When There Is No 'We'

The Fragmentation of the Public World

Wake, reach for the phone before the eyes have properly focused, and the day begins where most days now begin: in the scroll. Five feeds in the first ten minutes. The first carries news of a war, framed as a moral emergency demanding that you choose a side this morning or forfeit your decency. The second is a stream of people you’ve never met describing a country you thought you lived in, except the country they describe have different villains, different victims, and different conditions of grievance. The third is gentle — just a recipe for cleansing the liver — and it asks nothing of you except that you “save”. The fourth is an invitation to join a private group of forty people who have agreed, without ever saying so, on what’s true. The fifth is generated, in some sense, for you alone: an AI has read the small traces of your attention and assembled a world it believes you won’t put down.

Five feeds, five worlds. And the unsettling part, the part that takes a while to surface, is not that they disagree. Disagreement would be an act of intimacy. To disagree, two people must at least be pointing at the same object and must share enough of a map that they can argue about what lies at a given coordinate. What the five feeds offer is something abnormal and more corrosive. They are not arguing. They have lost the shared coordinates that would let an argument happen. Each has become internally coherent and externally sealed. You move between them the way you might move between dreams, and, like dreams, they’re in some sense ephemeral and don’t answer to one another.

This is the condition I have been contemplating, because it seems to be the quiet emergency beneath the strident ones. Not the collapse of agreement exactly — agreement has always been rare and mostly coerced — but the collapse of the field in which agreement and disagreement were once possible at all. The disappearance, in other words, of the ‘we’.

We speak of the public sphere as if it were a natural feature of human societies, a clearing that opens wherever people gather. It’s nothing of the kind. The public — the singular, shared, addressable public that politicians courted and writers wrote toward and citizens imagined themselves part of — was a technology. It was constructed, and like everything man-made, it had conditions of possibility, a period of operation, and the very real prospect of obsolescence. The public was a machine, and machines have working lives.

Just consider for a moment what had to be true for it to function. A population had to receive roughly the same information at roughly the same time. This required scarcity: a small number of newspapers, a handful of broadcast channels, a shared evening hour in which a nation sat before the same set of moving images and was told, by a voice it had agreed to trust, what had happened that day. The scarcity was not incidental. It was the engine. Because there were few channels, the channels had to address everyone, and because they addressed everyone, they manufactured what they appeared only to report – a common world, a single surface on which events could be said to have occurred for all of us at once.

The miracle was real, whatever its origins. For a few generations across the industrial democracies, very large numbers of strangers could coordinate around shared facts and shared symbols. They could be summoned to a war or a vaccine campaign or an election as a single body because they inhabited a single informational space. The newspaper on the train, the news bulletin at six, and a photograph that everyone had seen which had common semiotic significance — these were the connective tissue of mass society, the substrate that made the word ‘society’ mean something more than just an administrative fiction. Benedict Anderson called the nation an imagined community, political, limited and sovereign. And the imagining was done largely through print, through the daily ritual of millions reading the same pages and knowing that millions of others were reading them too.

The first-generation World Wide Web didn’t break this. For a weird and wonderful and hopeful decade, it actually seemed to extend it — the same surface, now searchable, now linked, now open to anyone with a modem and something to say. The dream of that period was of a public sphere finally delivered from its gatekeepers, a commons at last commensurate with the whole species. We know now that the dream contained its own undoing. But it’s worth holding onto the fact that the architecture, for a while, still pointed toward a centre. There was a front page. There were sites everyone visited. The geometry was still that of a shared place, however vast.

What we’re living through today is the dismantling of that geometry. And because the public was a machine and not a natural phenomenon, its dismantling is not a wound to nature. It’s the working life of a technology coming to an end, the way the working life of the cathedral and the town crier and the party newspaper came to an end before it. The grief we feel is real. But grief over the obsolescence of a machine is a particular kind of grief, and it solicits examination rather than indulgence.

