The Great Fragmentation
How Culture Stopped Arriving Together
Bits & Bytes — AI, science, and what comes next
The Great Fragmentation began around 1999, when American culture stopped arriving in the same room. The movies, songs, scandals, jokes, and arguments that once gave the public a common world to fight over were pulled into feeds, silos, and private realities. The internet gave us access, abundance, and voice. It left culture everywhere except together.
There is a strong case that 1999 was the last year American popular culture could plausibly pretend it still had a center.
Not because culture ended after 1999. That is too easy, too nostalgic, and wrong. Extraordinary music, film, television, comedy, journalism, and political art have appeared since then. Some of it could not have existed inside the older mass-cultural system. The internet opened doors that had been locked for generations. It let outsiders publish, organize, archive, remix, mock, document, expose, and find one another without permission. It weakened institutions that had confused their own interests with the public good for far too long.
But something did break.
The break was not simply the decline of taste. It was not the death of MTV, the collapse of the record business, the rise of reality television, the disappearance of malls, or the fact that fewer people watch the same shows at the same time. Those were symptoms. The deeper rupture was structural.
The shared room was lost because shared sequence broke: the old mechanism by which culture arrived to large numbers of people at roughly the same time, through roughly the same channels, with enough common context for the public to argue from inside the same symbolic room.
The Great Fragmentation was the cultural break that began around 1999 and accelerated through the 2000s, when American popular culture stopped moving through shared sequence and began splintering into individualized feeds, niche publics, private archives, platform tribes, and algorithmic realities shaped by behavioral feedback: what people clicked, watched, searched, shared, and returned to see again. Over time, those feedback loops hardened into silos, because systems optimized for attention learned to give people more of what confirmed their instincts, flattered their identities, intensified their grievances, and kept them inside the feed.
Before the break, culture still had common arrival points. A blockbuster opened, and everyone knew it had opened. A song hit radio, and even people who hated it knew the hook. A television episode aired, and the conversation happened the next day. A magazine cover, music video, late-night joke, scandal, or celebrity meltdown could still move through the public in a recognizable order.
After the break, culture became less like a room and more like a set of tunnels. One person was building a private music archive on Napster. Another was arguing on a message board. Another was watching cable news after 9/11. Another was discovering old clips on YouTube. Another was building identity through MySpace or Facebook. Later, nearly everyone would be inside different recommendation systems entirely.
The Great Fragmentation did not happen in one day. Napster is the cleanest starting symbol because it changed music from a scarce object into searchable access. It launched in 1999 and marked the emergence of decentralized peer-to-peer sharing of music over the internet, forcing the music industry into a new fight over copying, access, and distribution. But Napster was not the sole cause. It was the hinge the culture could see. 1999 is best understood as a symbolic threshold, not a mechanical cause. The deeper fragmentation became unmistakable through broadband, blogs, YouTube, social media, smartphones, streaming, and algorithmic feeds. The old bottlenecks lost control, and no legitimate replacement emerged to create shared cultural order.
A simple example is television. In the old room, millions watched the same episode at the same time and argued about it the next morning. In the fragmented world, one person binges a show three years late, another watches recap clips, another only knows the memes, another follows the actor on Instagram, and another has never heard of it because the feed never delivered it. The object may still be popular, but the shared sequence is gone.
That is the Great Fragmentation: not the end of culture, but the end of culture arriving together.
Before the Great Fragmentation, American culture still moved through a limited number of channels. Movies opened in theaters. Albums arrived on Tuesdays. Television episodes aired at specific times. Music videos premiered. Magazines landed on newsstands. Radio made certain songs unavoidable. Critics could still shape a national argument. Record stores, video stores, malls, newspapers, late-night shows, and cable networks functioned as cultural staging grounds. A hit was not merely something many people consumed. It was something many people encountered in roughly the same sequence.
That sequence mattered. It created a common symbolic field. People could disagree, rebel, parody, reject, imitate, and argue because they were still reacting to many of the same objects.
That was the old room.
The room was never innocent. It had guards at the door.
