At 6:47 AM—before anyone arrives—the community manager at WeWork Nomad is already underwater.

Coffee delivery was short. Three tours booked before 9. A vendor dispute over cleaning sits in her inbox like a fuse. And somewhere on the sixth floor, a leak that was “resolved” last week is back.

By the time she reaches her standing desk—a desk she won’t sit at today—Slack shows seventeen unread messages. Most are problems only she can fix.

This is the person responsible for community.

When WeWork filed its S-1 in August 2019, it tried to describe her work in the language of capital markets. The word “community” appeared over and over. The document spoke of “Community Revenue” (rent). It invented bespoke profitability measures that conveniently softened the costs of running the buildings.

The filing promised a flywheel: more space, more community, more value.

But community, in the real world, isn’t a line item. It’s 4 PM, when the light hits the common area just right and someone starts a conversation that turns into a collaboration. It’s when a freelancer gets a first client through a casual referral. It’s the ambient hum of people who don’t have to be there, but want to be.

She knows what that is.

She also knows what she can’t do: be present for it. Not today. Probably not tomorrow.

Give Him This

Give Adam Neumann this: he heard something.

In the early 2010s, loneliness wasn’t just a mood—it was becoming a structural condition. Fewer Americans belonged to anything. Fewer had close friends. More lived alone, worked alone, ate alone. “Third places” were fading: the ordinary social rooms of life where you could linger, be known, and return without an appointment.

Commercial real estate was selling square footage. Neumann wanted to sell the feeling of being somewhere that wanted you there.

At its best, the WeWork pitch was a counter-offer: what if work could feel like belonging?

The hypothesis wasn’t crazy. It was generous. In a world of fluorescent lighting and fire codes, maybe designed space could create a real social dividend.

There’s a difference, though, between hearing music and knowing how to play it.

Jazz Club, Recording Studio

A recording studio and a jazz club both involve music. But they do fundamentally different things.

A recording studio captures. It isolates sound, controls variables, eliminates uncertainty. The goal is to produce an artifact—something replicable, consistent, portable. The output is the point.

A jazz club hosts. The acoustics matter. The lighting matters. The bartender who knows when to shut up matters. But the club can’t produce the music. It creates the conditions, then gets out of the way. The best nights aren’t engineered; they happen. The same musicians, the same room, the same set list can produce transcendence on Tuesday and something flat on Wednesday. The club didn’t cause the magic. It enabled it.

Neumann built a recording studio when he needed a jazz club.

Call it the Neumann Paradox: systematizing what should stay loose while starving what should be systematized. The inevitable result is that you destroy the conditions for the very thing you’re trying to produce.

WeWork treated community like an output—predictable, measurable, replicable across hundreds of locations. Community managers were expected to manufacture it the way an engineer produces an album: show up, run the board, generate the thing.

But community isn’t produced. Community emerges. And emergence can’t be controlled—only hosted.

This distinction isn’t philosophical. It’s operational.

In a recording studio, operations is control. In a jazz club, operations is liberation. Everything invisible exists to free the humans to do the visible thing. The soundboard works so the musicians don’t have to think about it. The staff handles the room so the players can play.

WeWork inverted this. It systematized what should have stayed loose—branded belonging, programmed community, metrics-driven “engagement.” And it underinvested in what should have been ruthlessly systematized: the operational infrastructure that would have let community staff be present.

The Kitchen

A good dinner party depends on the host. Not on the recipes. Not on the playlist or the glassware—those help, but they aren’t the point. The party succeeds when the host can be there.

A present host reads the room. She notices when two guests share an obscure interest and nudges them toward each other. She draws the quiet one into the conversation with one perfectly placed question. She knows when to refill wine and when to leave a conversation alone.

Now picture the host trapped in the kitchen. The oven timer keeps screaming. The wine delivery didn’t arrive. The dishwasher broke, so plates pile up like a guilt sculpture. She keeps emerging to apologize—“be right back, so sorry”—and disappears again to fight another fire.

The party doesn’t fail because she’s a bad host. It fails because she can’t host at all.

WeWork’s community managers lived in the kitchen.

How Presence Dies

7:15 AM. She arrives early to handle the coffee delivery, which is short again. She calls the vendor, waits on hold, leaves a message that won’t get returned until mid-afternoon. Members will notice the missing oat milk. They’ll ask her. She’ll apologize.

8:30 AM. First tour. Tours matter. This is where she could explain the space, feel out fit, introduce someone to the vibe. But she’s also handling billing questions from last week, and a vendor is waiting for a signature she hasn’t had time to review.

11:15 AM. A member flags her down: the printer is jammed again. She’s not IT, but there’s no IT person here, so she spends fifteen minutes with paper dust and a YouTube tutorial.

Noon. She hasn’t eaten. A vendor call stretches into her lunch. Meanwhile the inbox fills: complaints, RSVPs, policy memos, sales pressure.