From one public to countless micro-realities

Let’s return to the scroll, because the abstractions only matter if they touch the texture of an ordinary morning. The migration is well underway, and it’s documented in the least romantic literature imaginable: the trade press of marketing, which tracks the movement of human attention the way a hydrologist tracks the movement of water, with no interest in what the water might want.

Marketers have a phrase for what’s happening, and it’s more honest than most of what philosophers like me have managed. They call it the great fragmentation. Audiences, they report, are stepping away from the standardised feed and into games, group chats, forums, private servers, and conversations with large language models. These spaces run on different social contracts. And then the sentence that stopped me, written without any apparent awareness of its weight: meaning now forms locally rather than at scale.

Meaning forms locally rather than at scale. A consultancy wrote that to describe a sales environment and, in doing so, described the end of the modern public as cleanly as any social theorist. For three centuries the project of modernity was precisely the manufacture of meaning at scale — the nation, the public, the citizen, the mass audience, and the shared database. To say that meaning now forms locally is to say that the production line has been switched off and that something older and more granular has come back on.

The numbers, such as they are, tell the same story. More people now engage inside direct messages than on the open feed. Any élan has moved to the private server, the subscription newsletter on Medium or Substack, the group chat of forty people who have quietly and solemnly agreed on what’s true. The open timeline, where strangers once collided, is becoming a thin outer membrane — a place you pass through on the way to somewhere enclosed.

These enclosures retain attention precisely because they are sealed, because inside them you are spared the friction of the stranger, the dissonance of the other world, and the effort of coexistence. Each of these was, for the older public, the substance of the product itself rather than a defect to be engineered away. The stranger was the person whose presence you could not curate — the one on the train reading a paper you would never have chosen, the caller to the radio talkback programme whose voice carried an accent and a grievance from a part of the country you had never visited, or the letter to the editor that arrived from a life unlike your own. You were obliged to register that such people existed, that they shared your weather and your currency and your half of the century, and that they had concluded, from broadly the same facts, things you found strange or plain wrong. The friction was the evidence that you lived among others. To be rid of it is to be rid of them.

The dissonance of the other world worked the same way at the scale of meaning rather than individuals. The old common ground forced incompatible accounts of reality into the same frame and held them there, unresolved, in the same broadcast, the same front page, the same hour. You couldn’t read the news without brushing against interpretations that contradicted your own, and the contradiction lodged somewhere, a small permanent irritation that kept you aware your account was just one account and not the totality. The closed feed dissolves the irritation by dissolving the contact. Inside it there’s no other world with which to be dissonant; there’s only the deepening confirmation of the current one, each item arriving pre-agreed, each judgement met before you have finished forming it, until the texture of reality itself seems to have taken your side. Nothing grates or contradicts you. The absence of friction feels like relief, like coming home, and almost never like the impoverishment it also is – which is exactly why it holds.

The effort of coexistence is the cost the other two were always extracting, and it’s hard work, the most demanding a society asks of its members. To coexist is to carry, daily and without resolution, the knowledge that people you can’t persuade and wouldn’t choose in a fit are nonetheless yours, bound to you by a shared world none of you designed and can’t leave. It means tolerating the unbearable opinion because the person holding it votes in your election and breathes your air and will not simply disappear if you close the tab. It is exhausting in the way that marriage and citizenship and any long obligation are tiring. Like them, it was never freely chosen so much as inherited, and once inherited, it must be endured. The fragment offers an exit from the obligation. It feels like a gift, because the effort was invisible until something finally relieved us of it. Only afterwards, in the comfort of the closed space, does it become possible to notice what the exertion was producing all along – a society, held together by the friction it cost us to maintain – and to wonder whether comfort was ever the point.

Over all of this, a newer layer is settling. The feed is no longer only curated from a common pool. Increasingly it is generated – assembled in real time by systems that have learnt the contours of your own nervous system and compose for that alone.

Curation selected from a shared world. Generation dispenses with the shared world altogether. There’s no longer a pool of knowledge from which your portion is drawn; there’s only your portion, made for you, answerable to nothing and nobody outside the closed loop of your own engagement. The endpoint of personalisation is a public of one, and a public of one is a contradiction in terms. It is solitude wearing the mask of company.

