“The United States Constitution, our government itself, is basically a really sophisticated engine of enfoldment. It’s brilliant when you actually look it at that way — the Constitution was designed to take incompatible views, and to suggest a process by which those views can be made compatible with each other, to begin pulling together different views, different ideologies, different positions on all sorts of really complicated subjects, and to then enact that into law. So when our society is functioning in a good, positive, healthy way, when people are engaged and all that, we see this kind of enfoldment. These days, not so much.

So I think one of the things we are seeing right now is what happens when enfoldment completely breaks down at the level of government. But where is that coming from? That actually comes from the fact that we as individuals are having a harder time talking to each other than ever before in our history, at least since the Civil War. And I think there’s a reason for that. We have only recently fully entered the postmodern age.

And what I mean by that is, our actual media platforms in the lower-right quadrant made this shift — and about five years ago that shift hit its tipping point — from the old media model to the new internet media model. And here’s the thing about the internet: it is the first media platform in the history of our society that has no built-in enfoldment mechanism at all. It just says, ‘here’s a billion truths, have fun making sense of it.’ Whereas before we used to have a couple anchors who were sort of the referees and umpires, ‘this is news-worthy and this is not; this is more true than this’. Now we’re just left to our own devices, and we’re forced to sort of constellate a billion different competing data points that we find on the internet into something that resembles a true narrative.”

—Corey deVos