1:30 PM. Tonight’s “spontaneous” networking event needs setup. It must look organic—members mingling over drinks—while requiring signage, beverage orders, and furniture arranged with the precision of a stage set.

3:00 PM. The leak returns. A member sends a photo. She escalates to building management and knows, in her bones, that the response window is “whenever.”

4:15 PM. The good light hits the common area. Members gather around the coffee bar. Someone’s laughing. This is the thing she was hired for: the unscripted human moment where she could sit down, listen, connect the new person who looks isolated to someone who would actually welcome them.

Her phone buzzes: another tour request. A billing issue. Event setup incomplete.

She waves at the group and goes back to her desk.

By 6 PM, she has handled tours, sales support, vendor management, IT triage, maintenance escalation, event production, and eighty micro-fires that weren’t hers—but landed on her. What she didn’t do: be present for a single impromptu human interaction.

She’s not bad at her job. She’s buried by a role design that made presence impossible.

What the Metrics Couldn’t See

WeWork’s meltdown made irresistible copy: the leases, the spectacle, the executive self-mythology. But the spectacle isn’t the deepest story.

The deeper story is that the business model required community to be a legible output.

Community isn’t easily quantified. Connection can’t be graphed. Belonging doesn’t sit neatly in a quarterly deck. So the company measured what it could see: occupancy, tours completed, events hosted, deals closed. Those metrics became the scoreboard. And as metrics do, they quietly became the point.

Once that happened, everything that didn’t produce countable output became “nice to have.”

A dedicated billing support layer? Hard to tie to growth. A facilities coordinator who prevents the tenth daily interruption? Doesn’t show up in the dashboard. An IT person who keeps printers from becoming a community manager’s second job? Invisible.

So those positions were thin or absent. The community manager absorbed everything—because the org needed someone to absorb it, and she was the one on site.

Then leadership asked her to produce more community.

More events. More programming. More “activation.” More visible output from someone whose job was already a trash compactor for everyone else’s operational debt.

Flow, Neumann’s residential venture, will test whether cleaner governance changes anything. Same thesis—belonging as product, community as moat. The category error isn’t in the spreadsheet.

Siena

Late afternoon in Siena. The Piazza del Campo, that shell-shaped expanse of rose-colored brick, begins its daily transformation.

No one organized this. There’s no events team, no programming, no community manager. The tourists have their photos. The café tables fill with espresso and aperitivo. Then the Sienese appear—older men who’ve claimed the same spots for decades, families with children who’ll run across the same bricks their grandparents ran across. By dusk, hundreds of people are doing nothing in particular together.

Someone centuries ago designed this. The bricks were laid at a nine-degree angle to drain rainwater toward the center. The buildings around the perimeter were regulated to maintain sight lines. The engineering was invisible and meticulous.

But no one designed what happens at 6 PM. Every generation since the 1300s has found their own way to fill the space. It was built for emergence. Emergence showed up.

Infrastructure and emergence aren’t opposed. The medieval drainage enabled seven centuries of unplanned life. The operations were invisible precisely so the emergence could be visible.

No one thinks about drainage while watching the sunset. That’s the point.

The sun sets over the Campo. The tourists leave. The Sienese stay.

Trust the Process

The question was never whether community can scale.

The question is whether the piazza can.

Neumann heard real music: loneliness, atomization, the hunger for belonging. He wasn’t wrong about the problem. He built the wrong instrument because the wrong instrument produces the kind of outputs investors recognize.

The community managers weren’t failures. They were hosts turned into firefighters. They had the instincts. They had the warmth. What they didn’t have was bandwidth—the single prerequisite for presence.

Presence is the scarce resource. Presence requires freedom. Freedom requires operations so smooth that no one thinks about them: the coffee arrives, the printer works, the leak stays fixed, the vendor dispute gets handled by someone whose job is vendor disputes.

Build the infrastructure. Tune the instruments. Protect the humans who host the room.

Then trust what emerges.

Community is what happens when people are free to respond to each other.

The discipline isn’t in what you program.

It’s in what you leave alone.

This is Part 5, the final part of “Finding Coherence: A Guide to Political Judgment in Fractured Times.”

Humans are contradictions. The same species that built Auschwitz also liberated it. The same brain that produces empathy produces tribalism. We hold universal principles and betray them. We recognize humanity in strangers and strip it from enemies. When threatened, our worse angels win.

The Constitution was designed by flawed humans who understood this about themselves. They assumed we’d fail our ideals. They knew factions would form, interests would clash, passions would override reason. So they built a machine that didn’t require angels — one that could channel human contradiction toward self-correction rather than self-destruction.

For two centuries, it mostly worked. Not because we overcame our contradictions. But, because the machine used them.

Frederick Douglass saw this most clearly. The Constitution protected slavery in practice while condemning it in principle. That wasn’t just hypocrisy. It was leverage. The document’s own words became weapons against its betrayals. Douglass held America accountable to ideals it professed but failed to honor. And slowly, bloodily, the machine corrected.

