Usually, miniaturization is a clear sign of human progress. When things get smaller, it means there’s been a major breakthrough that required a lot of intellectual firepower to achieve. Handheld cell phones now have far more computing power than the cabinet-sized machines that NASA used to put the first man on the moon. Televisions that used to take up half the living room are now thinner than a pencil, and so on. None of these developments happened without a lot of ingenuity from some of the smartest people on the planet.
But there is one recent, high-profile example of miniaturization that, it has to be said, is not evidence of progress or cleverness or anything like that. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. This particular example of miniaturization is yet more evidence that there is an epidemic, a pandemic, of stupidity across certain sectors of the United States. Put another…
