Like all good stories, it started out with a meme. Three years ago, my roommate tagged me in a silly joke about buses in the Facebook group NUMTOTS (New Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens). I accepted her invitation and laughed at the silly bus.

Before I knew it, I was hooked. I was soaking up anti-nimby rants, liking death threats to landlords, laughing at cars being evaporated, and reading long debates over the best way to increase density in cities. (But, no matter how radical the content became , there was always a steady stream of pictures of cool trains. Trains are cool.) This digital diet eventually began to affect my physical life too. It's been several months since I stopped going on Facebook, yet I am still a menace to society. I jaywalk with abandon; I take the "Bicycles May Use Whole Lane" signs literally; I ignore stop signs and most red lights; I almost took a propane tank on the bus. I think your lawn looks stupid and that parking should be more expensive, that highways need fewer lanes and buildings more floors. I think that public transit should be free and housing affordable. If I'm in the crosswalk, I will not stop for your car. Radicalized, I say! Radicalized!

And all thanks to Facebook. Three years ago, I had very few strongly held political beliefs. I mostly just thought that people were stupid and that the continued existence of daylight savings time is the biggest threat to our democracy. I still believe these things -- Facebook is powerful, but it can't change anyone's mind; that's what blogs are for -- but now I have a hundred other political opinions. I could give you a moderately well-informed take on a myriad of social and economic questions, from "How can we as individuals begin to take power back from the automobile and make our cities more human and livable?" (jaywalking) to "How can we avert a climate apocalypse?" (also jaywalking).

The weird and very modern and very Facebook-y part of this is that I never opted in to being radicalized. 50 years ago, if you wanted to be radicalized, you had to get out of bed, put on pants, go to the library, and check out a copy of the Communist Manifesto. All I did was like a picture of a silly bus. The algorithms took care of the rest.

On the bright side though, at least I was brainwashed into believing a set of principles that are actually right. Disparage social media all you like for creating radicalizing filter bubbles, but for every anti-vaxxer it makes, there's someone else who learns the real Truth.