But leverage only works when enough people believe in the principles they’re failing.

Section I: The Machine

The Constitution builds a machine for one job: keeping people who hate each other from killing each other over politics.

Federalism lets different communities balance goods differently. Massachusetts chooses collective approaches. Texas chooses individual ones. Neither convinces the other. Both experiment and learn.

Separation of powers prevents any faction from capturing the whole system. You win the presidency but lose Congress. You control Congress but the courts block you. Power stays contested.

Checks and balances make rapid change difficult. This drives everyone insane. But no side rams through their perfect vision. Change requires coalitions that last.

A pressure cooker with a release valve instead of a bomb.

They didn’t design for a nation of saints. They designed for a nation of humans—capable of wisdom and cruelty, cooperation and betrayal, principle and self-interest.

The machine works when the valves work. When Congress legislates, pressure releases through negotiation. When elections resolve disputes, losers accept outcomes and fight again next time. When you can encounter the other side as human, disagreement stays disagreement instead of becoming war.

Close the valves and pressure builds.

Section II: The Douglass Insight

The Constitution as originally written protected slavery. Shut women out. Limited participation to white, male, propertied people.

These weren’t bugs. They were fundamental contradictions between what the Constitution claimed and what it created. But contradictions contain their own cure — when enough people believe in the principles being violated. Douglass saw this.

The document that protected slavery also declared universal principles. “We the People.” Not “we the white people.” “Establish Justice… secure the Blessings of Liberty.” Applying to all persons. “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process.” Person. Not citizen.

The gap between principle and practice wasn’t just hypocrisy. It was leverage. The Constitution’s own words became weapons against its original sins.

This only worked because enough people — not the slaveholders themselves, but others who shared the founding principles — could be moved by the contradiction. Slaveholders weren’t shamed into freedom. They were defeated in a bloody war. But the coalition that fought that war, the amendments that followed, the century of struggle after — all of it drew power from the gap between American principles and American practice.

And the enslaved weren’t waiting to be saved. They resisted, escaped, organized, testified, fought. Douglass himself was an escaped slave. His very presence on the abolitionist stage was the contradiction made flesh. A man of obvious intellect and dignity who the Constitution said was property. He didn’t just make arguments. He was evidence.

Hypocrisy-as-leverage doesn’t work on true believers in their own rightness. It works on the conflicted middle. But it requires someone to wield it.

History proved Douglass right. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments abolished slavery using the Constitution’s own mechanisms. The 19th Amendment extended voting to women. Brown overturned segregation. Loving struck down bans on interracial marriage. Obergefell extended marriage rights.

Not perfectly. Not fast. Not without bloodshed.

The machine corrected itself. Because the contradiction was leverage. Because enough people could still be moved. Because those with the most to lose refused to stop pushing.

Section III: The Breakdown

The constitutional framework works only when parties honor its mechanisms even when frustrated by outcomes. And when the underlying conditions it assumes actually exist.

Both are breaking down.

Federalism Can’t Function When Politics Nationalizes

Federalism assumes Congress legislates on major issues through negotiation. That state parties have genuine autonomy. That policy gets made through democratic processes, not executive orders and court rulings.

None of these hold.

Congress abdicates. Won’t legislate on abortion, guns, immigration, healthcare, climate. These issues get decided through executive orders (easily reversed) and court decisions (generating endless litigation).

National parties control state parties. Even when issues formally return to states, state parties take marching orders from national leadership. We have nationalized politics with state implementation.

Executive expands, legislative withers. Presidents govern through executive orders because Congress won’t act. Courts overturn or uphold them. The next president reverses them. Nothing stable gets built.

Abortion exemplifies this collapse. Roe was judicial, not legislative. Stayed that way for fifty years because Congress wouldn’t legislate. Dobbs overturned it judicially. Congress still won’t legislate. Even “returning it to the states” doesn’t restore federalism when state parties march to national directives.

Separation of Powers Can’t Function When One Branch Abdicates

Separation of powers assumes Congress legislates, the executive executes, and courts resolve disputes about meaning.

But Congress abandons its core function. Presidents govern through executive orders. Courts settle policy through litigation. Nothing durable gets built.

Members of both parties vote with their party, not their conscience. Not because they’re uniquely spineless. Because party leaders demand lockstep control and prioritize fundraising over governing.

Elections Become Existential

When Congress stops legislating, elections transform from policy contests into deathmatches for institutional control. Every election feels existential. Not because the other side’s policies threaten you. Because the other side owning the institutions feels permanent.

When elections can’t change policy through normal legislative means, both sides question whether the other side can legitimately win at all. We saw this in 2016, when many treated that outcome as fundamentally illegitimate rather than merely disappointing. We saw it again in 2020, with fraud claims that persisted despite investigations finding no evidence.

Both patterns damage the same foundation: acceptance of outcomes that makes democratic contestation possible.

