On the whole we're not treating one another worse, we're treating one another better. At the same time, though, as anyone who's ever spent an hour in deadlocked traffic only to discover that the crash was on the other side of the highway knows, people love to watch a disaster. So all the stories about the most fucked up things in the world are readily accessible. We can learn about horrors that we were ignorant to just a few years ago from the comfort of our living rooms.

So while things are getting better on the whole, we're more able to learn about all the myriad ways in which things are bad. Then we've got the internet. As you may have noticed, people are often quite rude on the internet. How would they not be, though?

Face-to-face communication benefits from countless generations of adaptation and evolution. We don't just communicate in English, Mandarin, or Dutch, we communicate with the tone of our voice and with body language. The difference between typing "go fuck yourself" onto a screen and saying "go fuck yourself" to someone's face is monumental. You don't have to watch the anger in their expression or show them any form of hesitation or discomfort in your own if you're on the internet. Likewise, any social niceties you might attempt to imbue into the text will likely be lost without your voice and face to ensure the intention is retained.

Instead we're left dealing with the results of whatever tone our companions in discussion choose to assign to our text, most likely whatever the first thing that comes to mind is. Compounding the confusion we ourselves are left to our own devices when it comes to sussing out how bare text should be interpreted.

That doesn't mean we're not becoming generally kinder and more compassionate.