I think they are referring less to the actual virus and more to the rapid deterioration of our discourse and politics that accompanied it. Or at least this is what I might mean when using "COVID" as an epoch.
> rapid deterioration of our discourse and politics that accompanied it
That has been happening way before Covid.
IMHO it started with the internet. Pre-internet the flow of information is gatekept by traditional media - newspapers, radio, TV, … etc. Everyone watched, listened to, read more or less the same things. This resulted in a more uniform set of opinions and more common ground between people.
The internet broke all that. People could choose what they watch/listen/read and different people picked different things, coming to very different conclusions. In the past you could ask someone if they watched X last night and there is a decent probability they did. Today it’s much harder to find common ground - you could both be on YouTube but watching completely different things.
Edit: Don’t just downvote. You got a problem with this post, say something.
I agree it was happening before COVID. I think the internet could be part of the problem. But it wasn’t freedom of choice that caused the problem, which is what you claim. There’s much less freedom on the internet now, and if anything it’s much worse. If we’re going to blame internet then blame ads and big tech. Don’t blame people for watching cat videos, that’s absurd.
I’m not blaming anything. But it’s my theory that whatever consensus we enjoyed in the past was due to the information landscape of the time - where information was controlled and curated by a dozen or so centralized entities and their affiliates.
The internet though is mostly chaos. There are gatekeepers, e.g. Google, but they don’t curate much - using a blacklist approach rather than whitelist - and instead just organize the information making it findable.
Niche ideas get air time and now compete in the market place of ideas.