What Actually Changed

Watch a congressional hearing. Any hearing. Members don’t ask questions to learn answers. They ask questions to produce clips. The witness is a prop. The audience is social media. The hearing ends and nothing happens. No legislation. No accountability. Just content.

Congress performs instead of governs. Deliberation becomes pointless when legislation stops being the goal.

Algorithmic amplification replaced civic discourse. Platforms optimize for outrage. You don’t encounter opposing arguments. Their worst representations bombard you. Handpicked to boil your blood. The marketplace of ideas became an attention marketplace engineered for rage.

And here’s where human nature bites. The algorithms didn’t create tribalism. They industrialized it.

Millions of years of evolution built threat-detection systems that kept our ancestors alive. Those same systems now fire at political opponents. The amygdala doesn’t distinguish between the jungle and the feed.

The last time I tried to explain the other side’s position to someone who agreed with me, they looked at me like I’d betrayed them. Not disagreed. Betrayed. That’s what the environment does. It triggers the tribal response coded in our DNA. It makes nuance feel like treason.

When constitutional mechanisms require conditions that no longer exist, both sides attacking them becomes symptom, not cause. The deeper problem is the transformation itself. Both parties contribute to it, benefit from it when in power, attack it when out. Neither seems capable of restoring the conditions the framework requires.

The release mechanisms that let Douglass’s contradiction become leverage are seizing up.

Section IV: The Question

The tools laid out in this series work. The Constitution has proven it can manage disagreement and correct wrongs.

But both assume conditions that may no longer exist.

Can these frameworks function when Congress won’t legislate, parties nationalize everything, courts make policy, and algorithms trigger our tribal instincts before reason can engage?

Think about your actual life. Where do you get authentic perspectives from the other side? Your neighborhood sorts by tribe. Dissent vanishes from your workplace. Algorithms curate what you see online. Every aspect of life splits into parallel realities.

Where do you actually encounter the other political tribe as a full human?

That question haunted me as I wrote this series. Trying to answer it forced me to confront something harder than structural breakdown: the limits of what I’d built.

Conclusion: What I Thought I Was Writing

I started this series thinking I had an answer. Tools for better judgment. Ways to think more clearly. Fix how we think about politics, fix the problem.

The complications started in the first drafts.

The Neutrality Trap

I kept finding my own politics in the text.

When I listed examples of “appropriate certainty” in Part 4, I chose climate change, vaccines, and election integrity. Someone else would list biological sex as binary, market efficiency, or border enforcement as equally settled. We both think we’re listing facts. We’re both revealing priors. The tools can’t adjudicate whose list is correct. That requires the very judgment the framework claimed to provide.

When I wrote about election legitimacy in Part 3, I treated 2020 fraud claims as definitively debunked while handling 2016 more gently. But many Democrats spent years questioning 2016’s legitimacy in ways that exceeded what evidence supported. “Not my president.” Resistance framing that treated the outcome as fundamentally illegitimate. Applying my own standard, that skepticism also lacked adequate evidence. My asymmetric treatment revealed which tribe’s excesses I notice more readily.

When I catalogued power asymmetries in Part 3, I gave more detailed treatment to economic power (workers versus corporations) than to government power or institutional capture. That’s a choice about which asymmetries feel obvious to me. A libertarian reader noticed immediately. A progressive reader probably didn’t.

When I said “find the legitimate concern underneath objectionable positions” but also “sometimes the answer is just racism,” I created a loophole that could swallow the rule. Who decides which is which? Anyone can classify opponents as bad-faith actors. The exception lets you escape the discipline whenever you want.

The framework claimed to transcend politics while requiring political judgments at every turn. That’s a contradiction. Like the Constitution that declared universal principles while protecting slavery. Like humans who hold ideals they can’t live up to.

So I edited. Made examples more balanced. Softened the language. Tried for neutrality.

That made it worse.

The writing became robotic. Dishonest. I was hiding my perspective while claiming to offer clearer thinking. You can’t teach wrestling with disagreement while pretending you have no position.

Where the Framework Breaks

When you decide what counts as “clear harm requiring immediate action,” you make a political judgment. Take Gaza. One tribe sees genocide. The other sees self-defense. I considered using a less radioactive example. I used this one because the framework only matters if it works on hard cases.

For many, there are no questions here. Their position is self-evident. Beyond the pale to challenge. Even raising questions triggers threat response. The amygdala fires. Nuance becomes betrayal. The binary hardens. You’re not asking genuine questions. You’re providing cover for evil.

For those willing to sit with complexity despite the discomfort, traps await. The situation involves questions neither binary captures. Questions about Israeli conduct: proportionality, civilian protection, laws of war. Questions about Hamas: embedding military assets in civilian areas, stated goals regarding Israel’s existence. Questions about regional actors: Iran and Qatar’s role in funding the conflict, Arab states’ choices regarding Palestinian refugees. Questions about history: decades of decisions by multiple parties that produced current conditions.

