The Cloud revolts simply upon contact with the Pyramid—and against it. But the Cloud’s nature is inherently turbulent, prone to animosity and agitation.

digital orality retrieves not only relational bias and agonistic intensity but also other traits of primary orality: bragging, truth relativity, analog thinking, and magical consciousness (fueling the rise of science denialism).

The reversal of progressivism is not conservatism—nothing can be conservative in the accelerating Axial Decade. The reversal of progressivism is reactionism or revanchism, which sets the stage for a reversal into even more radical forms of progressivism.

Writing became the ultimate form of reaction delay: a literate culture may postpone its response to events for days, months, or years, but deliberation and cooperation, fostered by literacy, enabled humans to thrive and transform the entire planet into our ecological niche.

As the internet emancipated authorship, people began sharing what they saw, felt, or thought. This seemed likely to create only cacophony. And indeed, noise surged when everyone posted anything. But no one really consumes it all—a mechanism of collective filtering emerged.

Affordances disregard human personal attitudes. All humans are the same to media when it comes to extending humans in space and time in exchange for developing media. This uniting power of media converts media as tools into media as environmental forces.

There are hard affordances—they offer only certain ways of interacting with objects, such as a door with a metal plate or, say, stairs; and there are soft affordances, when media can be interacted with in various ways but still invite users to choose a “preferable” use.

As McLuhan once said, if you don’t have a TV, you miss all the fun it provides but still suffer the consequences it brings.[57] Digital orality shapes social conditions for everyone, whether they’re online or not.

Media are the hardware of society—the hardware has evolved from expressing ideas to centering on identities. The software—our culture—has followed suit. Identity politics mirrors the development of media, reflecting its cultural consequences.