Each of these micro-realities is optimised, and what it optimises for is the prolongation of attention, measured in the only currency these systems can read. Coexistence does not enter the calculation.

Coexistence is expensive. It requires that you encounter what you would not have chosen, tolerate what unsettles you, and share common ground with people whose worlds run counter to your own. The architecture of the fragment is built to spare you all of that, and it is extraordinarily good at its job. We didn’t choose fragmentation by referendum. We chose it click by click, each choice locally rational, the aggregate a continent breaking into an archipelago.

What is governance when there is no field for speech to land in?

Here the matter turns to civilisation, because every instrument of collective life that we inherited assumes a public that no longer reliably exists today.

Consider what we suppose a ‘leader’ does, stripped of this mechanism. A leader speaks, and the speech is meant to travel across a shared field and land in many minds at once, producing something like common orientation – a sense of where we are, what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what’s being asked of us. This is not a rhetorical flourish. It’s the whole of what we understand leadership to be. Strip away the office, the title, the apparatus of state, and what remains is this single capacity: to say something into a shared space and have it arrive, more or less intact, in minds that did not have to be in the same room. Everything we call authority is built on that one improbable transmission. Remove the shared space and you haven’t weakened a leader. You have removed the ground on which leading was ever possible.

Authority, in the modern sense, is the capacity to make speech land. The orator, the statesman, the reformer, the founder—each depended on a surface across which words could carry to a population that would receive them more or less together and know that others were receiving them too.

Remove the shared field, and the mechanism idles. Speech still issues. Still circulates. But it no longer lands. It disperses into the archipelago, refracted differently in each fragment, metabolised by each micro-reality into a version intelligible only there. A head of state addresses a nation and reaches, in truth, a thousand sealed rooms, in each of which the words are received as something the speaker never said. There’s no longer a single act of reception to which ‘the leader’ can be answerable, and so there’s no longer the kind of authority that depended on it. What replaces it is a deafening multiplicity, never silence — a thousand authorities, each real inside its bubble, none able to summon the whole.

This is why political speech, outside the heavily scripted message, keeps shrinking. What survives the crossing into myriad shuttered bubbles is whatever demands the least of them — the slogan, the meme, a phrase too small to be mistranslated — and so the smallest unit of speech becomes the only one that reliably arrives.

Governance faces the same hollowing. To govern is to act upon a population that can, at least sometimes, be addressed as one – informed, persuaded, mobilised, and held to common account. A vaccine campaign, a mobilisation for war, a programme of shared sacrifice, and even an honest reckoning with a difficult fact: each requires that the governed inhabit a common enough world that a single message can act as a precise orientation. When the world fractures into micro-realities, the governing message fractures with it. The state speaks, and the speech arrives in forty incompatible translations, each enclosure receiving the version its prior translations have prepared it to receive. This is not a failure of communication that better communication could repair. It’s the absence of the surface on which communication of that kind was ever possible.

We are watching this happen in real time and mistaking it for a series of separate crises – polarisation, misinformation, institutional distrust, and the collapse of shared truths. They are not separate. They are symptoms of a single structural change: the dissolution of an addressable public, the field in which the modern apparatus of collective life was designed to operate. The apparatus has not been captured or corrupted, although it has been both. It’s been left standing in a landscape that no longer contains what it was built to act upon.

Decay, or a different geometry of belonging

The temptation now is elegy. To stand in the ruins of the common world and mourn – to treat the fragmentation as decay, as loss, as a falling-away from a wholeness we once had and have squandered. The elegy is seductive for someone of my age and experience because part of it at least is true. Something intangible is being lost. The loss is not trivial. The capacity to summon a population to shared sacrifice, to hold a society to a common account, and to face a planetary emergency as one body — these capacities are weakening precisely when the century most requires them.

