The kook we will always have with us, to paraphrase Jesus, but the kooks of yore had to work to maintain their kookery and locate fellow kooks. They had to pick up their kook phone, subscribe to the kook newsletter, drive to the kook convention. Nowadays, all the kook has to do is log in to Facebook, where his feed will be enlivened by the chatter of fellow — and likely more extreme — kooks, toward which Facebook’s algorithms helpfully steer him.
2019 January 29, Tom Bissell, “An Anti-Facebook Manifesto”, in New York Times