But which questions you ask reveals your priors as much as the answers you give. Lead with Israeli conduct, you’ve framed Israel as the agent requiring judgment. Lead with Hamas’s charter, you’ve framed the conflict as existential defense.

And balanced questions still assume one side is ultimately right. What if both sides have legitimate claims? What if both sides did wrong things? What if the situation is genuinely tragic rather than soluble? That sounds like both-sidesism. It might just be reality.

Which leads to the counter-trap: acknowledging complexity can become its own escape hatch. You can peel back layers forever. Call it Schrödinger’s Position: maintaining permanent uncertainty so you never have to commit to anything that could be wrong. It looks like intellectual humility. It functions as cowardice.

The framework can’t resolve this tension. It can’t tell you when to stop questioning and act. It can only make you defend your categorization — and remain open to the possibility you’re wrong.

What’s Left: Discipline

So what’s left?

Not neutrality. Not transcendence. Not a machine producing correct answers.

What’s left is discipline. Discipline for creatures who hold contradictions in their nature. Who are capable of both wisdom and cruelty, empathy and tribalism, principle and self-interest.

Distinguish types of conflicts. Not everything is a moral emergency. Getting the type wrong produces wrong responses. Treating value tensions as moral violations leads to unnecessary combat. Treating moral violations as value tensions leads to complicity.

Acknowledge trade-offs. Every choice has costs. Pointing to benefits while ignoring costs is how free trade advocates devastated communities while congratulating themselves on GDP growth. Your positions have costs too. Name them.

Test your own thinking. Can you state opposing views without making them sound stupid? What might you be missing? What evidence would change your mind? If you can’t answer these, you’re performing certainty, not thinking.

Scale certainty to reach. Speaking to friends requires minimal certainty. Broadcasting to thousands requires more. Algorithmic amplification created coercive power rivaling the state. Mobs destroy lives. State power ends them. Scale your certainty accordingly.

Defend your emergency claims. Everyone thinks their issue is the emergency justifying extraordinary measures. The framework forces you to defend that claim, not just assert it.

These disciplines have a floor. Judge actions. Call choices evil if they warrant it. But the move from “this person did evil” to “these people are less than human” can’t be crossed. Atrocities begin with that category shift. And as Baldwin saw, the damage is mutual: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for the annulment of theirs.

This is Douglass’s insight applied to enemies instead of the enslaved. See their humanity even when you oppose everything they stand for. Not because they deserve it. Because you do.

You will fail at these disciplines. I failed at them throughout this series. You’ll pick examples that reveal your priors. You’ll apply the framework more rigorously to opponents than allies. Individual application will always be flawed. We all see through lenses we can’t fully escape.

But collectively, if enough people commit to these disciplines despite knowing they’ll fail, we get better. Not perfect. Not unbiased. Better. Think of science. Individual scientists carry biases and make mistakes. But the process — peer review, replication, transparency — produces better collective understanding than any individual achieves alone. The mechanisms for political judgment are rougher — elections, courts, a free press, the slow accumulation of precedent — but the principle holds. Not through individual perfection. Through aggregation.

But the framework can’t escape the politics it claimed to help you navigate. And it can’t fix structural breakdown through individual virtue.

What I planned as the conclusion became a starting point.

The Douglass Question

Douglass faced a Constitution that protected slavery in practice while condemning it in principle. He found leverage in that contradiction. The document’s own words became weapons against its betrayals.

But that leverage only works on those who can still be shamed by hypocrisy.

Cynics can’t be mobilized. If you’ve decided that all principles are pretense, that everyone’s corrupt, that ideals are just power wearing a mask — then contradiction isn’t leverage. It’s confirmation.

The Constitution was built for a nation with enough hypocrites — enough people who believed in principles they couldn’t live up to — that the machine could eventually correct itself. The gap between principle and practice was a wound that enough people couldn’t ignore.

The question is whether enough of us remain.

When “you’re a hypocrite” stops being an accusation and becomes a shrug — when the response is “everyone’s a hypocrite, so what?”— you’ve crossed the line. I see that shrug more often now. From both sides. Though not in equal measure.

The valves are seizing. The pressure is building.

But Douglass didn’t know if the machine would correct itself. He acted anyway.

The journey continues.

Finding Coherence: A Guide to Political Judgment in Fractured Times is complete.

I immediately texted my wife to find out if she took the train.  This was one occasion where I was thankful that she spent the extra money to take a Lyft to the office.  She was safe.

After that, I went to check with my Dad if my stepmom took the ferry or the train to work today.  She was actually still home.  She was running late and was about to head out the door to take the train before my Dad showed her the news on TV.  

The relief set in as I made my way back upstairs to my apartment and I spontaneously started to cry.  

