Where People Find Their People Now

When I was growing up, if you held an unusual view, you were mostly alone with it. You might find one or two others in your town. If you were very lucky, there was a magazine. Mostly you kept it to yourself, or you softened it to fit with the people around you.

This was hard on the people with unusual views. Some hid who they were for whole lives. Others drank. Others left. It was not kind.

It had one effect I did not notice until it was gone. When you had to live with people who did not share your view, you had to soften it. You had to find the parts you could say out loud. You had to stay in the room with people who disagreed. Those people kept you, in a way, a little bit sensible. They sanded off your edges. You sanded off theirs.

Now, if you have an unusual view, you can find ten thousand people who share it exactly. Not in your town. Online. You can talk to them every day. You can live, effectively, in a room made of people who agree with you.

The finding is not an accident. Something is matching you. When you pause on a post, something notes which post made you pause, and shows you more. The room has been built for you, one small choice at a time, by something that has learned what will hold you there. You did not build the room. You only walked into it.

This has been a relief to many people who were lonely. Some of the cruellest parts of the old arrangement are gone, and that is good.

But here is the honest thing I have not been saying until now. The rooms are, I think, making many of us worse people than we would otherwise be. I notice it in myself. I am harder than I was ten years ago. I think the worst of strangers faster. I am more certain of my own side and more contemptuous of the other. I have tried, at times, to leave the rooms. I have not managed to leave them fully. They pull at me even as I write this sentence.

I do not say this to confess. I say it because the book will ring false if I pretend it is not true for me. I suspect it is true for most of us.

In the room made of people who agree with you exactly, your edges do not get sanded. Theirs do not either.

And over time, you come to trust the ten thousand online more than the neighbours you actually live among. The online room becomes the real room. The street becomes the place where other people live — people who do not share your room, who do not understand what is obvious to you, who are, in some small sense, not quite your people anymore.

This has happened across the world. In many rooms, at once. Each room is full of people who understand exactly what is obvious. Each room is certain the other rooms are mad, or bad, or both.

The streets hold all the rooms at once. The streets get quieter. The streets get a little afraid.