The Refragmentation

I think that the field in US in urgent need of refragmentation is the political systems. The two parties are oligopol that don't care about their customers and they don't deliver enough political product to the people. We need more smaller parties that could represent the increasing diversity of opinions.

> I wonder a bit about the fact that it focused on the US only. On a global scale I think that experiences are continuing to compress and will continue to do so for at least a few generations.

There's actually a little allusion to this in footnote 21:

> [21] Globally the trend has been in the other direction. While the US is becoming more fragmented, the world as a whole is becoming less fragmented, and mostly in good ways.

He didn't elaborate, but I suppose the essay was already pretty hefty.

Ah, I missed that footnote. Thanks!

pg provided his own tldr; in the first paragraph of the essay:

"One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest. And increasing economic inequality means the spread between rich and poor is growing too. I'd like to propose a hypothesis: that all these trends are instances of the same phenomenon. And moreover, that the cause is not some force that's pulling us apart, but rather the erosion of forces that had been pushing us together."

In general he tries to look for a net positive outcome resulting from these changes, but is not confident there will be one.

Great essay. I would quibble with the following though:

> [Technology] means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating.

The problem with this is that success = ability * motivation * opportunity. There's no question that technology is increasing ability. But it's less clear what's happening with opportunity.

Networks tend to be winner-take-all, which means that technology actually depletes opportunity at the same time as it increase ability. Which I think means that we're actually going toward integration, not fragmentation. Only this time we don't need another WWII to integrate society because it's already happening, it's just less visible.

E.g. the vast majority of the traditional media is controlled by the same six corporations. And to quote Fred Wilson's 2015 wrap up, "10 of the top 12 mobile apps are owned by Apple, Facebook, and Google."

There's no question that individuals are way more free than they were in 1950 or whatever. But I think it's more analogous to free-as-in-beer, as opposed to free-as-in-speech.