I was planning to write a whole different piece today about a breakthrough technology in Geothermal energy led by the startup, Quaise Energy.  I hoped to get back to my original aim with this newsletter to report on reasons for optimism and the ways that technology can help solve some of our big problems.  With everything going on in the world, I thought we could use some reasons to feel optimistic.  And I will make another attempt at that in another installment.  For now, I still need to process.

Three hours have passed since the tragic event.  I’m typing these words with the persistent whirl of helicopters and sirens blaring outside my window.  I wonder what my 6 year old son is thinking while his school is in lockdown.  Does he give any thought to the sounds?  What are his teachers telling them about what’s happening?  Are they scared? Or just oblivious?

My heart goes out to anybody who was there in those terrifying moments and to all the families who feared for their loved ones.  I also feel a profound sense of gratitude because my family is safe, but also because as sad as this was, it was an exceptional event in the US.  It makes national news because it is rare.  The uncertainty of my family’s safety and well being is not a perpetual fear that hums in the background like those helicopters hovering outside my window.  

For a very brief moment the terror that many families face all the time in many parts of the world hit a little closer to home.  Not just because it happened in NY, but because I’ve taken my son to school on that train.  My wife takes that train to work.  And not just on that train, but at that time.  

It’s a stark reminder of how sheltered many of us are from some harsh realities that persist in the world.  We can hand a few bucks through our car window to the homeless man sleeping on the street in the freezing rain.  We can post blue and yellow squares to Instagram to “support” the Ukrainian families hiding in basements below a daily barrage of bombs and shrapnel.   We can yell at our TV screens for neglecting the millions of children starving in Afghanistan or Yemen. And we can venmo our donations to any number of other humanitarian crises.  But, then we get to return to the comfort of our homes unconcerned with our next meal or the worry that a loved one might not return home.  

I’ll get back to writing that optimistic piece next week.  Today, I’m not feeling it.

Equally as impressive, if not more so, Chris Rock took it like a champ.  His composure snapped back almost as fast as his chin.  Again, I had to wonder how many times has Rock been smacked?

Now, obviously I’m making light of the whole situation.  Why shouldn’t I?  I’m interested because it’s a spectacle.  And this gets to the heart of what I find annoying about the moralizing that inevitably follows a public indiscretion by a famous person or someone who becomes temporarily famous for an unfortunate moment.

Yeah sure, what Will did was wrong.  But, the idea that I should spend any energy wading into the judgments of strangers (or that the public nature of an action is somehow more revealing of character than what they do in private) irks me.  Because, whether you judge Smith for a violent outburst or Rock for a tasteless joke or you just think the whole thing is hilarious – the only reason anyone is talking about it is because it’s entertaining.  

On the list of important issues in the world and their impact on real people, this ranks pretty low.  So let’s all get over ourselves, and leave the judgments and penalties to the people that are actually affected.  

P.S.  I am perfectly aware of my own hypocrisy as I finish off this sanctimonious rant about inconsequential things.  But, at least I admit I’m just doing it for fun.

I get why Rogan triggers people. He says dumb shit. He reaches millions with medical opinions he’s unqualified to hold, and during a pandemic, that matters. The concern is legitimate.

But the obsessive focus on one podcaster reveals more about the institutions attacking him than about Rogan himself. The question isn’t how to stop Joe Rogan. It’s why institutions have lost so much trust that a comedian with a microphone has more credibility than CNN.

The recent feud between CNN and Joe Rogan showed exactly why so many people think the media is full of shit.

It started when CNN called Rogan’s COVID treatment a dangerous “horse dewormer.” He’d been prescribed a human dose of Ivermectin by his doctor. Early studies had suggested the drug might help with COVID. Those studies were later retracted for faulty methodology. The evidence was inconclusive—not disproved, but not proven either. CNN skipped the nuance and went with “horse dewormer.”

CNN’s medical expert, Sanjay Gupta, saw an opportunity. He joined Rogan on his podcast to reach an audience skeptical of vaccines. During one tense exchange in their three-hour conversation, Rogan asked why CNN had deliberately mischaracterized his treatment. Gupta admitted CNN got it wrong.

Then came the correction.

Gupta was dragged onto Don Lemon’s show a few days later. Lemon opened by dismissing Gupta’s appearance on Rogan as “tongue-in-cheek.” He demanded Gupta recant. When Gupta tried to explain Rogan’s position fairly, Lemon cut him off and ended the segment.

If Lemon wanted to persuade vaccine skeptics, this was a strange approach. Most skeptics don’t watch CNN. Gupta should have been applauded for meeting them where they are. Instead, CNN signaled to its own audience that it remained the sole legitimate authority. For many of us—liberals included—it only diminished that authority further. Even the Washington Post called out their reporting.

The Rogan feud wasn’t about Ivermectin. It was a masterclass in how institutions lose trust: by asserting authority they haven’t earned.

The path here was decades in the making.

In 1985, Reagan repealed the fairness doctrine, the FCC rule requiring broadcasters to present public issues with opposing viewpoints. Conservative voices who felt shut out of television turned to talk radio. Rush Limbaugh went national in 1988 and launched the “liberal media bias” meme that persists today. News stopped being a public service. It became a business. Conflict sold.

