🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place. You can read my AI disclosure here.
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In Anton Chekhov’s “The Student,” a dispirited theology student, shivering through a bitter Good Friday, stops to warm himself by a widow’s campfire. Staring into the flames, he recounts the biblical story of Peter’s denial in the Garden of Gethsemane. As he speaks, the old widow begins to weep. In that shared, ignoble, unglamorous grief, the student experiences a sudden revelation: human sorrow - the injustice, the shame, the desperate search for warmth in the dark - has remained entirely unbroken across nineteen centuries.
“The truth and beauty which guided human life,” Chekhov wrote, “have continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the main thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed, in the whole world; a feeling of youth, health, strength... and an inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, strange, mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little.”
Chekhov’s student found continuity // connection through a shared story told around a shared fire.
...We have systematically dismantled that fire, and now we wander around bewildered by the cold.
I have a theory about social media: the reason we are all so obsessed with political outrage, the reason we spend our days dunking and ratio-ing and quote-tweeting with the fury of a pitchfork-wielding mob who have been personally wronged, is that we miss each other.
We miss the comfort of a shared reality. We are angry together because we have forgotten how to be anything else together. Over the past few decades, we bulldozed the infrastructure of cultural commonality - local gathering spaces, overarching communal narratives, the slow, forgiving warmth of a shared fire. We replaced them with isolated, curated feeds algorithmically tuned to flatter our individual biases and stoke our deepest anxieties.
Bereft of shared meaning, we cling to shared grievance just to feel the intoxicating rush of belonging to a collective.
Literally, any collective.
When you strip away the stories that bind us and the physical spaces that hold us, the only thing powerful enough to cut through the digital isolation is collective anger.
Outrage, as it turns out, may be the last monoculture we have left.
The broadcast era’s gift
The mid-twentieth-century monoculture was undeniably rigid. A handful of network executives decided what the entire country consumed, acting as absolute gatekeepers who left countless stories on the cutting room floor.
Nobody is arguing for a return to a world with only three channels. But in our rush to dismantle that centralized system, we lost something irreplaceable: a shared commons of attention. The old broadcast era didn’t guarantee everyone agreed on politics or ideology, but it did provide the raw material for a national conversation.
People tuned into the same programs, hummed the same songs, followed the same scandals, and mourned the same tragedies. Even when people fiercely disagreed, they were at least arguing within the same reality. We traded that common ground for an infinite buffet of isolated, hyper-personalized choices - and lost the very foundation of our ability to talk to one another.
Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), argued that television turned public discourse into entertainment. But Postman analyzed television from the inside, without seeing what came after it, and what came after it makes television look almost quaintly communal.
At least when Postman’s readers watched TV, they watched the same TV.
The internet privatized cultural attention much the same way enclosure privatized the English commons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Where before there had been shared ground, now there were a million separately owned plots. People still grazed on these plots; the content kept coming. But the shared commons - that had allowed strangers to speak without first negotiating the terms of their shared cultural citizenship - was gone.
Enclosure produced landlessness; internet fragmentation produced something analogous in the cultural register, a condition I’d call attentional landlessness, which makes it very difficult to feel at home in any conversation with anyone outside your specific niche…
A problem of niche identity
I’ve been writing online for more than a decade, and one thing I’ve watched happen over that time is the increasingly explicit way niche membership functions as an identity container. When the monoculture was intact, you could be a fan of something without it being constitutive of who you were; you watched M*A*S*H along with everyone else, which meant your M*A*S*H-watching was just a fact about you, not a signal of tribal affiliation. When the monoculture fragmented and niches became the organizing principle of cultural life, choosing which niche to inhabit became freighted with identity significance.
This is how you get fandoms that behave like political parties, and political parties that behave like fandoms. The underlying mechanism is the same: when your cultural choices define your tribe, defending those choices becomes existential. An attack on your taste is an attack on your people. And attacks on your people must be met with retaliation.
The promise of niche culture was that you’d find your people, the ones who really got it, and you’d be happier than you’d ever been in the generic blur of mass culture. For some people that happened. For a lot of people, I think, niche identity delivered community that was narrower and more brittle than what it replaced: you found people who shared your interest, but the interest was so specific that the community around it couldn’t bear much weight, couldn’t become the broad social substrate that casual acquaintanceship requires.
You need both.
You need your specific interests, and you need some common ground with strangers. The monoculture provided the latter badly and clumsily, but it provided it.
We haven’t built anything to replace it.
Why outrage works (and why that sucks)
Political outrage cycles are the solution the internet found for the attentional commons problem, and they are genuinely clever in the engineering sense: they solve the stated problem, even if the downstream effects are catastrophic.
A sufficiently viral political controversy recreates the experience of something happening to everyone all at once; the sense that you’re participating in something shared // ongoing rather than dipping into your personal media pool alone. It crosses niche boundaries in a way that almost nothing else does, surfacing in the feeds of people who have nothing else in common. It provides a common referent, a thing everyone knows about, which is the basic precondition for strangers to have a conversation. And it generates the particular pleasure of being in a crowd, one of the oldest human experiences and one that modern life has made increasingly difficult to access outside political contexts.
The chariot factions of sixth-century Byzantium were, historians have argued, more than sports teams: they were the organizing structure of popular political identity in a city that had no other form of mass public participation. When Justinian’s crackdown on the faction riots in 532 A.D. escalated into the Nika revolt, which nearly toppled his empire and killed 30,000 people, the factions on both sides briefly united against the emperor.
They didn’t actually care that much about chariot racing.
They cared about having something to care about together.
The attention economy was always…this
Outrage reliably generates engagement; therefore, platforms have structured themselves to surface outrage.
I’d consider this a truism, and it’s certainly a part of the story - but only a part.
We piled onto these platforms with the hunger already in us, for shared attention and common reference, and the platforms found that outrage was the most efficient way to satisfy it. If the companies had never tilted their algorithms toward controversy, I think we’d have found controversy anyway, because controversy crosses niche lines, and crossing niche lines is what we craved most.
This doesn’t exculpate the platforms.
They made it worse, faster.
But any critique that focuses exclusively on algorithmic manipulation tends to treat users as passive recipients of whatever they’re served, when actually we’re active participants in a search for something real, something shared, something that feels like belonging to a civilization rather than a demographic.
We have agency.
We are exercising that agency.
Just rarely for the better…
What has to come first
We have a deficit of common experience, a deficit of common reference, a deficit of the ambient sense that we are all living through the same historical moment together, even if we interpret it differently. Outrage floods that deficit, briefly and violently and at tremendous cost to everyone involved.
I strongly suspect no technological solution is forthcoming, partly because the fragmentation was itself a technological process and partly because the loss isn’t a bug that can be patched. It may be that the monoculture was always a temporary anomaly, a blip produced by the particular economics of broadcast media, and that the condition we’re returning to, a world where different communities live in different cultural universes and occasionally collide with violent surprise, is just the default human condition.
But Chekhov’s student found a thread connecting him to nineteen centuries of human pain and endurance. He found it in telling a story across a social divide in the dark.
I wonder if there’s something, anything like that for us.