Language’s power crashed exactly when activists won control of it.

Evidence

We did. But we appear to have done it at the precise moment when words and ideas underwent a radical currency devaluation, a crash connected, in ways we have barely begun to understand, to the torrent of words in which we are swimming on those screens. A torrent that assiduously amplifies the most operatic forms of virtue performance and the most cynical forms of pipiking. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 496

Categorization

• QUESTION: The causal link between screen word-torrent and discourse devaluation is explicitly flagged as underexplored — Klein’s account of the mechanism itself deserves scrutiny.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing tracking of information overload as structural noise and the commodification of outrage.