CNN launched in 1980, but cable news didn’t dominate until a white Ford Bronco fled police on the 405. The OJ Simpson trial made 24-hour news a spectator sport. The profit motive took over.

The institutions that translated reality to the public—media, politics, academia—became a closed loop. Headquarters clustered in coastal cities. Leadership recruited from elite universities. A professional class emerged, culturally severed from those who couldn’t ride the new economy. The gatekeepers started talking only to each other.

Newt Gingrich accelerated the political side. When Republicans took Congress in 1995, he reframed politics as existential combat. The opposing party wasn’t a difference of philosophy. It was an existential threat. Every election since has been sold this way. Both sides.

Then came the disasters no one answered for.

The War on Terror. The 2008 financial crisis. Both devastated the poor and working class. Despite the scandals, the lies, the exposed criminality, media and political leaders delivered no real accountability. The conflicts of interest were obvious. Trust collapsed.

Obama represented hope for something different. He delivered a symbolic victory for the professional class instead. The appearance of a post-racial society without structural change. Meanwhile, an invisible poor was left behind. Opioid-ravaged towns. Dying farms locked out of subsidies captured by factory operations. Food deserts at the margins. The professional class moved on to cultural battles and dismissed the dissenters as deplorable.

Then wondered why they stopped listening.

We’re left with two choices in a politics flattened beyond recognition. On one side, a dominant elite consensus. On the other, angry voters convinced we’re full of shit.

The Republican Party stopped being an ideological party. It became an opposition party. Opposition parties don’t need ideas. They need an enemy.

CNN kept handing them one.

The Rogan obsession isn’t about Rogan. He’s a symptom. The disease is a gatekeeping class that lost its credibility and has no idea how to earn it back.

They had decades. After Iraq. After 2008. After the opioid epidemic. They chose symbolic gestures over accountability. Now they watch their authority drain to podcasters and Substacks. Their response is to insist louder that they are the experts, they are the responsible voices, they deserve trust.

It’s not working. Attacking the competition won’t fix it.

The question isn’t what to do about Joe Rogan. It’s whether the institutions that once translated reality to the public can learn to earn trust again—or whether they’ll keep asserting authority they no longer have, wondering why no one listens.

The printing press made it possible to speak to thousands. Radio let you reach millions in real time. Television added pictures and put a glowing box in every living room. Each leap felt like progress. More reach. More people. More connection.

The internet promised the ultimate reach. Everyone could broadcast. Everyone could connect. The gatekeepers would fall and we’d speak directly to the world.

It delivered. That was the problem.

Reach is not connection. Broadcasting to everyone is not the same as finding your people. The internet gave us the biggest audience in human history. We performed for it. It left us empty.

For years, this was how I experienced the internet. Not as a performer. I watched from the sidelines. But I absorbed the logic. Reach was the point. Audience was the goal. Someday, I told myself, I’d build one.

I had it backwards.

---

On July 20, 1969, six hundred million people watched Apollo 11 touch down on the moon. They sat with their families in front of the same glowing box, watching the same grainy footage. In the days that followed, they gathered at office water coolers to talk about the miracle.

That was the gift of broadcast. Forced synchronicity. Everyone received the same signal at the same time, and that created something real—shared experience across millions of strangers who would never meet.

Nearly twenty years later, a television was rolled into my third-grade classroom. Thousands of classrooms across the country did the same thing that morning. We watched Christa McAuliffe prepare to become the first teacher in space. Seventy-four seconds into the journey, the Challenger exploded. Seven astronauts died on live television in front of millions of children.

It was my earliest memory of national tragedy. For days afterward, that was all anyone discussed. Strangers and friends, everywhere I went. We processed it together because we had witnessed it together.

Broadcast had constraints. Miss an episode of In Living Color and you missed the cafeteria conversation the next day. But have recordings of the Stretch and Bobbito show—a hip-hop program that aired at 1am on a college station with a sixty-mile range, requiring you to stay awake for three hours flipping cassette tapes—and you had something. The DJs introduced Wu-Tang, Biggie, Jay-Z, and Nas before any of them had record deals. Having those tapes meant something.

The constraint created value. Scarcity made things matter. Showing up at the same time made us feel like we belonged to something larger than ourselves.

The internet removed the constraint. We celebrated. Then we realized what we’d lost.

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In 2012, Felix Baumgartner stepped out of a capsule at the edge of space and fell 24 miles to Earth. He broke the sound barrier with his body. Eight million people watched live—the largest YouTube audience in history. But that meant six hundred million didn’t. Most caught it later, alone, as a clip in a feed. The shared moment had become a private one.

That same year, Psy released “Gangnam Style.” It became the first YouTube video to hit one billion views. But few people watched it. They shared it. Parodied it. Filmed themselves doing the horse dance in offices, at weddings, in Times Square. World leaders attempted the choreography on camera.

