The Fracturing Web: Why Society Isn’t Polarising, It’s Differentiating
The Myth of Polarisation
We often hear that the internet has “polarised” society — split us into warring tribes of left and right, believers and deniers, elites and populists. But that image assumes a simple, binary world, like a bar magnet with two poles. In truth, what’s happening looks far more biological. The modern web, with its millions of microchannels and affinity groups, isn’t polarising humanity. It’s fragmenting it — in a creative, proliferative way.
Polarisation implies tension across a single axis. Fragmentation implies differentiation across many. The internet hasn’t divided us into two opposing camps; it’s enabled billions of humans to form countless new identities, subcultures, and self-organising “cells.”
Biogenic Lens: Differentiation as Growth
In biogenic terms, fragmentation isn’t collapse—it’s morphogenesis. Life evolves by producing differences, not uniformity. The first multicellular organisms emerged not by consolidating, but by specialising: one cell became muscle, another nerve, another skin. Communication was the key that made it possible.
Human societies are now undergoing a similar phase shift. The digital nervous system—the modern web—has connected the global body so tightly that differentiation is no longer just local or cultural. It’s ideological, aesthetic, moral, and memetic. Each niche subreddit, Discord, fandom, or activist collective is a new “cell type” in the social organism.
The Turbocharger: Communication as Growth Medium
Every new communication technology—from the printing press to the smartphone—amplifies differentiation. But Web 3 (or whatever we call this era of AI-augmented, decentralised, immersive communication) acts like a growth medium. Ideas can self-replicate, mutate, and differentiate faster than ever before.
This can feel chaotic. To the old hierarchies, it looks like disintegration. But in biogenic terms, it’s distributed intelligence. Each node (person, group, algorithmic cluster) learns, adapts, and self-organises. Society is not “breaking apart”; it’s discovering new forms of coherence at smaller scales.
From Consensus to Coherence
Old institutions seek consensus—a single unified narrative. But biological systems thrive on coherence—local order that contributes to global complexity.
In a body, no single cell type dominates.
In an ecosystem, diversity ensures resilience.
On the web, microcultures play the same role.
Fragmentation, when guided by minimal shared rules (like freedom, connectivity, and trust protocols), increases systemic intelligence. It’s not a bug; it’s evolution.
The Challenge: Maintaining Permeability
Still, life depends on semi-permeable boundaries—membranes that allow exchange without collapse. The danger of online fragmentation isn’t division itself, but impermeability. When communities seal themselves off completely, communication halts, and so does evolution.
The biogenic task, then, isn’t to force reintegration, but to design membranes, not walls—platforms, languages, and norms that let difference communicate without dissolving identity.
The Biogenic Conclusion
The internet’s great experiment isn’t in unity or division; it’s in living complexity.
The web is doing what life has always done: producing more forms of itself, faster.
What looks like fragmentation from above is actually differentiation from within.
The future of the web isn’t tribal—it’s cellular.