit that Twitter is being actively and completely handed over to far-right trolls.

If we succeed in re-siloing all the interesting and productive discourse (for example), such that our discourse is reframed and we as individual human beings are making the smart move to better protect ourselves from people who deliberately frame their discourse to hurt us, we might start to get different results. That involves prioritizing intellectual honesty as well as self-protection and mutual protection.

This is a very broad answer. But I feel like we're at a pivotal moment in a horror movie where we have the option to face a villain, to see what's real and what's illusory about the evil, and to start doing something differently so we have a better chance of surviving.

We can't directly change them, which leaves us with changing our own behavior.