The great error in romanticizing the pre-internet world is forgetting how narrow, self-protective, and rent-seeking many of those guards were. The old gatekeepers were not pure custodians of taste. They were studios, labels, editors, publishers, network executives, radio programmers, critics, bookers, buyers, distributors, advertisers, gallery owners, prize committees, and institutional brokers. They decided what entered visibility, who was allowed to be taken seriously, which accents sounded authoritative, which bodies were marketable, which stories were universal, which communities were niche, and which forms of talent could be ignored because they did not already resemble power.
They did not merely curate culture. They extracted tolls from access.
This is not only a retrospective accusation. Radio payola showed how supposedly organic popularity could be shaped by money and inducement; the FCC’s sponsorship-identification rules require broadcasters to disclose when aired material has been exchanged for money, services, or other valuable consideration. Media consolidation also narrowed the field of cultural access. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 directed the FCC to revise national and local radio ownership rules, and the FCC’s implementing order conformed those rules to the Act.
The same pattern appeared in other industries. Hollywood’s long record of exclusion narrowed who appeared onscreen and who held authority behind the camera; USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative tracks representation across top-grossing films, including onscreen roles and behind-the-camera positions. Publishing repeatedly treated institutional familiarity as a proxy for seriousness; PEN America has documented persistent obstacles facing authors of color in commercial publishing. These examples are not proof of individual bad faith by every editor, critic, producer, programmer, or publisher. They are evidence that institutional pipelines repeatedly narrowed access and authority. The point is that gatekeeping was never merely taste. It was taste fused with market power.
Gatekeeping almost always contains a moral risk. It presents itself as stewardship while practicing self-preservation. It claims to defend standards while often defending incumbency. It claims to protect the public from bad work while frequently protecting insiders from competition. It claims to identify excellence while filtering excellence through class, race, geography, gender, credential, wealth, ideology, manners, and proximity to existing power.
The old gatekeepers often confused their own preferences with civilization. They treated their own networks as merit. They treated their own economic position as proof of discernment. They confused the health of culture with the health of the institutions that paid them.
Much of what happened to them was deserved.
The record labels invited Napster by making abundance feel like liberation. The newspapers invited bloggers by mistaking institutional authority for permanent trust. Television invited YouTube by underestimating the hunger for access, remix, and participation. Publishing invited the newsletter by narrowing the path to visibility. Hollywood invited the digital camera by making permission too expensive. The critic invited the comment section, at least at first, by forgetting that public judgment was never meant to be a private estate.
So this cannot be a simple lament for the old gatekeepers. Many gates needed to come down.
The tragedy is that the shared room came down with them.
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That is the paradox at the center of the Great Fragmentation: the gatekeepers were often compromised, but the system they controlled performed one function the post-internet world has never adequately replaced. It created common reference. Not fairly, not democratically, not without distortion, but powerfully. It produced a culture in which the public could still experience certain works, scandals, songs, films, jokes, villains, icons, disasters, and arguments together.
Even subcultures depended on that geometry. Punk, hip-hop, indie rock, skate culture, goth, metal, rave, zines, alternative comedy, underground film, and countless local scenes defined themselves partly by their distance from the center. The center gave rebellion a shape. To reject the mainstream, one had to know what the mainstream was. To be underground meant something because there was still an aboveground.
“The things you used to own, now they own you.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996), novel later adapted into David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club.
The old system’s bottlenecks were exclusionary. They were also synchronizing. That is the uncomfortable part.
Scarcity produced sequence. Sequence produced shared attention. Shared attention produced common argument. Common argument produced public culture.
Then the scarcity broke.
1999 is the failure point because it was the last year when the old machine and the new machine were both visible at full strength. The twentieth-century cultural system was still standing. Blockbuster movies still mattered as national events. Television still gathered large audiences. Music still had physical form. MTV still carried symbolic power. Malls still functioned as teenage civic centers. Magazines still set aspiration. Radio still imposed repetition. Late-night television still distributed jokes into the bloodstream.
And yet the dissolving agent had already arrived.
Napster’s significance was larger than piracy. Piracy was only the legal and commercial surface. The deeper transformation was ontological. Music stopped being primarily an object and became a searchable condition. A song no longer needed to be bought, borrowed, taped, displayed, shelved, or discovered through a clerk, a friend, a radio station, a magazine, or a local scene. It could be summoned.
