Comment by poszlem

What’s really interesting to me is how this coincides with a larger push to break up more and more ties that kept our society going for the last 30–50 years. Look at what’s happening to globalization and the push to near-shore. Look at the fragmentation of media into private channels and closed groups, the erosion of shared narratives, and the growing skepticism toward institutions that used to act as connective tissue.

Individually, many of these shifts make sense: resilience over efficiency, trust over reach, local over global. But collectively they point to a world that is becoming more segmented, less interoperable, and harder to coordinate at scale. If fewer people participate in shared public spaces, economic, cultural, or informational, it’s not just advertising models that break, but the assumptions underpinning growth, politics, and even social cohesion.

That doesn’t necessarily mean collapse, but it does suggest a lower energy equilibrium: slower growth, fewer mass phenomena, more parallel realities. The open question is whether we can rebuild new forms of shared infrastructure and trust at smaller scales—or whether we simply learn to live with a more fragmented, quieter, and less synchronized society.