Author: CHTL
In 2021, Bo Burnham released his Netflix special "Inside". The special was widely praised and discussed FaceTiming, sexting, and livestreaming video games, but mostly it painted a picture of what it was like to be alive when it released, during the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, people across the globe were spending days on end living inside their homes, separated from the rest of the world they wished to be in. What Bo did with his show was to speak life to the shared experience that all of us knew we were having. A pandemic is an isolating experience, but what rang most true in that moment is that we were experiencing loneliness, together.
In a community of any size, it's possible for the people in that community to experience what I'm calling "Alignment Events". Alignment Events are shared experiences that bring people into alignment on their thoughts, goals and psychological state. Alignment Events can be good or bad experiences, but the core component is that something is shared. Ultimately, alignment Events can cause, or be caused by a shared "intersubjective reality".
In Yuval Noah Harari's book "Nexus" he discusses intersubjective reality, or the idea that groups of humans believing in something can cause it to become real. Imagine a consensual hallucination so powerful it could cause you to kill another human being. Or to lend someone your wealth, trusting they'll return it to you ten-fold. To accept one of these ideas is to permanently volunteer yourself for an alternate reality that only exists between thinking beings. A reality that only exists because they are thinking beings.
And engaging with one of these hallucinations is inherently bonding and pro-social. To express that you believe in one of these fictions is to include yourself with the ingroup of other believers. At the same time, the longer you believe this fiction, the more it becomes part of your own history. The longer you identify with a shared fabricated reality, the more it enmeshes you in the superorganism of fellow travelers. If your shared hallucination is a beneficial one, the bonds you make and the time you spend sharing this belief reinforce each other, creating a virtuous cycle.
In the modern era, the fundamental unit of shared reality is the group chat. The world's first global group chat was started in World War I. For the first time, all the major powers of the world were deeply intertwined with the fates of one another. Troops from every continent were sent to fight. A 100,000-mile network of submarine cables ringed the earth, such that allies could respond to attacks and coordinate. Global communication didn't just become possible at this time, it became critical. It's during the most pivotal of times that coordination becomes imperative.
While alignment events can be destructive, they can also be constructive. Post World-War, the US engaged in some of the biggest organized projects they had undertaken to that point. To lift themselves from the Great Depression (another aligning event), they formed the CCC, the WPA, and the TVA. All ambitious undertakings requiring extensive collaboration that were far from a sure thing. Some of them failed. But at the end of it, a new generation of people had grown together by building something, blindly perhaps, but with the hope that something great would come of it. “I’ve never seen such camaraderie anywhere, not even in a fraternity or a church. It’s like blood brothers.”
World War II began because those same powers forgot the lessons of the group chat. They forgot to leave those connections open, to reinforce the veracity of their entanglement. The League of Nations fell apart, leaders refused to cooperate, and the world watched fecklessly as chaos reigned again. It was only when war became inevitable that everyone realized they needed to coordinate once again. When this became clear, they finally drew up their shared vision.
After WWII concluded and the globe learned its lesson, society went and founded the final (maybe?), most spectacular, group chat of all, the UN. Although imperfect, it is through the group chat that we find solace from the chaos of discoordination. What's more, soldiers came back from their fight, more united than ever before. That same generation went on to build the Interstate Highway System, connecting each other even more.
Modern social media offers its own kinds of alignment events. Humanity was hardly onboarded to the internet before the "viral meme" snatched our eyes and brains. What could be more aligning than an image or idea occupying the headspace of legions of digitalists all at once? You would think this type of alignment would result in the leagues of twitter posters throwing into common cause with each other, but that's not what we've seen. The problem is duration and location.
Most viral memes are simply ephemeral. They fly out of your brain as quickly as they flew into it. And usually, internet memes find allies in the form of lambasting a target. Ganging up and bombarding twitter's villain of the day just does not have the same depth as being huddled in the bunker, bombarded for weeks on end. Endurance matters, the event must recur over and over again for it to lodge in your brain.
Location matters for alignment events too. For something to happen, it has to take place. The more specific that place, the more unique your experience of it, the more it stands out to you. The internet is a place, things happen to it and on it every day. But the space that it takes up, at least memetically, is very broad. You could travel the memesphere from trollies to tyranny in under an hour, but what you won't find, is focus. To condense the breadth of that space, but to increase the depth of it, is to condense its power.
When the founders of the United States were creating their nation, where did they find the audacity to do such a thing? How could they bet that their brethren were willing to join with them? That they would be willing to fight and die by their side? What shared experience could have been so dire that it required such a drastic response? It was during this time that the stamp act was passed, incurring a tax on regular, everyday transactions. This infuriated people across all strata of life, merchants, lawyers, printers and publishers all required paper to do their work. [Committees of Correspondence] were created to distribute pamphlets of anti-British sentiment and the Stamp Act Congress was formed to develop strategies of resistance. Finally, Thomas Paine's rousing Common Sense was distributed and read widely, describing how to turn Whig theory into praxis. It was these cascading acts of shared experience which caused this nation to embark on such a risky and uncertain wager, but to do anything else would be to deny the lived experience that was bubbling underneath the surface.
To found something is not equal to any regular act. To found something completely new is to wrest control of intersubjective reality and warp the shape of it in one fateful play. To found is to say "No. the world is not that way, it is this way" or at least "the world may be that way, but it is also this way". To mold a new concept out of what exists is to declare a new vision of our shared reality.
Of course, you can broaden the sphere of sharedness to mean anything. Shared resources, shared language, shared culture. But what's shared only matters if it's multiplied by time. Over time you amass more resources, your culture finds more niches, and eventually what's shared becomes harder to fake or rebuild. When this happens people begin to guard their shared reality preciously, and hold their compatriots even moreso, tightening the bond even greater. What defines a community might just be their shared unique traits over time. Events over time are the only way mark those discrete shifts in alignment as they occur. Each event layers on top of one another, revealing the compounding gains of the last. Another day, another mark on the shared kanban board. Day after day, the alignments shift, the pacts form, and each event leaves its trace.
"Humour is often linked to shared experience. Like, a guy gets up and says, "Have you noticed public restrooms have really inefficient hand-dryers?" Oh my God, yes I have, hahaha, really good point, they should... fix that. It's good to know that somebody finally gets me!" -Bo Burnham
P.S
Based on my findings, I think it may be a blessing that the submarines broke long ago and we can no longer leave. Thanks for reading.