The song wasn’t a hit because people consumed it. It was a hit because people performed their relationship.

This is the Reach Game. The content matters less than the reactions it generates. YouTube overflows with videos of people reacting to old songs for the first time. A TV show isn’t popular unless it spawns a dozen recap podcasts. The thing becomes raw material for the discourse about the thing.

This cuts both ways. Memes make me laugh. Commentary sharpens my thinking. I’ve discovered music and books I never would have found alone.

But I’ve watched strangers spend weeks destroying each other over whether a dress was blue or gold. The same machinery spreads joy and poison. It doesn’t care which.

For years, this was all I saw. The fragmentation. The outrage. The endless performance. I wasn’t performing myself. I was watching, scrolling, imagining a future where I’d join in. Mostly I lurked. It still left me empty.

I didn’t know there was another way.

---

Last year, I joined a cohort-based writing course. The curriculum was solid. The real value was what formed around it.

I connected with a handful of people. I was lucky enough to land in one of the few cohorts that kept meeting after the course ended. Weekly sessions. Drafts exchanged. Honest feedback delivered.

Week after week, I gather with five people I’ve never met in person, scattered across three continents. I wait to read Kyle’s synthesis from his Book Pairings newsletter. I learn about creative friendships from Kate—her piece tracing Herbert Matter’s hidden influence on Jackson Pollock. Manish brings relentless optimism and investing wisdom. Harry and I have spent hours dissecting crypto, tech, and the differences between Britain and America. One of his posts sparked what you’re reading.

Emily joined most recently. Her first piece floored me. She connected a personal tragedy to larger forces with precision I envied. The tagline on her newsletter captured why I started writing: “stories about tech changing the world, instead of eating it.”

I wish I could steal it.

None of us planned this. We didn’t set out to build something. We kept showing up, week after week, and became the reason each other kept writing.

I doubt I’d call myself a writer if those meetings had stopped. This piece exists because of the tough love they gave me last session. They told me to stop tinkering and ship.

So here it is.

---

I’ve been trying to understand why this worked when so much else fails.

Part of it is scale. Six people, not six million. No audience means no performance. You stop reacting and start talking.

Part of it is synchronicity. We meet at the same time each week. The constraint broadcast forced on us—we rebuilt it by choice. Showing up together turns out to matter.

Part of it is shared struggle. We’re all trying to do the same hard thing. That creates investment the sidelines can’t match.

But the more I think about it, the more I believe the answer is simpler. We were all looking for the same thing. Somehow, we found each other. That’s when I realized I’d been thinking about the internet all wrong.

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Before printing presses, before written language, before anything we’d call technology, there was an older way to find your people.

A fire on a hilltop. Smoke rising against the sky.

It wasn’t broadcasting. It couldn’t reach everyone. That was the point. It reached the people who were looking for it. The ones who knew what the signal meant. The ones searching for that exact light.

No one built the internet to work this way. We built it for reach. We built it for scale. We built it to broadcast to everyone.

But buried inside the machinery, there’s an older model waiting to be found. The internet can be a smoke signal—if you use it that way. A signal that crosses every border, every ocean, every barrier that ever separated the people meant to find each other. Not by reaching everyone. By reaching the right ones.

I don’t know if this scales. I don’t know if it works for everyone. I have no system. No framework. No five steps to build your tribe.

I know that I spent years on the sidelines, absorbing the logic of reach, and it left me empty. Then I stumbled into a corner of the internet where six people gathered around something small and real. It changed everything.

---

When I started writing online, I carried all that old logic with me. I thought it was about building a following. Accumulating subscribers. The dreams I’d had as a lurker, finally realized. I imagined big names noticing me. Likes rolling in.

I had it backwards.

Your content isn’t a product. It’s a smoke signal. It’s not supposed to reach everyone. It’s supposed to reach the people looking for exactly what you’re making—even if they don’t know it yet, even if you haven’t met them, even if they’re scattered across three continents and you’ll never see their faces.

Most people won’t see it. That’s not failure. That’s the point.

The right ones will.

How To Internet © 2021 by Josh Zen is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

I see the promise of technology and the brighter spots of humanity - that this is just the middle stages of a larger transition. Digital technology is changing everything about the way society will function. It is bringing us into the Knowledge Age. Significant challenges are an inescapable reality of massive upheaval. Culture can't keep pace with technology and the gatekeepers of the industrial age will not relinquish the power they accumulated during the last century overnight. But in the words of the great Sam Cooke, a change is gonna come.

There is great promise on the other side of this transition. Innovations in technology and culture can improve life for all of humanity - drastically. Citizen Code is my small contribution to learn, think and share publicly about the trends shaping our future through the lens of personal experience, to cut through the noise and polemics of the moment, and to uncover the people and ideas that arm us with reasons to push ahead with optimism. It is the story of my journey to be human in the Knowledge Age.

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