Why We Can See Everything & Agree On Nothing
Understanding the observable distance problem
Imagine that it’s 2026 and your local grocery store has two types of apples: Red Delicious and Honeycrisp. Nobody has strong feelings about this. The Democrats haven’t issued a position on apple varieties. Tucker Carlson isn’t doing segments about how the globalist elite are forcing Honeycrisps on Real Americans. You just pick whichever apple you want and go about your day.
Fast forward to 2027. AOC tweets that Red Delicious apples are a symbol of agricultural worker exploitation. Fox News runs a segment about how “woke millennials” are trying to cancel traditional American apples. Suddenly, your choice of apple is a signal of your political tribe. Red states see a 300% increase in Red Delicious sales. Blue cities start hosting Honeycrisp-only farmers markets.
This is very much how our current media ecosystem operates today — observable signals become signals for tribal battle lines, often with little basis in reality. How does this happen?
The Pothole
There’s a pothole on my street. I know this because I ride over it every day, muttering curses at the city and making mental notes to finally submit that complaint. I also know, with equal certainty, that a neighbor’s oak tree dropped a branch during last week’s storm.
This physical distance between me and the object is finite, observable, and real. The pothole has little hidden meaning, no subtext. I can walk outside right now and touch it. The solution to the pothole is visible to me — someone needs to fill it up.
But what about something like the border crisis? The war in Ukraine? The California wildfires? These are problems that I can only observe through many chains of intermediaries. These intermediaries often change what that object represents.
A recent strange example: On Jan 27th, President Trump announced he had sent the US military into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER” to help stop the L.A. wildfires. In the Central Valley, farmers watched their reservoir levels drop as two billion gallons were released to fight fires that were already contained. The water never reached Los Angeles — it couldn’t have, because the infrastructure did not exist to bring it down there — but that hardly mattered. Many Trump supporters celebrated a victory over California’s water politics — It was a political “win” for his base, even if it was just a signal with no physical results.
The farmers downstream of the reservoirs could observe it personally (many of them were Trump supporters), and according to reports, were worriedly trying to figure out what it meant for their water allocations. But I doubt it changed their support for Trump. One local congressperson said they were “excited” that Trump is proactively engaging with the state’s water issues, even as that water was flowing into the ground and the ocean. This was not a neutral event, despite the fact that it was directly observable to them.
You can laugh at this, and call the people dumb who support candidates that count wins while making things worse. But it’s not the whole story. There are plenty of examples of high-signal, low-impact things that the Biden administration did as well.
Democracy is a big coordination game. We need to know what’s happening in order to vote people into office that can solve our problems. In this way the democratic process is a sort of problem-solving machine — if you’re angry about something you see in your community, you should be able to vote for change. If that thing is fixed by that representative, great! Vote them in again. If not, vote them out and try again with a different guy.
For local issues this is pretty easy, because there are fewer mediated steps between us and the issue. Like the pothole on my street, the observable distance is still very low. School boards and city governments function pretty well because people can see what is wrong and which policies are failing.
But for national issues, most of our problems are not directly observable. We rely on mediators — journalists, scientists, pundits, influencers, politicians, and our smart friends — to help us figure out which issues we should pay attention to and how we should vote. The internet was supposed to help us here, giving us access to far more objective information about the world. Someone with a smartphone in Bakersfield or El Paso can broadcast live to millions, giving us immediate observational powers.
But we forgot one of the key axioms of the modern internet age: the more information we have available to us, the more important the serving mechanism becomes. And social media has done some really weird things to how we share information.
The Telephone Game From Hell
Remember the telephone game from elementary school? One kid whispers a message to another, who passes it to the next, until the final person announces something hilariously garbled. “Sally sells seashells” becomes “Jelly smells terrible.”
Now imagine playing the telephone game, but designed by a sadist: each person in the chain gets a few dollars based on how many people emotionally react to their version of the message. Suddenly, “Sally sells seashells” might become “BREAKING: Local Girl’s Illegal Seashell Operation Funding Underwater Criminal Empire.”
This is essentially what we’ve built with social media. Outrage is viral, nuance is not. Every repost, every quote tweet, every shared article becomes another link in a chain where engagement-maximizing distortion isn’t just possible — it’s incentivized. The platforms literally pay people (in likes, shares, and ultimately real money through creator programs) to make each iteration more outrage-inducing than the last.
Let’s examine for a moment what this payment looks like. Do you know someone with a large social following? You remember what that felt like when you learned they had it? Your opinion of them probably changed. Followers are esteem. Followers are influence. And if you post a viral hit, you will get more of them. We are paid in reputational capital, and at times, real dollars.
I’m not saying that everyone on these platforms is intentionally trying to game the system to make money. But when the likes, shares, and follows tick upward, we feel good. We get enormous hits of righteousness, meaning and purpose from our audience. These are not-so-subtle payments to our limbic systems, and they are actually rewiring us.
