Wonderful piece, Uli. The surprise bon mot for me was "ego feed." Might this link to the megaphone? "I want my own megaphone!" or "I am only happy when the megaphone(s) is/are talking about. me"? ("So that everyone is talking to me.")

Perhaps MAGAs love Donald "Megaphone Maximus" Trump because he talks about them, or more precisely, what's on their bitter minds?

Perhaps fact / truth is debased because we have abandoned reality for a steady diet of words and images, which is the water we fish swim in?

I imagine every person in the crowds walking along Sixth Avenue in NYC with their faces glued to their smartphones, magically able to not bump into one another, allowing them to never having to look up.

Re the WWW, whatever people do, some people will jump in and extract money from it. I read "The Silk Roads" --2,000 years of it's all about money money money and only money -- people who can't be happy with what they have (greed).