Division Isn’t Something Society Has. It’s Something We Make.
I
The line has become the stuff of business-school legend. In 1983, Steve Jobs looked across the table at John Sculley, then the president of PepsiCo, and asked him a question that was less an inquiry than a verdict: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Sculley took the job. The anecdote is retold endlessly in profiles and commencement addresses, offered as proof that the highest ambition is not to profit from the world but to transform it.
Jobs was right. He changed the world.
In the worst possible way, too. But that part tends to get left out.
The iPhone did not only give us miracles in our palms. It industrialized the instant, thoughtless utterance. It established the attention economy as the organizing principle of public life. It handed our outrage and our grief and our half-formed opinions directly to algorithms designed to make them travel as far and as fast as possible. It deepened loneliness while flooding us with the appearance of connection. All of this, too, is the legacy of the ecosystem Jobs built—and yet the critique is almost never made, for reasons that are themselves worth examining.
Jobs is dead and mythologized. Apple is synonymous with wealth and elegance. The iPhone is so thoroughly woven into daily existence that to condemn it would feel like condemning oneself. And, perhaps most damningly: the people most likely to raise these objections are raising them on iPhones. The criticism cannot be made without implicating the critic. That impossibility is not incidental. It is the measure of how deep the problem runs.
II
There was a time when the act of speaking to the public was, by its nature, a constrained one.
You printed flyers, wrote letters, submitted to newspapers, mimeographed newsletters. However radical the content, the physical and economic friction of the medium imposed a natural discipline. More importantly, writing took time. You wrote something, read it back, revised it, read it again. This editorial process was not merely a technical step; it was a conversation with yourself, a space in which feeling was required to pass through thought before it reached anyone else.
There was also, in those days, a reader in mind. You were writing for the people at the meeting, or for the subscribers to the pamphlet, or for the editor of the letters page. That specificity—knowing, more or less, who would receive your words—imposed a kind of accountability. Language addressed to a known audience tends to be more careful, more contextual, more aware of what it might break.
Social media dismantled all of this at once.
You can publish the moment you feel something. The editorial pause is gone. The imagined reader has dissolved into an abstraction: everyone, which is to say no one in particular. And what you post is, in theory, available to every person on earth.
This is routinely described as the democratization of speech. What it actually represents is something more complicated: a change not merely in the scale of communication but in its fundamental nature. A private diary entry and a statement addressed to the world are different kinds of acts, even if the words are identical. When the scale of an utterance crosses a certain threshold, the act of speaking is no longer the same act. But the speaker’s sense of responsibility has not crossed that threshold with it. The “just my personal opinion” disclaimer coexists, in the same person, with a potential audience of billions. That asymmetry has been left almost entirely unaddressed—legally, ethically, culturally.
III
And then the algorithm arrives.
The platforms are designed not for truth or nuance but for engagement—which is to say, for the capture and retention of attention, which is to say, for emotion. Anger, fear, contempt, and outrage are not unfortunate byproducts of social media; they are its fuel. The algorithm does not reward the careful formulation or the well-hedged argument. It rewards the thing that makes you stop scrolling, and what makes you stop scrolling is almost never a sentence that begins, “This is more complicated than it appears.”
The radical pamphleteer of an earlier era was constrained, at minimum, by the labor of writing. Today there is no such constraint, and the incentive structure runs in precisely the opposite direction. Words stripped of their original context travel faster. The sharper the edge, the farther it cuts. Writers—if that is still the right word for people composing thoughts on phones—find themselves, often unconsciously, calibrating their language toward maximum reaction. Simplification is reinforced. Radicalization is rewarded.
IV
Consider what this has done to the landscape of civic activism in Japan—specifically, to movements organized around nuclear power, the American military presence, and the pacifist provisions of the postwar constitution.
These movements were built on an equation that once had genuine descriptive power: protest equals grassroots equals the powerless equals righteousness. For much of the postwar period, this was not merely a rhetorical posture; it reflected something real about the relationship between citizens and the state. People who stood in the rain holding signs were, by most measures, at a disadvantage relative to the institutions they opposed.
That equation no longer holds, and the movements have not updated their self-understanding accordingly.
A single activist with several hundred thousand followers commands more immediate public attention than most elected officials at the prefectural level. A hashtag can summon international press coverage within hours. Mainstream media outlets, having hollowed out their own reporting capacity, routinely launder social media posts into news articles, which are then reshared across the same platforms that generated them. The echo chamber does not merely close around a community of believers; it absorbs the institutions that were supposed to provide an independent check on it.