And unfortunately, reality is often the casualty.
Consider a few examples of issues that were recently broadly bipartisan or nonpartisan:
- The EPA was created by Republican President Richard Nixon with overwhelming bipartisan support. The Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 passed 89–11 in the Senate.
- Immigration reform was not fundamentally partisan until recently: This video shows two (Liberal?) Republicans — Reagan and Bush — debate the issue here. In 1986, Reagan proudly signed an amnesty bill for undocumented immigrants.
- Until recently, voting methods were largely technical discussions among state officials. The 2002 Help America Vote Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
- Vaccine requirements for school children were standard, uncontroversial policy for decades. The polio vaccine rollout was celebrated across political lines. Even childhood vaccine requirements remained largely bipartisan until the mid-2010s.
- As recently as 2012, Republicans were warning about Russian aggression while Democrats advocated for reset and engagement.
How did these things become politically charged objects, or even flip in valence? There is a fairly straightforward process to making this happen.
First, you need elites — politicians, pundits, and Twitter blue-checks who identify potential wedge issues. They’re looking for topics that can generate engagement and signal virtue to their base. The intrinsic political relevance of the issue barely matters. Climate change could have remained a boring discussion about carbon taxes and international agreements.
Second, you need normal human psychology. We like to think we’re rational beings carefully weighing evidence, but we’re actually exquisitely tuned social creatures. Once our tribe stakes out a position, we don’t just agree with it — we incorporate it into our identity. Tell a conservative their truck choice shows patriotism, or a liberal their coffee habits demonstrate ethical consumption, and watch as the preference becomes part of who they are.
Third, you need social media. The algorithms that decide what we see are optimized for engagement, and nothing drives engagement like tribal conflict. Each retweet and share strengthens the association between issue and identity. Your feed fills with people who share your views, while the algorithm helpfully hides anyone who might complicate the narrative.
Lazy Followers
A 2019 Cornell study revealed how arbitrary this process can be.
The researchers created ten separate “worlds” — essentially isolated social feeds where participants were isolated from each other. In each world, they introduced politically neutral statements like “The greatest books are universal in their appeal” and “AI should be used in blackmail detection” and asked Democrats or Republicans whether they agreed. The crucial variable was that in some worlds, participants could see how others before them had responded, along with their political affiliations.
What happened next was remarkable. After running the experiment, the same statement would become a firmly held “Democratic position” in some worlds and an equally firm “Republican position” in others, based solely on who happened to stake out positions first. In one world, a Democrat labeling an issue first as Democratic would cause Republicans to see it as a “Democratic position” and disagree. But in another world, a Republican might claim the same position first, creating the exact opposite pattern.
This suggests something crucial about our political world: many of the issues we now see as inherently “liberal” or “conservative” might have ended up completely reversed if different people had staked out positions first. Our deepest political divides might not be about the issues at all — they’re about who claimed them first and how we aligned ourselves in response.
A simpler way to explain this might be thinking in terms of mental shortcuts. Our brains are fairly efficient (read: lazy), and don’t want to expend any effort they don’t have to. For an opinion which we have very little previous information about, we’re likely to use the scaffolding of other people’s opinions to determine how to evaluate it.
But other people’s interpretations are also lazy. They relied on someone before them to determine if it was a political object. A chain of lazy evaluations can turn one person’s initial gut reaction into a thousand other people’s gut-reaction follow-ons.
The Way Out
Is there a way out of this? There is some evidence that there is. The first step is recognizing that most political positions aren’t inherently partisan — they’re made partisan through a specific social process that we can understand and potentially interrupt.
Some institutions are already experimenting with ways to short-circuit this process. Structured debates on social media have proven surprisingly good at helping people find information with a few simple norms in place (see AskScience, or ChangeMyView on Reddit). Some news organizations are experimenting with formats emphasizing direct observation, ideological flags and verifiable facts over partisan framing.
Nothing about this process is inevitable. Some communities have managed to maintain productive disagreement without descending into tribal warfare. They typically share a few features:
- They explicitly separate ideas from identity
- They reward good-faith engagement across partisan lines
- Their discussion formats emphasize understanding over winning
These efforts won’t eliminate disagreement, nor should they — genuine political differences are a healthy part of democracy. But if we can carefully examine the machinery in play, it might help us design better “neutral zones” where we can discuss problems and solutions without immediately sorting into tribes. The pothole on my street doesn’t care which party I vote for, and neither does the reservoir pushing water into the ocean. Reality is stubbornly non-partisan, and we need to remember that.
And maybe that’s the real source of hope: beneath all our mediated realities and engagement-optimized outrage, there’s still a physical world we share. The challenge isn’t to agree on everything — it’s to keep more of our discussions anchored in that observable reality, where problems are just problems, and solutions can come from anywhere.
Thanks for reading. These are ideas from my book, which you can find here. You can also sign up for my newsletter here (where this piece was originally published). Your attention is a resource I deeply value.
