I think the comparison of the internet with Stalinism and even echoes of Fascism ("The first [they] came for were the travel agents") is more than a little hyperbolic.

The article is drenched in a nostalgia for a time when the public shut up and consumed their ad-laden print produced by elite institutions like good little consumers. After all, "for all its defects, [the NYT] was the best and most comprehensive [...] in the world".

The power of newspapers, and media more generally, lay in their concentration of power, the fact of their placement in society acting as a consciousness and conscience for a nation. The agenda for public debate is set by the media; politicians and leaders feel public pressure primarily through the media. But as we all know, the fact of the concentration wasn't a function of their power, their placement or their importance; it was a function of the large capital costs of printing. With publishing so cheap, there's no need for such centralization.

The question that remains is whether this new world is genuinely at a loss for new kinds of organs that serve the same kinds of public function. That e.g. newspapers specifically fail to adapt, or become uneconomical, is unimportant, I think. What's important is that there is debate, that insightful authors get an audience, and that this process is public enough that politicians and other leaders are aware of the resulting public pressure.

And for this, I'd like to look at a microcosm of debate and test its health, and then contrast that with the larger public sphere. Consider tech and software development. Hacker News is one of our highest quality aggregators, but this forum is first for centralizing and popularizing links to other articles we believe to be insightful - and those articles are quite often on individually run and published blogs; and secondarily, there is some trivial debate and discussion here. But the best responses are in turn further articles and blog posts. I think the iterative churn of point and counter-point that I see pop up on HN is pretty healthy. I also think it's much better than it ever was when people had to rely on the likes of Dr Dobbs to track debate and trends. I think developers today are better informed and more involved with the debate that controls the direction of our industry than at any time previously.

So this microcosm is why I believe public policy debate is not really at risk from the death of newspapers, and the way other media dilute themselves with soft entertainment news and gossip. I think public policy debate in more niche areas like economic policy, foreign affairs, health, education etc. are more vibrant now because they don't need to rely on amortizing large capital costs. And I think the kind of "hub and spoke" system of aggregators as "insight filters" with substantive articles at the end of links is actually superior to the alternative, where you have regular columnists on a payroll who may be more or less insightful on their daily or weekly writing schedule.

As to the stuff about art, games, etc. in the article, I think it's largely tosh and not very relevant. "High art" is what it is primarily because of its use as social markers, tokens and objects that signal status; moreover, art works best when it appeals both to our most base and visceral instincts at the same time as engaging our highest faculties. But for art to do this successfully, it needs a high degree of maturity, which takes time in terms of technology, practitioners and audience. Art is to rational debate as metaphor is to argument. The more able games are to create metaphor with parallels in the important things in our lives, the closer to good art they'll be. But I think they're art none the less; even Dostoyevsky (the last quote, which if I recall correctly is from a translation of Crime and Punishment) wasn't a particularly good writer.