It’s not like the public sphere was an ideal of camaraderie before being shifted into electronic overdrive.

The question you seem to be posing is as to whether there is any signal in the increasing noise, or is it just melting down whatever social structure existed.

Our religions, ideologies, nationalisms, regionalisms, economic systems all seem heading for some denouement anyway, so why not speed up the process and see where it takes us?

Having grown up in the backside of the horse racing industry; a business with a reputation for both churning up bs, as well as seeing through it, I’ve developed a list of dissents from the normal outlook, that goes deeper than the current online chaos. If the world is going to melt down, these might be something to consider:

Time

Time is not so much the point of the present, moving past to future, as it is change, turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

Time is asymmetric, because what is measured, action, is inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is not being measured and is emergent, like convection is emergent from temperature and pressure.

Different clocks run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism. That much of history has been about getting everyone dancing to the same tune has us indoctrinated to a universal time. The winners write the history books.

Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.

Being “conserved,” energy is always and only present. So the patterns it creates come and go. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.

So process=past to future. Patterns=future to past.

Consciousness goes past to future. Thoughts go future to past.

Lives go birth to death. Life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Products go start to finish. The production line consumes material and expells product.

The feedback being the patterns define and steer the process.

Though like waves, the patterns are most defined, as they are cresting. So clear thinking is what is directly past, while instincts are of the wave starting to build. Think flow.

Form and energy. Galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in.

Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system to sort through and order the information precipitating out, as well as referee the emotions bubbling up. Navigation.

Society is the raw energies and desires bubbling up, while civil and cultural forms coalesce in. Youth and age. Liberal and conservative.

Feedback. Thermodynamics all the way down.

Although with our linear, goal oriented philosophy, each side of the various processes, social, economic, political, see themselves going the right direction, so those going the other way, that provide balance, must be idiots.

God

A spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and knowledge, from which we fell.

More the light shining through the film, than the images on it. Consciousness seeking knowledge, than any particular form, or brand of it.

Conflating the ideal with the absolute tends towards cultural narcissism, as we assume our cultural preferences to be universal, rather than unique expressions of our time and place.

Although this top down, father figure lawgiver is a useful narrative device for instilling cultural forms onto succeeding generations, especially respect for authority, after several thousand years, it might be worth reviewing the logical basis for it. While God might be dead, we still live in its monist shadow.

Just because everything is connected, doesn’t make it one, only networked.

To the Ancients, monotheism represented monarchist culture, while pan and polytheism were associated with democracy and republicanism. Only when we went back to them, did separation of church and state, culture and civics, become necessary.

Money

Money is the social contract that enables mass societies to function, but we treat it as a commodity to mine from society, to save and store.

As a contract, one side is an asset and the other is a debt, so to save the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated. Which creates a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of society, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges.

As money and finance are the system to circulate value around the community, analogous to the body’s circulation system, this effect is like the heart telling the hands and feet they don’t need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get. The results are predictable.

As a contract, money makes an effective medium, but lousy store. In the body, blood is the medium and fat is the store, or for cars, roads are the medium and parking lots are the store. Confusing them creates problems.

The functionality of money is in its fungibility, so we own it like we own the section of road we are on, or the fluids passing through our bodies.

If our goal is healthy societies and environments, we need to store value in them directly, not assume we can save for them abstractly. We save for many of the same reasons, from raising children and housing, to healthcare and retirement. If these were designed as community assets, rather than everyone trying to save for them individually, with bank accounts as the economic umbilical cord, we would have what we actually need, not an overreaching and corrupted financial mechanism.

The irony of our individualistic culture, is that it creates atomized societies, that are more easily controlled by instituionalized authority and most relationships mediated by a parasitic feedback mechanism. Somewhat analogous to the movie; The Matrix.

So deal with the here and now and accept that thermal feedback loops are what mostly explain it, rather than racing for the pot of gold at the end of the narrative arc.

We seek immortally as a function of time. That we will live on beyond the events of our lives, but if time is merely an effect of the changing configuration of what is, then we might look for it beyond our immediate bubbles of being and learn to sit back and sense that element of what makes us conscious shining through all of life. That we are all flowers off the same tree. Cells in a larger organism. Possibly one that is following an organic route, laid down from the dawn of life and the earth is evolving into a singular organism, with humanity as its central nervous system. Aka, Gaia Hypothesis.

Though keeping in mind we still fluctuate between the absolute and the infinite, so any top down node rests on a bottom up network.

Maybe we are more towards the end of the beginning, than the beginning of the end. Just suffering through an overwrought adolescence.

This is all somewhat outside the Overton window, but the foundations of that house are shaking, as the stories we tell our various tribes have everyone in a frenzy.