That changed more than the music business. It changed the experience of culture itself.
The pre-digital album had weight, sequence, artwork, scarcity, and social location. It lived somewhere. It sat in a room, a car, a store, a backpack, a bedroom, a dorm, a shelf. It could be lent and not simultaneously retained. It could be worn out. It could be hidden from parents or displayed to friends. It could mark identity precisely because it had material presence and social friction.
The MP3 liberated the song from all that. This was thrilling. It was also destabilizing. Once culture became pure access, taste became less anchored to place, ritual, and community. Discovery became easier, but belonging became thinner. The archive expanded beyond imagination, but the room began to dissolve.
The movies of 1999 understood this rupture before most institutions did. That is one reason the year still feels mythic. It was not only a good movie year; it was a diagnostic year. The culture was producing works that seemed to know the system was ending without knowing what would replace it.
The Matrix imagined reality itself as an operating system. Fight Club saw consumer masculinity collapsing into rage, performance, and anti-corporate fantasy. Office Space turned white-collar work into spiritual anesthesia. Being John Malkovich treated identity as a portal, a commodity, and a violation. Eyes Wide Shut saw elite power as ritualized opacity. The Blair Witch Project suggested that cheap mediated fragments could feel more real than studio polish. American Beauty, whatever one now thinks of it, captured late suburban prosperity as moral and erotic suffocation. The Sopranos placed the old patriarchal order in therapy while leaving its violence intact.
These works were not evidence of a single conspiracy, and they did not cause the break. They were diagnostics. They registered the atmosphere of a system becoming aware of itself: unreality, exhaustion, simulation, performance, hidden systems, false prosperity, and the suspicion that ordinary life had become a set built over a void.
The culture was naming the cage just as the cage was becoming invisible.
Then came the accelerants.
Broadband made the archive continuous. The iPod privatized the library. Blogs multiplied commentary. Forums multiplied micro-publics. Google reorganized memory around search. YouTube made the past instantly visible and the amateur newly powerful. Facebook attached identity to the network. Twitter converted public life into a commentary machine. Smartphones collapsed the distinction between online and offline. Streaming destroyed the schedule. Algorithmic feeds replaced the editor, the critic, the clerk, the DJ, the programmer, the front page, the channel, and eventually the friend.
This was not just an increase in options. It was a change in cultural physics.
The pre-fragmentation world was organized around sequence. The post-fragmentation world is organized around availability. In the old model, culture arrived. In the new model, culture accumulates. In the old model, audiences were assembled. In the new model, users are tracked. In the old model, attention moved through public bottlenecks. In the new model, attention is continuously captured, measured, redirected, and monetized.
The result is not that nothing is popular anymore. There are still enormous hits, global stars, viral songs, prestige shows, blockbuster franchises, platform-native celebrities, and shared spectacles. But they do not bind the public in the same way because they do not arrive through the same architecture. Even when millions encounter the same object, they often encounter it through different feeds, different interpretations, different identity frames, different recommendation paths, different ideological filters, and different temporal delays.
The hit survives. The common sequence does not.
“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power.
— Philip K. Dick, from “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978)
That is why the Great Fragmentation feels so disorienting. It is possible for everyone to know about something and still not share it. Awareness is not the same as common culture. Virality is not the same as ritual. A trending topic is not a public square. A platform is not a commons.
The old gatekeepers created a distorted public, but it was still a public. The new systems create endlessly addressable populations. That is not the same thing.
This is where the argument becomes more serious than nostalgia. The problem after 1999 was not that compromised gatekeepers lost power. That was, in many cases, necessary. The problem was that no legitimate replacement architecture emerged to perform the non-corrupt functions gatekeepers had accidentally provided: trust, ordering, context, discovery, shared timing, reputational consequence, and public legibility.
Instead, those functions were absorbed by platforms whose primary obligation was not cultural health but engagement. Their recommendation systems organized visibility through ranking, prediction, personalization, and behavioral feedback. They solved the problem of keeping people inside the system more effectively than they solved the problem of helping the public understand itself.
