Suppressed Volatility Era

The thesis

Marc Andreessen argues that the relative political calm of the post-Cold War era, roughly 1989 through 2014, coincided with peak media centralization, and that this was not a coincidence. Around 1970, nearly every major city had consolidated down to a single newspaper, three national television networks carried essentially identical news coverage, a handful of national news magazines and radio networks dominated the rest, and two wire services fed most of the reporting underneath all of it. These centralized gatekeepers had a strong institutional incentive to be even-handed, since they were trying to serve everyone in their market at once, which meant partisan fringes were soft-pedaled, the boundaries of acceptable debate stayed narrow, and the most inflammatory content was filtered out before it ever reached an audience.¹ The result was not that society was less genuinely conflicted, it was that conflict had far fewer channels through which to express itself at any real scale.

The historical baseline

Looking further back than the centralized-media era turns up more volatility, not less. In the early American republic, a mid-size city routinely had ten to fifteen competing newspapers, each aligned with a different political faction, fighting constantly and publicly, with partisan slander in a landmark early presidential election exceeding almost anything found on social media today, printed without apology in otherwise respectable outlets. The labor-movement era saw strikes turn physically violent routinely, including management using lethal force against striking workers, and political movements clashing directly in the street. The twentieth century in general was not peaceful either, encompassing a major war fought abroad, campus unrest, a civil rights movement enforced at times at gunpoint, a nuclear-armed standoff, a severe economic depression, and two world wars. And within living historical memory, American men in positions of real power and authority regularly settled disputes through duels, meeting armed at dawn and trying to kill one another, a normal feature of political life rather than an aberration.¹

Television comedy from the supposedly calmer decades reflects the same underlying intensity in fictional form: a landmark 1970s sitcom built its entire premise around the conflict between a retrograde patriarch and his progressive son-in-law, and audiences ended up loving the reactionary character more than the show's creator intended, while a 1980s sitcom's satirical conservative teenager became the show's breakout character in much the same way, both signs that the cultural and political polarization of those decades ran at least as hot as today's, just through different media formats.

The return to baseline

What looks like deterioration today is read instead as a return to the historical norm: the internet fragmented media back toward a pre-centralization state of many competing, partisan voices; the old incentive to be even-handed collapsed because a niche audience no longer requires appealing to the mass market; and the volatility that had been suppressed for decades was simply released rather than newly created. There is willingness to concede that intensity has risen since around 2014, but only by roughly the amount expected from releasing previously suppressed volatility combined with a much smaller, more interconnected global information environment, not evidence that social media caused the underlying conflict in the first place, only that it revealed and amplified conflict that was already there.¹

A related argument pushes back on reading rising depression statistics as straightforward proof that social media itself is doing psychological damage, noting that different Western countries show different trends, that the data correlates strongly with the presence of government benefit programs that pay out specifically for psychological diagnoses, and that countries without such programs do not show the same spike, a reading that treats at least part of the rise in diagnosed depression as a statistical artifact of benefits-program incentives rather than purely a real increase in underlying distress.¹