I’m a big fan of explaining difficult and unintuitive concepts through analogy to even more unintuitive ideas — a technique known to the ancients (and my friend Seth, who first explained it to me), as obscurum per obscurius.
Let me apply this device to the greatest tribulation of the current era: the self-evident, ever-increasing polarization of our civic spaces. My personal analogy for how this works is that notoriously clear and intuitive concept: the cosmic expansionary theory of the universe.
Wherever you look, it seems like society is getting not just more divided against itself — but at the individual level, people’s opinions have become more radicalized.
Except, of course, for you and me, who have stayed more or less where we’ve always been.
No, of course: you feel it too. Do you? That you’ve become self-radicalized, that you’re further out on some axis or another than you were? We can pretend that it’s everyone else who has lost their mind and wandered off the main sequence, but perhaps it’s not just all the stars in the sky that have moved away from us; we too, are moving away from them.
How can this be? It feels like when the Big Bang was explained to me, and I needed to ask: well, if everything is breaking apart, and everything moving away from everything else, where is all that extra space coming from?
And that point in the pedalogical act of confusing you more, your local friendly cosmographer takes out their rubber balloon and shows you. They put two points on its surface, they say, and then they blow it up, and then you see: the balloon gets bigger, so every spot on its surface is getting further away from each other.
In my analogy-on-analogy, it’s the world of discussed ideas that’s grown: fewer gatekeepers, more speakers, more ideas. This is a comforting explanation for internet old guards like me. We imagined that the world of ideas would grow bigger, and it has! We seem polarized because we’re all homesteading these new ideas on an ever-expanding noosphere! Infinite in all directions!
Comforting, that is, until the balloon pops.
First problem. Do we have more variety, more diversity of thought? We don’t seem to be expanding in every direction equally. There seem to be some gravitational anomalies in the expanse; Great Attractors that, rather than distributing us all evenly and individualistically across known ideaspace, draw chunks of our neighbors into a limited set of deadly memetic gravity wells. Like thinking 9/11 was planned by the US government, or US elections were planned by the Russians; QAnon and the devilry that exists within 15 minute cities; fears of gender perturbations and fears of contagion; urges that we should RETVRN to communism or fascism, or pockets of conviction that we already have.
The universe of ideas may be bigger, perhaps, but are all these ideas as worthwhile as the ones we started with? The neo-noosphere seems less comforting, less grounded. Can we contain all of this in a single discourse? Or do we all get sucked into some collapsing, cold, future universe where all this variety just shatters itself into a sameless void, with the good corner of the universe we used to inhabit having been surrounded and outnumbered by inhospitable alternatives, incapable of supporting life.
Well, having stretched this metaphor beyond its own heat death, I’ll throw in one more reason why it stays with me. After we answer with an analogy”why is everything in the universe running away from me?” — which is truly how I feel: lonelier, somehow, with a universe that should have more people in it, and more ideas to share with them — we have to ask the next question. Show a lonely child in an expanding universe a rubber balloon, and sooner or later they will ask: what, exactly, is the balloon in this metaphor? What is it that keeps growing between me and my fellow dots?
Cosmologists shrug and point you to – obscurum per obscurius – another rubber sheet, saying “space-time”. I hand-waved a little earlier and said, well, it’s… the space between ideas, I guess?
In the noosphere, though, I think it’s this: it’s other people. My (geographical, national, regional) neighbors in the real world seem further away in an expansionary noosphere, because the growing space between them is filled with people who are more like me. In the beginning of the Internet, we called the gathering together of these new folks, “intentional communities”. It was going to be great. Finally, if you like collecting paintings of buffalo, you could attract and meet other buffalo-painting fans, even if there were just three of you in the world. They would gravitate toward you, sashaying weightlessly toward the like-minded. And it was great! For the first time, we met people just like us on the Internet, as opposed to the geographically proximate people we bumped into on our street, who are sort of like us, but they support the wrong football team and aren’t as clever (or are too clever), and they think 15 minute cities are good, and while occasionally they are part of buffalo-painting fandom, they’re in the terribly wrong part of buffalo-painting fandom. And they live a few blocks away, and my internet friends are just there, in a city that’s always less than 150ms away. Rather than being stuck with the sort-of-akin in my own town, I can find the people who are just like me, from around the world.
Unlike these real world friends and my real world family, I chose my Internet friends, and they chose me, using our individual algorithms. Sometimes they’re not even real friends, they’re just parasocial approximations , but they are still hew closer to me than a randomly selected person could ever will do. And if we share exciting hobbies like conspiracy theories, we will grow ever closer, locally.
The point here is that the cyberspace close to me is filled with these new, similar people. The people close to me in the real world are pushed away, because, by comparison, they are foreign, alien, strangers.
Well, so far so Burnham and Booker. The nineties Internet seemed like it would be fun, but now we’re on the internet. First it lost the capital “I”, and then it lost its perceived benefits. I’m surrounded by strangers, and the world has gone to hell at the hands of these other people.
But I promise I’m still an optimist, even if I think too much about all of these problems. And here’s the precise one that I’m trying to solve for right now: you can’t make a movement from people who are just the same as you. Polarization is not about other people being too extreme: it’s about being in communities that are sorted by an uncomplicated form of compatibility. I still crave novelty, I guess, and I still want to explore this expanding universe. But we can now see and find and touch so many people who are like us, that our levels of affinity only cover the short distance around our communities. Everyone else seems so far away: but only because we’re so overwhelmed by the night sky, that we’ve turned in to our closest — who are closer to us than they’ve ever been before.
I believe that the job of civilisation is to expand our empathy to cover more and more of the universe, and that this contraction in love is temporary, and fixable. You can’t run away from an expanding universe: but you can still strike out toward the furthest stars.