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Fixing Social Media

“When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry a hundred.” Thomas Jefferson.

“Move fast and break things.” Mark Zuckerberg

In this post, I explain how to fix social media, the internet, and the polarization of America. To be clear, I don’t expect the fix to happen, not without divine intervention that I am not presumptuous enough even to hope for. But I do hope I can show that the “like” button is pernicious. I don’t especially like ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence, but they are only a symptom of the underlying problem with the computer network, the so-called Internet, that has become the nervous system of our world.

My argument requires a long introduction.

I was one of the constructors of the ubiquitous computer network that connects nearly everyone today. I played only a small part, but I think my attitudes were shared by almost everyone on the project.

We had one goal: connectivity, to connect every programmable computer to every other programmable computer on the planet and share all their resources— data, programs, storage, and sensors into the “real world.” When we on the eastside of Seattle saw the level of a pot of coffee in a lab at MIT in real time, we declared a triumphant milestone. In 2025, we are outdoing ourselves. We are now developing interplanetary computer connectivity.

I used to say the greatest mistake of the 1990’s was ignoring security. Using computer connectivity for malice, fraud, and theft never occurred to us. Cybercrime is rampant today, but so is the computer security industry. I’m not as worried as I might be because they cancel each other out.

Now, I think that our greatest failing was lack of attention to humanity, the engine that ultimately drives the computer network. Of course, the computer network can be no better than the people who use it; that should be obvious. I think we in the 1980s and 90s realized this, but shoved it to the back of our desks. What did not occur to us, at least not to me, was that the network had the capacity to make humanity worse.

Karl Marx said that changing relationships between workers and the means of production deeply affected society, which is the basis of his economic determinism.

That’s about as far as I go with Marx, although I used to soothe our infant daughter to sleep by reading Das Kapital to her in German. I don’t have my copy anymore. She may have thrown up on it.

Changes to the means of dissemination of knowledge are even more significant than changes to the means of production. I quote Phil Christman from another context in which he says that improvements in communication are not all good: “people panicked over television (Fox News alone proves them right) and that people thought radio would rot your brain (it rotted Germany’s) or that print would kill memory (which it did, that’s like Media Ecology 101).”

Now, let’s get down to exactly how the computer network has made humans worse. I still believe connectivity is good.

Today, I, an engineer without special resources, can broadcast my thoughts to anyone who cares to listen. This post on Vine Maple Farm and my Substack is an example.

I, and everyone else, have greater freedom of speech than any previous generation.

As little as twenty years ago, this freedom did not exist. Today, anyone can post on social media like Facebook or Bluesky.

Yet why has our free public discussion become so crabbed and polarized? Is it simply an example of “one bad apple spoils the barrel”? The computer network puts more bad apples in the world’s barrel and therefore there is more spoilage?

That’s oversimplification. Growing up on a farm, I recall that a bad apple spoils a barrel of apples but a bad walnut does not spoil a bushel of walnuts and a bad potato does not spoil a  sack of potatoes. The difference is that spoiling apples produce a gas, ethylene, that spoils any fruit in its proximity. No gas, no spreading spoilage.

The spoiling gas of the computer network is thoughtless propagation. The easiest and most thoughtless propagation is to hit the “like” button. “Sharing” is a close second.

You don’t have to stop and think long enough to type out a comment like “I agree! Chopping up starving children in poor countries for pet food is a grand idea, ” and signing your name. Instead thoughtless “likes” and “shares” seep out like ethylene from a bad apple, perhaps not as egregiously as my example, but each thoughtless propagation is a missed opportunity to add another morsel of humanity to the message, and that is the tragedy.

Instead of a vast community, each member adding to soaring cathedral choir, the computer network promotes thoughtless, sterile, and soulless anonymity.

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The Federalist on Factions

“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Number 10.

Over two centuries ago, the authors of the United States constitution were remarkably prescient in their anticipation of the turmoil that blankets the United States today.

The United States in 2025 is in the clutches of a faction that wants to remake the country into something it imagined existed in a mythical near past. Mounting a diatribe against the faction is tempting, but here I will only discuss why factions are undesirable and how they rise rather than fume over the details current factional fever.

The problem with factions is, as James Madison pointed out in his definition above, is that a faction places the impulses of one group over the rights of other groups and the interests of the wider community. In the eighteenth century, propensity toward factionalism was noted as a flaw in democratic governments and a reason for forming the United States as a republic rather than a democracy.

Here, republic and democracy are used precisely. A town hall that is open to all and gives an equal vote to each attendee is a pure democracy. A city council meeting in which only the elected council members have a vote is a republic. In both cases, the ultimate authority stems from the citizens, but control is less direct in a republic. In historical republics, such as the classic Roman republic, membership in the governing council might be be freely elected but was often limited to people of wealth, land ownership, special families, etc.