And, above all, the power to agree that there is such a thing as enough. Sufficiency is not a private calculation. No one arrives at ‘enough’ alone, in the private hush of their own feed, where the only signal is more – more attention, more acquisition, more of whatever the fragment was built to maximise. ‘Enough’ is a judgement a society makes together or not at all: a shared sense of what a decent life requires and where accumulation stops serving it, held in common so that no one need win the whole race to feel safe in it.

That settlement was always fragile. The broadcast public sustained it imperfectly. But it sustained it nevertheless. A fractured public can’t reach it at all, because the very ground on which a civilisation might say ‘this far and no further’ has dissolved into a billion private appetites, each optimised, each insatiable by design. It’s impossible for a species that can’t constitute a ‘we’ to decide that it has enough. And a species that can’t decide it has enough can’t act as one in the face of what is coming, for the polycrisis is, at root, the sum of appetites that were never told to stop. What’s coming will not wait for a species still learning, too late, how to want less.

And yet the elegy smuggles in a presumption that simply doesn’t survive scrutiny. It assumes the singular public was the natural state of human belonging, a wholeness from which we have fallen rather than a brief and uncharacteristic arrangement through which we passed. The evidence runs the other way. The mass public lasted a few generations. It was made possible by a specific and temporary scarcity — of channels, of bandwidth, of ways to speak — and underwritten by the hard borders of the nation-state. Before it, human beings belonged the way they had always belonged: locally, plurally, in overlapping circles of kin and guild and faith and place, in worlds that were many and didn’t pretend to be one. The village, the congregation, the trade, the tongue. Meaning formed locally then, too, and human beings managed to be human inside it for the overwhelming majority of our history.

So perhaps what we’re inside is better read as a change of geometry than as decay – a return, on unfamiliar terms and at planetary scale, to a plural and granular way of belonging that the mass broadcast century interrupted. The fragment is not only an echo chamber. It’s also a hearth. The group of forty who have agreed on what is true are, seen less harshly, a community of forty who know one another, who attend to one another and care about each other, and who form meaning at a scale a human nervous system can actually hold. The mass public asked us to see ourselves as members of an abstraction of millions whom we would never meet — an extraordinary feat of imagination, sustained at considerable psychic cost, and perhaps never as solid as it appeared. The fragment asks something smaller and in some ways more honest. It asks us to belong to what we can touch.

I don’t want to conclude too quickly, because the danger in the geometry is real and the hearth has a shadow. A belonging organised entirely around the local and the affirming, shut against the stranger and the discordant, is not a return to the village. The village could not choose its members or curate its reality; it was porous to weather, to scarcity, to the neighbour one could not avoid, and to the hard fact that arrived whether or not it was welcome. The micro-reality is porous to none of this. It’s the hearth with the door sealed and the windows painted over, comfort purchased at the price of every draught of air from outside. And a civilisation composed entirely of such hearths, however warm each is within, has no common ground on which to meet the emergencies that respect no border – the heating ocean, the engineered pathogen, the machine intelligence that will not belong to any one of our archipelagos. So the honest position is neither elegy nor celebration. It is the tougher recognition that we are passing out of one geometry of belonging, have yet to build the next, and that the interval is hazardous because the old machinery still stands but no longer works, while the new arrangement has not yet taken shape.

The task is not to mourn the singular public, which was a technology and seems to be reaching the end of its working life. Nor is it to surrender gratefully to the fragment, which is a home with a sealed door. The task is to imagine a geometry we have not yet seen — plural, like the fragment, but porous, like the village; many, but not closed; local in where meaning forms, yet somehow capable, when the planet or society requires it, of constituting a ‘we’ large enough to act.

Whether such a geometry is even possible is not a question the present can answer. What can be said is that the morning scroll, with its five sealed worlds, is not the final form of anything. It’s the rubble of one arrangement and the raw material of another, and the people now waking into it — reaching for the phone before the eyes have focused, moving between dreams that don’t answer to one another — are the ones who will either learn to leave the doors open or inherit a warmth with no air in it at all.