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For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.

We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet? In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. The early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance. Zero-sum conflicts-such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe-were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress.

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Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “ major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. There is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life? The Rise of the Modern Tower

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It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.įrom the December 2001 issue: David Brooks on Red and Blue Americaīabel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future-and to us as a people. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. But Babel is not a story about tribalism it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. We are cut off from one another and from the past. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.