Posted by geox 10/27/2025
Occam’s Razor tells me that it’s almost certainly linked to the near-total failure of the economic system (and the very slow recovery outside specific US cities).
I get why social media could possibly be the cause but what makes you so certain it is the cause or the largest contributing factor?
When did algorithmic recommendations (by which I mean injecting content into your feed to maintain attention, rather than an attempt to rank by quality) become commonplace? ISTR Youtube was being criticised for pushing conspiracy theories in the late 2000s, but I could be misremembering the timeline.
Digitalization and the pursuit of perfect information seemed to invite more binary thinking — and with it, more opportunities to disagree every single day. Meanwhile, other forces found easy consensus on simpler, more immediate issues: cheap gas, housing, grocery prices, job security, immigration. Complex, long-horizon topics like the climate crisis rarely stood a chance.
I also offered to buy several people a drink while I was there. This was received every time with suspicion and I was treated as if I was trying to gain something transactional besides a simple friendship in the moment. It was an interesting part of that society to experience.
better connectivity -> destroyed physical limits on group size -> groups not only get larger but also more ideologically homogenous because they're moderated by a central authority like how physical crowds are moderated -> people make friends more easily in those homogenous groups OR get kicked and start their own group, which also has the potential to get larger and more homogenous without limit -> groups have larger differences and clash harder
More friends is a symptom rather than a cause.
Indirectly? Seems to me that this is far more likely the "direct" cause, given what we know about the psychology around algorithmic feeds.
Also - I'm not sure if I missed it in the article, but did they define what they mean by "close relationship" means? I'd be very curious to know if a purely online relationship is counted and how this may also contribute to the observations made.
That could be a problem, considering how the push back to "actively cultivating tolerance" has unfolded so far.
Isn't polarization a good thing? If I was enslaved by tyrants making my life worse everyday, shouldn't I be opposed by their ways?
But now we have huge online mobs that are homogenously polarized that want to kill eachother. It gets violent when the group size reaches the nation-state level because that's where most of the violence and oppression in our society is siloed.
We have to limit group sizes online. Before social media, it was physically limited by the difficulty of meeting up in person. But now groups just keep getting larger and more homogenous.
That wouldn't create polarization, it would create extremely strong cohesion since everyone else enslaved by those tyrants would agree with you.
I agree that people with an anti humanistic worldview being able to network is very dangerous. But most polarization I've personally witnessed are people not wanting to live in a system that heavily favors the rich without forcing them to contribute in the same amount poorer people do. People just wanna buy houses and be able to afford a family, while houses are being used as speculative objects by the rich.