“it feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection is made by the system.”

Tapping into our deepest psychological needs, then training us to pursue them through commercial consumption that will leave us unfulfilled and coming back for more, has been central to American capitalism since the postwar boom.

The founders and CEOs of these companies, for all their fabulous wealth, have been, whether they realized it or not, prisoners of their creations from the day that a venture capitalist first cut them a check in return for the promise of permanent, exponential growth.

majorities angry and fearful over change that threatened to erode their position in the hierarchy. Because the impersonal forces of social change are, for most people, no more defeatable than the weather, social media had stepped in to provide a more corporeal, conquerable villain: feminist bloggers, the religious minority next door, refugees.

Without the underlying infrastructure, social media movements are less able to organize coherent demands, coordinate, or act strategically. And by channeling popular energy away from the harder kind of organizing, it preempts traditional movements from emerging. It

Being shunned hurts for the same reason that a knife piercing your skin hurts: you have evolved to experience both as mortal threats.

Joining often worsened the very sense of isolation and being adrift that had led people to it in the first place. With nowhere else to turn and now doubly needful of reassurance, followers gave themselves over to the cause even more fully.

When members of a dominant social group feel at risk of losing their position, it can spark a ferocious reaction. They grow nostalgic for a past, real or imagined, when they felt secure in their dominance (“Make America Great Again”). They become hyper-attuned for any change that might seem tied to their position: shifting demographics, evolving