Societal Rupture
Artwork by Unknown
We have started calling this moment a rupture, as if reality broke all at once. The term does make sense because it suggests a discrete event, an insidious descent into our civilization. But what we are experiencing is less of a collapse and more of a delayed recognition of simulated conditions that have been intensifying for over a decade, and now it’s as relevant as ever.
Since the early 2010s, leading platforms have converged around a single economic logic that most of us are now aware of. Attention is captured, measured, and optimized, and then add the infinite scroll, invasion of push notifications, and algorithmic ranking systems that were intentionally greedy design choices. These tools are engineered to push content that elicits strong emotional responses, and they do in fact rewire neural pathways. Internal research from these platforms, including widely reported findings from the early 2020s has repeatedly shown that this kind of content travels farther and holds attention longer, and by effect, generates an obscene amount of profit. These systems actively shape what is seen, when it is seen, and how often it returns, relying on mechanisms like autoplay, the infinite feed, and intermittent reinforcement to keep users in continuous cycles of engagement. Over time, this produces an information environment that is not only dense but deeply volatile.
At the same time, much of this environment continues to be described as if it were just “information,” as though everything encountered online were equivalent to speech or expression. That framing has allowed these systems to operate with minimal structural accountability, even as their influence extends far beyond communication into behavior and habit formation. The conditions have changed, but the language used to justify them has not kept pace.
Algorithms operate as large-scale systems of selection and omission, which creates a persistent asymmetry. Users encounter an onslaught of immediate stimuli without any corresponding literature for understanding the underlying predatory design. So when people ask what changed in the past decade, they are often looking for a singular cause, but the shift is cumulative, and the gap between lived experience and how reality is presented to us through digital platforms has grown so wide that the usual stories we tell ourselves about the world no longer fully make sense of what we are actually living through.
The instinctive response for many users is to create more and more content with the hope of increasing traffic on their profiles, but this response is already anticipated by the system and absorbed into it. The more demanding task of today is to redirect attention toward the conditions and oligarchs who introduced these platforms into our environment, systems that behave less like tools and more like parasitic plants, drawing energy from their hosts while appearing to sustain them. In this arrangement, users become the surrounding ecosystem, continuously supplying attention and content that the platforms extract and circulate. To respond, we have to begin understanding the structure of the digital space itself, the one we inhabit for a large portion of our lives.
