A generation or two ago, “fighting for your ideals” was an unambiguous virtue. Authenticity meant standing firm, drawing lines, having character and convictions. But every line you draw becomes a coordinate in a vast sorting system. Take any contentious topic: immigration, abortion, gun control, mandatory COVID vaccination, Gaza strip politics, you name it. Each position you hold, each conviction that once signaled character, now signals which camp you belong to.

You don’t need many of these questions to uniquely identify someone. A hundred polarizing questions, even if they’re correlated, even if some only split 70/30 instead of 50/50, still generate more possible combinations than there are people on Earth. The math is forgiving: correlations reduce the effective number of independent dimensions, but a hundred questions still leave billions of unique profiles. Your specific constellation of opinions becomes a fingerprint.

Imagine a company that has a dossier on your historical likes, browsing history, your social graph, who do you talk with more often, and imagine you get to find the precise combination of issues that will separate any two people in the world.

Imagine that this company’s business model is not only to harvest data to build that dossier in the most efficient way, but use that to display advertisements and bombard your attention in ways that allow advertisers to shift your urgency to discuss these topics with your loved ones, creating cracks in the fabric of societal bonds.

These companies already know what makes you angry, what keeps you scrolling, what you share. Unfortunately, the infrastructure for mass individualized polarization already exists.

Preservation of plurality is more important than ever. Not tolerance as passive acceptance, but active resistance to the sorting algorithms that profit from our division. Let us all hold more time in our daily lives to pay attention, build bridges, and tolerate people who disagree with us on some dimensions and find common ground on others.