Source article thesis that this article is a response to (the Atlantic piece): > "Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collective

Source article thesis that this article is a response to (the Atlantic piece): > "Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009." Social scientists have reproducibility problems in their work, so that's more like an ideological opinion than anything else, but if we take it as given, here's the gist of the response: > "First, social media (and Twitter in particular) cannot account for a societal wide decline in trust or a societal wide rise in radicalism and partisanship. The number of active twitter users is just too small... Second: the better explanation for declining institutional trust is declining institutional performance... Third, what we call “cancel culture” is not a new feature of American life. It has always been with us." Another possibility is that the chattering classes believe they're more important than they are, and more fundamental economic and ecological factors are behind the deepening cracks in the facade of social stability. A society divided into wealthy pockets and impoverished wastelands is simply not a stable society, and the ecological impacts of resource exhaustion and climate extremes certainly aren't helping with the resilience factor. The combination of economic and climatic stress has destroyed entire civilizations in the past. Modern technology (for example, the ability to dig deep wells for water, the ability to generate power via different means if one source is exhausted, etc.) can buffer this to some extent, if there's enough social cohesion to ensure that technological benefits are available to all. Otherwise, the historical record points to civil war being the most likely outcome.