The algorithm did not replace the editor with democracy. It replaced the editor with behavioral prediction.
That distinction matters. The early internet promised a more open culture, and in many ways it delivered one. But openness alone does not solve the problem of attention. Once the supply of culture becomes effectively infinite, the central question is no longer access. It is ordering. Who or what decides what rises? What gets recommended? What gets contextualized? What gets trusted? What gets forgotten? What becomes visible enough to matter?
In the old system, the answers were often corrupt or visibly interested. In the new system, the answers are often opaque.
At least the old gatekeeper could be named. The editor had a masthead. The critic had a byline. The network had a schedule. The label had executives. The store had shelves. The newspaper had a front page. These systems were flawed, biased, and exclusionary, but they had surfaces that could be criticized. Their authority was visible enough to be attacked.
Algorithmic authority is harder to confront because it often disguises itself as personalization. It does not say, “This is the culture.” It says, “This is for you.” That sounds more democratic. It may be more efficient. But it also means each person is drawn into a private reality whose organizing logic is commercially optimized and only partially visible.
The public does not experience the same front page anymore. It experiences millions of adaptive front pages.
That is fragmentation at the level of reality construction.
“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
— Aldous Huxley, “Words and Behaviour,” in The Olive Tree and Other Essays (1936)
The political consequences are obvious, but the cultural consequences came first. Taste became identity. Identity became content. Content became data. Data became prediction. Prediction became power. The self became a profile moving through systems designed to learn what would keep it engaged.
In the old model, people used culture to belong. In the new model, people use culture to continuously perform, refine, defend, and monetize the self. This is not entirely bad. For many people, especially those excluded by older institutions, digital culture offered recognition that legacy culture denied them. But the cost was the conversion of identity into a permanent production burden. Everyone became, in some measure, a broadcaster. Everyone became legible to systems that did not love them.
The shared room became a hall of mirrors.
This is why 1999 remains such a useful marker. It sits just before the full conversion. It is late enough to feel the digital future arriving but early enough that the older public still exists. It contains the last bloom of the monoculture and the first breach in its walls. It is full of endings disguised as peaks.
The year also matters because it reveals the difference between critique and construction. By 1999, popular culture had become very good at critiquing the emptiness of late capitalism, the falseness of suburbia, the absurdity of office life, the seductions of simulation, and the hollowness of consumer identity. The culture could diagnose its own sickness. What it could not do was build the institution that would come after the diagnosis.
That failure still defines the present.
Distrust of gatekeepers was justified. But distrust is not an institution. Exposure is not a culture. Access is not legitimacy. Abundance is not meaning. Fragmentation is not freedom by itself.
A healthy culture needs more than open gates. It needs credible pathways. It needs systems that can elevate without becoming priesthoods, filter without becoming censors, contextualize without becoming propaganda organs, and create shared reference without crushing difference.
That is the unsolved problem after the Great Fragmentation: authority without priesthood.
The old priesthood failed because it became self-interested, exclusionary, and rent-seeking. It mistook its control over visibility for wisdom. It deserved to be challenged, and much of it deserved to fall. But the replacement cannot simply be a billion isolated feeds pretending that personalization is liberation. That is not a commons. That is managed atomization.
The task is not to rebuild the old gates. It is to build better legitimacy architecture: traceable curation, accountable ranking, source provenance, plural public pathways, visible editorial standards, contestable authority, and discovery systems that can explain why something is being elevated. It would not require one center, one canon, or one priesthood. It would require shared conditions of trust.
A better system would not ask the public to choose between corrupt gatekeepers and algorithmic chaos. It would distinguish curation from control, expertise from incumbency, visibility from value, popularity from importance, and personalization from public meaning. It would preserve the openness gained from the internet without abandoning the shared field that makes culture more than isolated consumption.
That is what the post-1999 world never built.
Instead, it produced scale without stewardship. Access without coherence. Discovery without trust. Commentary without common ground. Infinite shelves with no room around them.
