What's going on is not just in-groups operating towards local betterment. It's a disintegration of national consensus from the decline of mass (industrial) media. Democracy can't work without at least a rough consensus on what the truth is. The filter bubbles we increasingly inhabit lack conflict resolution and the bubbles drift further apart. We end up with factionalism, leading to balkanization, and unless we find a way to resolve the underlying tension, we're on the way to violence, IMO.
In the face of complexity caused by global integration people are turtling into the culture of their micro-ecosystems. And perhaps rightly so. Local conditions might beg for this behavior as being the most efficient. Eg: If you have a majority culture of people who are anti-gay, than trying to forcefully apply globally gay friendly laws is just going to cause confusion and chaos.
To be fair to Toffler, I don’t know if this could be obvious except after the fact. To be less fair, I am not sure I ever saw the value of vaguely trying to predict the future with overly broad linguistics.
Better I think would be to have a slightly ambitious and more humanitarian view of the future and figure out how to get their as fast as possible. Baby steps.
Such an approach is accountable and has goals which can be reasonably achieved. Anything else, IMHO, is just sci fi.
The polity was fractured like this before TV and radio.
Mostly the lesson over time has been that people don’t want to agree about anything with their rivals until absolutely forced to. The content of the argument is less important than the medium of argument.
Network TV didn’t create a realm of common facts exactly but a single forcing factor that compelled resolution because the system could not sustain a lot of competing ideas.
Of course this meant that better ideas would survive, and that very often meant good ideas that worked in reality—-though not always.
Now you have to show an idea is better by implementing it at a smaller scale and growing it rather than winning all at once at a national level.
It’s all doable but it is harder and takes longer. It is possibly lower risk and more dynamic.
> The polity was fractured like this before TV and radio.
But it wasn't felt.
Before TV and radio, the main method of communication was print and conversation, so that a random person picked out of a population might come in contact with only a few political or cultural opinions in a given day. This continued into the age of TV and radio because only a few such opinions were permitted by those controlling the broadcasts.
Now that people might easily come into conflict culturally or politically hundreds of times a day, the real diversity of opinion across a large population is apparent to a given member of that population, in a way that it wasn't before, even if we assume that the differences were really there.
That constant conflict is a few clicks away at any moment leads many people to internalize that they are constantly fighting for their ability to hold their political beliefs and perform their culture, and/or to shut out most large differences to the extent they can, while conforming themselves to minor differences.
The only people who experienced this kind of constant churn in the past were travelers, and mostly only while traveling. We are all travelers now.
You can have all those with just two sides. The difference now is that the attempt to corral all views into two main camps is breaking down, revealing the chaos of the actual landscape of opinions.
What's going on is not just in-groups operating towards local betterment. It's a disintegration of national consensus from the decline of mass (industrial) media. Democracy can't work without at least a rough consensus on what the truth is. The filter bubbles we increasingly inhabit lack conflict resolution and the bubbles drift further apart. We end up with factionalism, leading to balkanization, and unless we find a way to resolve the underlying tension, we're on the way to violence, IMO.