Madison’s argument was that factions form with more difficulty in a republic and dissipate more quickly in a large republic. This argument may not have greatly swayed decisions on the U.S. constitution, but we now have what Madison wished for: a large republic of federated states.

I’m not sure that today’s prevailing faction is a majority. In my estimate, although Donald Trump officially won both the popular and the electoral vote, the November 2024 election was too close to confirm his supporters as a majority. Nevertheless, the election has given a faction a tight grasp on the reigns of power in America and the winners intend to do as much as they can to reshape the country to their tastes.

I ask what caused the current faction to prevail, contrary to Madison’s expectation. Before I sail off into speculation, I quote Madison again, simply because he wrote so well:

“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”

Since the turn of the twenty-first century liberty has reached new levels; we have computer networks that offer almost everyone the liberty of their own platform for broadcasting to the world. In the last decade or so, social media have added the equivalent of anabolic steroids to the computer network: likes and shares on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others. Those pernicious buttons have enabled virality; today, within a few clicks, a catchy post spreads like the measles at an anti-vax birthday party.

Ubiquitous platforms and virality have transformed our American republic to a brood stall for factions. Virality is all about “fast thinking,” the shoot-from-the-hip thoughts that are fight or flight reflexes rather than considered, judged, and reasoned responses; in other words, an aliment which is gasoline to the fires of faction.

Madison expected that a large republic would quickly engulf factions with reason.

Instead, technology has added an accelerant.

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American Civil Religion And Christian Nationalism

“Today, the U.S. faces both a rise in Christian nationalism and a crisis in civil religion. The two phenomena are related.”

In the 1960s a sociologist, Robert Bellah, coined the term “American civil religion” for a set of beliefs that could be ascribed to almost all Americans and is not limited to the United States. This national religion has no defined legal status, but these beliefs are consistently affirmed and followed in public discourse.

The American civil religion was, and still is, invoked when witnesses take the stand in court and officials are conferred their office. It is not specifically Judeo-Christian but it is consistent with Judeo-Christian beliefs. The core Christian precepts of loving ones neighbor, salvation, and resurrection are not directly present.

In an article published in 1967, Bellah said

 “The whole address [the Kennedy inauguration] can be understood as only the most recent statement of a theme that lies very deep in the American tradition, namely the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth.”

Don’t confuse civil religion with Christian nationalism. Civil religion, as observed by Bellah, maintains strict separation of church and state. In America individuals and their churches are obliged to accept the civil religion, but civil religion does not endorse the idiosyncrasies of individuals or the denominational churches they have formed. Christian nationalists want to go beyond civil religion and oblige the state to publicly sanction specific religious symbols and practices. Nationalists are less concerned with common faith than the civil religion.

Pew Research Center studies have revealed that Americans who identify as Christian and attend religious ceremonies has declined from about 90% when Bellah first wrote about civil religion to less than 70% in 2020.

How has the decline in Christian affiliation affected civil religion?

In 2011, reviewing a book by religious and political philosopher Charles Taylor, Bellah wrote

“The deeper question that I, a Durkheimian[1] sociologist, would ask Taylor is whether a post-Durkheimian society is ultimately viable. Without some degree of consensus, without something like a ‘common faith’ … is a coherent society possible? … We have become … a nation whose citizens feel no lasting solidarity beyond themselves and their families. Is that a situation too incoherent to last?”

Bellah raised a serious question.  In the intervening decade, divisions have gotten wider and more intense. Today, even families are often harshly divided over politics.

The U.S. faces both a rise in Christian nationalism and a crisis in civil religion. The two phenomena are related. The current president appears to have jettisoned the sanctity of his oath of office in a profound rejection of the civil religion, a set of beliefs that have prevailed from the origins of the country in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The current president’s election was endorsed by the proponents of Christian nationalism and their attitudes have buoyed up the rejection of our civil religion. The Christian nationalists, many of whom seldom attend church services and frequently are not church members, think that public government endorsement of Christianity will restore greatness to America, but don’t mind a president who publicly despises the American civil religion, which many thinkers and historians assert is the motivation behind the two century success story of the United States.

It is easy to confuse causation and correlation, especially when the ground is shifting under our feet. Has decreased participation in church services caused a decline in civil religion? Or the other way around? Or does declining civil religion cause empty pews?

Or is an enormous paradigm shift changing us it ways we don’t understand?

[1] Emile Durkheim was a founder of modern sociology in the early 20th century who argued that governments were essentially religious in origin and justification.