This is not an argument for going back. The old room was too small, too white, too male, too straight, too credentialed, too coastal, too corporate, too easily bought, and too comfortable with its own exclusions. Many people were never truly invited into it. Some were only visible as stereotypes. Some were mined for style and denied authority. Some had to build parallel worlds because the main room would not admit them except on humiliating terms.
So nostalgia is not enough, and nostalgia is not the point.
The answer is to understand what was lost without lying about what was wrong.
Culture did not disappear after 1999. The conditions under which culture could become common disappeared. The public lost shared sequence, common argument, and the civic rhythm of release and response. It lost the ability to assume that disagreement was happening inside the same symbolic room. It gained access, voice, archive, plurality, and speed. It also gained isolation, opacity, overload, and a reality machine that sorts people before they know they are being sorted.
The old gatekeepers stood at the entrance to visibility and charged rent. The new systems removed the door, flooded the world with entrances, and then built invisible corridors around each person.
That is the Great Fragmentation.
The tragedy is not that the gatekeepers fell. Many deserved to fall. The tragedy is that when the gates came down, the commons did not rise in their place. The room collapsed, and the wreckage was handed to systems with no cultural obligation beyond attention.
1999 was the last year American culture could still mistake the room for the world.
After that, the walls dissolved.
References
Napster and the Shift From Scarcity to Searchable Access
Encyclopaedia Britannica | “Napster”
Link: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Napster
Note: Establishes Napster’s 1999 arrival and its role in decentralized peer-to-peer music sharing over the internet. Supports the essay’s claim that Napster is the cleanest symbolic hinge for the shift from music as a scarce object to music as searchable access. Does not establish Napster as the sole cause of cultural fragmentation; the essay treats it as a visible threshold within a larger structural change.
Payola, Sponsored Broadcast Material, and Gatekeeper Incentives
Federal Communications Commission | “Payola and Sponsorship Identification”
Link: https://www.fcc.gov/general/payola-and-sponsorship-identification
Note: Official FCC guidance explaining that Section 317 of the Communications Act requires broadcasters to disclose to listeners or viewers when aired material has been exchanged for money, services, or other valuable consideration. Supports the essay’s claim that supposedly organic popularity could be shaped by payment or inducement. Does not prove every radio hit or programming decision was payola-driven.
Electronic Code of Federal Regulations | 47 CFR § 73.1212, “Sponsorship identification; list retention; related requirements”
Link: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-C/part-73/subpart-H/section-73.1212
Note: Primary regulatory text requiring broadcast stations to announce sponsored, paid, or furnished material when valuable consideration is provided. Supports the legal/regulatory basis for the sponsorship-identification claim. Use alongside the FCC explainer for clearer public-facing context.
Radio Consolidation and the 1996 Ownership-Rule Shift
Federal Communications Commission | March 8, 1996 | FCC 96-90, “Implementation of Sections 202(a) and 202(b)(1) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996”
Link: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-96-90A1.pdf
Note: Official FCC order implementing Telecommunications Act revisions to national and local radio ownership rules. Supports the essay’s claim that the 1996 Act directed the FCC to revise radio ownership limits, enabling greater ownership concentration. Does not independently quantify every downstream cultural effect or prove that consolidation alone destroyed local radio.
Federal Communications Commission | 1996 | “Telecommunications Act of 1996”
Link: https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.pdf
Note: Full statutory text of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Use as the primary legislative background source for the ownership-rule changes referenced in the essay. Best paired with FCC 96-90 for the specific radio-ownership implementation.
Hollywood Exclusion and Institutional Access
USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative | 2025 | “Inequality in 1,800 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ+ & Disability from 2007 to 2024”
Link: https://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-2025-inequality-popular-films-full-report.pdf
Note: Longitudinal study of the 100 top-grossing domestic narrative films each year from 2007 to 2024, tracking inclusion across onscreen roles and behind-the-camera positions. Supports the essay’s claim that institutional film pipelines have repeatedly narrowed representation and authority. Does not prove individual intent by every studio executive, producer, director, or casting authority.
USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative | Reports Portal
Link: https://aii.annenberg.usc.edu/reports
Note: Institutional reports hub for USC Annenberg’s entertainment-industry inclusion research. Use as the stable root reference if the direct PDF link changes. Supports the broader sourcing architecture for Hollywood inclusion/exclusion claims.
