The Reason Americans Can't Talk To Each Other

In the Book of Genesis the people of Shinar were trying to build the Tower of Babel, which went up to the heavens. So God, offended, “confused” their single and uniting language so that they could not understand one another. Imagine how disorienting that would have felt.

American society today resembles this post-Babel world.

We rarely speak the same language anymore and social media dynamics seemed to have played a major role in this.

A decade ago this would have been hard to predict. It seemed that the newfound world connectivity was bringing forth great developments. The revolts against authoritarian governments (Arab Spring), Google Translate and the non-toxic, informative Facebook feed was the state of the world in the early 2010's.

In 2012, Facebook's Share button was introduced, copying Twitter's Retweet button from a few years back. These new mechanisms to share and distribute information at a global scale, in hindsight, turns out can destabilize seemingly stable institutions rather quickly.

In a world where outrage is the key to virality, mass media is obsolete and stage performance crushes competence, we see the emergence of:

• Political polarization

• Frivolous debates taking over the national conversational

• Misinformation and disinformation

Trust in institutions get slowly chipped-away as its narratives (the stories they tell) get contested in open and public discussion forums where the voices of activists at the political extremes tend to bubble-up.

These voices are not representative of the overall population. They're also rarely scientifically backed. Rather, they're expressions of unruly political passions primed for social media widespread virality.

With time, institutions that are key for sustaining a large, diverse and secular democracy together have gotten politicized.

In the pre-digital era, a single mass audience all consuming the same content was as if it saw its own reflection through a single giant mirror. The digital revolution has shattered that mirror. The public is now highly fragmented and the stories we believe in can't spread past a few adjacent mirror pieces.

Society can't cooperate at large scales if we don't all share similar stories.

Babel has fallen in America and we can date its complete collapse to approximately 2016.

The American culture wars have gone berserk since.