Newsstands in particular once famously stood as the fulcrum of community, representing for its daily patrons the crossroads of culture and information, levity and severity, friends and family. As time, technology, and the turn of events has pushed us away from public places of gathering, we've lost something that cannot so easily be found at work or at home -- genuine connections.

The Newsagent's Manifesto delves deeply into the depression (so to speak) of loneliness that has accompanied the decimation of third places across America, but one thing that bears punctuating is the main reason being alone for long stretches of time is so bad: It atrophies our ability to empathize with strangers.

Take it from science: Not only have multiple studies shown that loneliness leads to diminished trust of others and reduced social awareness, a relatively recent landmark experiment found that when lonely people do express empathy, they feel less alone.

It just makes sense that being exposed to more and different walks of life in an open and welcoming space leads to stronger communal ties, which in turn fosters empathy -- the cure for loneliness. And it therefore stands to reason that fewer of these spaces means a vicious cycle of less empathy and more loneliness. 

The Newsagent's might not be armed with all the solutions to this widespread challenge, but in the War on Loneliness, we will gladly serve as your Fortress of Fellowship.

This is our third Rabbit Hole column, so you know what that means: It's time to talk about Enshittification. 

Coined by Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe the "seemingly inevitable" degradation of digital products and services over time, the now-household neologism has become a kitchen-table shorthand for practically everything that's wrong with the internet today. 

But the fact of the matter is, enshittification is far from a modern phenomenon. In fact, so-called "platform decay" has been around for as long as platforms have been around -- i.e., basically forever -- and the excuse given for the gradual decline in the quality of output is always the same: People prefer bad stuff to good stuff.

Allow me to disagree.

By far my favorite encapsulation of this ur-enshittification is the slow yet steady erasure of fine arts (and education writ large) from American television screens.

In the 1980s there were not one, not two, but several national TV networks dedicated to broadening the minds of the viewing public:

+ Bravo was founded with the intention of transmitting opera, ballet, and classical music performances directly into American homes (hence the name "bravo"!)

+ TLC (then The Learning Channel) broadcast academically inclined programming across a variety of categories, including science, technology, and history.

+ The Discovery Channel, launched as a rival to TLC, specialized in wildlife documentaries and world affairs.

+ American Movie Classics (now AMC) was originally dedicated exclusively to the preservation and distribution of historically significant films, going so far as to work with Martin Scorsese to recover and restore lost films.

+ A&E, which once stood for the Arts & Entertainment Network, was (as you might suspect) a fine-arts-focused TV service that formed following the merger of two separate highbrow channels: ABC/Hearst's ARTS and NBC's The Entertainment Channel. (The creation of A&E, incidentally, prompted the launch of yet another classic programming block with its own infamous legacy of decay -- Nick at Nite).

Just two decades later, however, most of these networks (and several others) would be transformed into hilariously antonymic orphan initialisms, and the grand experiment of TV as a medium for the mass-diffusion of knowledge and culture for the betterment of mankind would be effectively concluded.

What went wrong? Well, according to one top A&E network executive, art itself is to blame. It's simply too arty: "The word 'arts,' in regard to television, has associations such as 'sometimes elitist,' 'sometimes boring,' 'sometimes overly refined' and 'doesn't translate well to TV.'"

A contemporary TV critic seemed to agree when he wrote, in a piece entitled "what the hell happened to A&E?," that "art -- real art, not pretend art -- is rarely appreciated outside of a small cultural elite."

So there you have it: The problem is you're just not cultured enough to appreciate art. Boom! Roasted.

In reality, however, this is much less of a "lack of art appreciation" problem, and much more of a "lack of art curation" problem, which, in turn, leads to a "lack of art appreciation" problem. 

You see, since time immemorial, human beings have depended (whether consciously or not) on curators to navigate the gushing channels (pun!) of culture. From spiritual leaders to horror hosts; from roving poets to MTV VJs; from Reader's Digest to Must See TV, we have always sought out people-powered curation to help us narrow our field of vision so we can avoid wasting time looking at the wrong thing. 

That all started to change at the turn of the century, as curation increasingly gave way to homogeneity. Gone was the focus and the direction, replaced with cheap, same-y slop. In some cases, channels with a rich history of creative, diverse programming literally began airing the exact same show over and over again to comical effect. 

So what actually went wrong? It's ultimately a self-fulfilling prophecy: Penny-pinching platforms sacrifice curation (specialized and nuanced) in favor of automation & scale (frictionless and shallow); viewers, like the proverbial boiling frog, steadily come to accept (and even embrace) a lower quality product; platforms continue to reduce the quality of their product, pinning it on viewer demand for a lower quality product.

Just look at the internet: When the World Wide Web came along, it quickly took on TV's discarded mantle of a medium for the mass-diffusion of knowledge and culture for the betterment of mankind. As digital platforms proliferated and content concurrently boomed, the need for competent curation to focus the firehose became explicitly evident. The first few years were predictably blissful, with portals, blogs, and community sites effectively cataloging the best of the web, allowing even casual culture consumers to remain plugged in.

But, inevitably, the enshittification cycle ensued, and flesh-and-blood curators "naturally" ceded to culturally amorphous algorithms in the name of giving the people "what they want."

Here's the thing, though: The opposite of curation is chaos. Thoughtfulness was summarily replaced with mindlessness, and we found ourselves yet again drowning in a sea of nutritionally deficient mush. The slot machines in charge of your daily content feedbag no more care about your wellbeing than TLC stands for The Learning Channel. 

And so here we are again: The digital platforms have all decayed or drifted away from their original intent (and straying further still) and once-independent publishers, in blind pursuit of growth, are willingly prostrating themselves before the All Mighty Algorithm. And who is to blame? Why, you of course. /s

The good thing about enshittification, as Doctorow observed, is that it eventually dooms the platforms it ensnares, giving us a perpetual chance to try again, and maybe this time get it right. 

And so where do we go from here? Where we were always destined to end up: Back at the start. Back at art. Back at curation. Back at human beings.