Individual expression has, under these conditions, acquired the capacity to confront states directly—and occasionally to defeat them. Consider Donald Trump, whose social media presence, whatever one makes of its content, operated not as the official voice of a government but as something stranger and more destabilizing: a personal account that happened to belong to the most powerful elected official on earth, and that routinely said things no official government statement would dare to say, and was believed, reshared, and acted upon worldwide regardless. To call it a presidential communications channel is to misunderstand what it was. And yet it moved markets, shaped legislation, and altered the behavior of foreign governments.
Elon Musk offers the purer case. He holds no elected office, commands no army, and has been granted no authority by any treaty. He is, however, the wealthiest individual in the world; he owns the platform on which much of global political discourse now takes place; and he has, by his own account, adjusted the algorithms governing that platform to favor certain kinds of content—including his own. He has intervened in the elections of sovereign nations, publicly backed political parties across multiple continents, and held private meetings with heads of state in ways that no private citizen has quite managed before. The confrontation between the individual and the state, once a theoretical proposition, has become an empirical one.
In this environment, the insistence that civic movements represent “the powerless” is not merely outdated. It has become, in some instances, a convenient fiction—one that immunizes the movement from scrutiny it would otherwise have to endure.
The problem runs deeper still. This self-understanding is not a generational artifact. It has been reproduced across generations with remarkable fidelity. Young mothers active in environmental and pacifist causes, fluent in the idioms of social media, nevertheless tend to operate within the same basic framework: citizen movements against power, our side as unimpeachable conscience, dissent from within as betrayal. The specific vocabulary has been updated; the underlying structure has not. This is not a matter of age. It is a matter of how movements sustain themselves—by demanding ideological coherence as the price of belonging, by treating the internal critic as more dangerous than the external opponent, by converting moral certainty into a reason not to think.
The conviction of righteousness, sustained long enough, becomes an obstacle to perception.
V
We speak often, and with great urgency, about social division—as though it were a geological feature of the landscape, something to be mapped and mourned and, perhaps, one day, repaired.
It would be more accurate to say that division is something we manufacture.
Take the American case, which has become the reference point for discussions of polarization everywhere. The image of a country split cleanly down the middle, two tribes in permanent and irreconcilable conflict, is not an accurate description of the United States. Survey data have consistently shown that most Americans occupy a broad and rather muddy center, that their views on most issues resist clean partisan categorization, that they are capable, in direct conversation, of far more complexity than their social media profiles suggest. The division that appears so absolute is, in large part, a phenomenon of surfaces—of the fraction of any population that is sufficiently activated, sufficiently online, and sufficiently committed to perform its politics loudly enough for the algorithm to notice.
But the image of total division, once circulated widely enough, becomes generative. The moderate majority, confronted daily with evidence of a society at war with itself, begins to behave as though the war is real. People harden. They choose sides not out of deep conviction but out of a perceived need for protection. The image of division produces the division it purports to describe. It is, in the technical sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The same dynamic is legible in Japan, and in most democracies where the same technological conditions obtain. A noisy, radicalized fringe—on any side—becomes, through the alchemy of algorithmic amplification and media reproduction, the apparent voice of a constituency far larger than it is. And no one in that fringe believes themselves to be producing division. They believe themselves to be revealing it, fighting it, standing against it. The self-image of the crusader is entirely incompatible with the recognition that the crusade is part of the problem.
Division, in other words, is not something we find in society. It is something we make—and then fail to recognize as our own work.
VI
Jobs said: change the world.
What he built did change it. It eliminated the pause between feeling and utterance. It erased the imagined reader and replaced her with an abstraction. It handed the architecture of public discourse to systems optimized for emotional combustion. It gave the loudest, sharpest, most extreme voices a structural advantage over the careful and the ambivalent. It built the infrastructure through which division is manufactured and exported, daily, at scale, without anyone intending it and without anyone being accountable for it.
The world changed. Jobs was right—in the worst possible way.
The question worth asking is not whether technology is good or bad. It is a question about the nature of our own speech acts. When we write something addressed, in principle, to the entire world, how much of ourselves have we passed through before we publish? When we exclude those who disagree, are we actually the powerless party we imagine ourselves to be? When we name and condemn division, are we certain we are not, at that very moment, making more of it?
The interrogation, if it is to mean anything, has to be turned inward.