Publishing Exclusion and Barriers to Commercial Access
PEN America | October 17, 2022 | “New PEN America Report: Deep and Persistent Obstacles in Publishing Houses Impede Greater Diversity in Terms of Authors and Stories Told”
Link: https://pen.org/press-release/new-pen-america-report-deep-and-persistent-obstacles-in-publishing-houses-impede-greater-diversity-in-terms-of-authors-and-stories-told/
Note: Summarizes PEN America’s report on racial equity and representation in trade publishing, finding persistent obstacles to bringing more titles by authors of color to commercial success. Supports the essay’s claim that publishing has often narrowed access through institutional familiarity and structural barriers. Does not prove uniform exclusion across all publishers, editors, imprints, or literary agents.
PEN America | 2022 | “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing”
Link: https://pen.org/report/reading-between-the-lines/
Note: Full report underlying PEN America’s findings on race, equity, and book publishing. Use for final publication if linking to the full report rather than the press release. Supports the claim that commercial publishing has faced persistent racial and structural access barriers. Boundary: supports structural analysis, not individual intent by every gatekeeper.
Algorithmic Recommendation, Behavioral Feedback, and Silo Formation
YouTube Help / Google Help | “How YouTube recommendations work”
Link: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/16089387
Note: Official YouTube/Google support page explaining that recommendations rely on signals such as the current video being watched, watch history, and satisfaction feedback. Supports the essay’s claim that recommendation systems shape visibility through behavioral feedback. Does not prove identical silo effects across all platforms, users, or cultural domains.
YouTube | “Algorithm-Based Recommendations on YouTube”
Link: https://www.youtube.com/intl/ALL_en/howyoutubeworks/recommendations/
Note: Official YouTube explainer describing recommendation surfaces such as the homepage and personalized recommendations, including user controls over watch and search history. Supports the essay’s claim that post-fragmentation culture increasingly arrives through personalized recommendation architecture. Does not establish that every recommendation path produces ideological siloization.
Meta | June 29, 2023 | “How AI Influences What You See on Facebook and Instagram”
Link: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/how-ai-ranks-content-on-facebook-and-instagram/
Note: Meta explains that Facebook and Instagram ranking use signals and predictive models to determine what content users are likely to find relevant. Supports the essay’s claim that platform visibility is organized through prediction, ranking, personalization, and behavioral feedback. Does not prove that every feed outcome is politically or culturally siloed.
Borchers et al. / Systematic Review | 2023 | “Filter Bubbles in Recommender Systems: Fact or Fallacy — A Systematic Review”
Link: https://arxiv.org/html/2307.01221
Note: Reviews research on filter bubbles in recommender systems and reports evidence that recommendation systems can reinforce existing attitudes, beliefs, or conditions through various biases. Supports the essay’s claim that behavioral feedback loops can harden into silo-like effects. Boundary: the literature is mixed and context-dependent; this source supports the general mechanism, not a universal claim that all users are trapped in identical silos.
ACM Digital Library | 2023 | “Breaking Filter Bubble: A Reinforcement Learning Framework of Controllable Recommendation”
Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3543507.3583856
Note: Technical research discussing filter bubbles caused by feedback loops in recommender systems. Supports the essay’s specific language about feedback loops hardening into silos. Boundary: technical and model-based support; not a full sociological account of American cultural fragmentation.
Broader Media-Environment Claim
YouTube Blog | September 15, 2021 | “On YouTube’s recommendation system”
Link: https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/on-youtubes-recommendation-system/
Note: First-party discussion by YouTube’s VP of Engineering describing the recommendation system’s goals and operation. Useful as a contextual support source for the essay’s claim that recommendation architecture became a central cultural distributor. Boundary: company-authored source; useful for mechanism and self-description, not independent criticism.
This is the most important piece I've read in a long time. I'll share it widely, and in an ironic parallel with the thesis, to my like-minded friends. I wish I knew how to fix our fragmented society, but identifying the problem, and diagnosing it is an important step in what I hope becomes the new commons, as we endeavor to reunite.