For us, a people experiencing online polarization so deep we're calling this phenomenon a culture war — we need to touch each other more than ever, and we need to let ourselves be touched. The act is radical — we are making ourselves vulnerable to other people. Yet this is where the true strength in humanity comes through: our ability to share with... See more

Not only do we thrive under touch, we physically need it. Cultures where physical affection toward infants was high had low levels of adult aggression, but cultures where affectionate touch was low had high adult aggression.

The famous misprint from Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 book, “The medium is the Massage”, may actually be revelatory. Online linguistic collisions and their downstream cultural effects can be remediated by physical touch.

Not only do we thrive under touch, we physically need it. Cultures where physical affection toward infants was high had low levels of... See more

What happens when two disparate communities clash? What happens when arguments happen online, and people are saying things that the other completely doesn't understand? What happens when the two parties arguing don't even know how deeply they are misunderstanding the words being used? Can we ever rebuild the tower?

As we are fed more content, we are pushed deeper into algorithmic niches. In return, we are encouraged to engage with more extreme and polarizing identifiers because it is more labelable, more indexable by the machine — the creation of the “Island". On this island, the slang, in-jokes, and archetypes which emerge as a community develops in... See more

Babelification is the process by which, after splintering, insular digital groups develop unique languages which makes reintegration in shared digital spaces difficult, if not impossible. When someone believes their insular language in online echo chambers is commonplace reality, clashes ensue when that same individual is placed in a context where... See more

The pace at which we’re creating new words, then recontextualizing their meanings in hyperbolic, meme, and joke formats, is moving faster than ever before, in our age of relentless online discourse.

In the Bible’s book of Genesis, monolingual humans aspired to build a "city and tower with its top in the heavens". God punished humans by creating a multitude of languages to sow chaos: "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be... See more