I like to write about real-life situations and concerns that are brought up to me in real-life discussions—with everyday people dealing with everyday issues.
This article is no different, except it is a subject that requires zooming out from the individual, the city, or the state and looking instead at the collective.
Recently, a friend of mine who lives in Northern California left me with two words that inspired me to write about an obvious transformation of our culture.
My friend is 81 years old. He lives in a little slice of paradise. He is wise and kind. He told me he does not talk politics anymore—but he broke his own rule because of the state of our world that he can no longer ignore.
He expressed that he is deeply troubled because the vision of democracy has been lost.
He then gave me those two words for what he believes is replacing it: civilizationism and techno-feudalism.
He believes they are the future, and that saddens him.
Then he asked me to keep fighting for a better world.
I keep coming back to that comment because there was something about it that felt bigger than politics.
Here is a man who has lived through eight decades of American history. He has watched administrations come and go, wars begin and end, political parties change, technology completely transform our lives, and our culture become something almost unrecognizable from the one he grew up in—and quite frankly, even from the time I grew up as a young person.
He has seen enough history to know when something feels different.
I think he is right to be concerned.
There are two forces taking hold at the same time, and what happens when they collide is not being discussed enough.
The first is changing how we see one another.
The second is changing who actually holds power over our lives.
Neither one requires your vote and that should concern all of us.
Civilizationism is a term sociologist Rogers Brubaker has written about extensively.
Traditional nationalism said, essentially: protect the country, protect the borders, protect the nation.
Civilizationism goes further. It tells people that an entire culture, religion, or civilization is under threat and must be defended.
Once people believe that, almost every political disagreement can become existential.
The person across from you is no longer someone who has a different opinion about taxes, immigration, education, or foreign policy– WE are made to SEE them a threat to your way of life.
Versions of this take place in countries around the world going back decades in modern history. We are seeing echoes of it here too, when immigration, religious differences, or demographic change stop being about policy and become rhetoric about who truly belongs in America—or are framed as the reason our way of life is being “erased.”
At that point, the debate is no longer about finding a workable solution because the other side becomes the enemy.
You hear it whenever leaders convince people that this is no longer a debate about “policy”, but a “fight for survival.”
Once you believe your entire way of life is under attack, fear becomes very easy to weaponize.
That is one side of what my friend was describing…
The other word he used was techno-feudalism.
Economist Yanis Varoufakis uses that term to describe the enormous power now concentrated in a very small number of technology companies. Whether someone agrees with every part of his theory is almost beside the point.
The underlying concern is difficult to dismiss.
A handful of powerful technology companies now control much of the digital world where we communicate, shop, search, organize, debate, work, learn, and increasingly decide what we believe is true.
These companies are no longer simply businesses selling products or services.
They own and operate much of the digital infrastructure we all have to pass through.
That changes the power relationship.
Our data feeds their systems. Algorithms decide what gets amplified and what disappears. Those algorithms influence what millions—sometimes billions—of people see every day.
Most of us have no idea why we were shown one story instead of another, and it astounds me how unaware so many of us are that much of what we see every day is being filtered and constructed around us—creating an echo chamber that can reinforce our fears and confirmation biases.
We do not know why one idea suddenly explodes across the internet while another disappears.
We do not know what information about us is being used to decide what comes next on our screen.
Yet that screen increasingly helps shape what we believe or think we understand about the world.
That is an extraordinary amount of power.
Now this is where the two ideas begin to collide: Civilizationism needs fear and the modern technology economy needs attention.
Fear happens to be extraordinarily good at getting it.
In my nonprofit work, we teach something very basic about the human brain. The older, more survival-oriented parts of our brain are designed to notice potential threats quickly. It is one of the mechanisms that helped keep human beings alive long before we had governments, smartphones, or social media.
When something feels threatening, our attention naturally moves toward it.
That is incredibly useful when the danger is real.
It also helps explain why fear is so effective at capturing and holding our attention.
Somewhere along the way, fear became an economy.
The platforms learned what keeps us looking.
Anger gets clicks.
Outrage gets shared.
Conflict keeps people online.
The frightening headline gets opened before the reassuring one.
The post telling us someone is coming for our country, our children, our freedom, our values, or our way of life is difficult to scroll past.
Nuance rarely goes viral.
Every additional minute we remain engaged has economic value.
That creates a troubling incentive: the systems delivering information to us do not necessarily benefit when we become calmer, better informed, or more understanding of one another.
They benefit when we keep paying attention.
Politics has learned the same lesson.
Fear motivates people. It raises money. It drives turnout. It builds audiences. It turns complicated problems into simple enemies.
The consequences extend far beyond social media or politics.
A population constantly being told to fear its neighbors becomes easier to divide.
Once we are divided, something else happens.
We become so consumed with fighting one another that we often stop looking upward.
We stop asking who is accumulating enormous economic and political power.
Who controls the infrastructure through which information reaches us?
Who owns our data?
Who benefits financially from keeping millions of people angry at one another?
Meanwhile, the platforms profiting from that division have very little incentive to turn the temperature down.
That is the part I cannot stop thinking about.
My 81-year-old friend may not have used a thousand words to explain it, but he understood what he was seeing.
He saw two systems reinforcing each other.
One convinces us that we are enemies.
The other discovered there is money and power in keeping us that way.
Recognizing what is happening does not mean accepting that it is inevitable.
It certainly does not mean democracy is finished.
I refuse to believe that.
Civilizationism loses power when people stop seeing every disagreement as an existential battle. That begins much closer to home than Washington.
It happens when people start talking to each other again—face to face, without a screen or a meme telling us what to think about one another, and without being pulled into whatever outrage is dominating the day.
It happens when we remember that the person living next door probably wants many of the same things we do: safety, opportunity, dignity, a decent future for their children, and some confidence that the country is not falling apart.
It also requires better civic education.
Too many Americans do not understand how their own government works, what different branches of government actually do, or where power really sits.
That makes people much easier to manipulate.
A population that understands its institutions is much harder to frighten into surrendering them.
The technology side requires a different kind of courage.
We need to stop treating technology companies as though they are simply businesses selling us convenient products.
We have regulated essential infrastructure before.
We did it with railroads. We did it with utilities. We did it when private power became so important to public life that the public needed protection.
Technology should not be exempt simply because the infrastructure is digital.
That means serious antitrust enforcement when competition disappears.
It means meaningful rights over our own data.
It means more transparency about algorithms that are influencing public opinion at a massive scale.
It means asking whether a company should be able to know nearly everything about you while you know almost nothing about how it uses that information to shape what you see.
None of this means abandoning technology.
I believe deeply in technology and the good that it can do.
The issue is not innovation. The issue is unchecked power.
I wish I could put all of that into a reply in a text, but it is too much to say.
What I can say to him—and to you—is this:
At 81 years old, you are still paying attention.
That matters.
You did not allow yourself to become so angry that you stopped thinking.
You did not become so distracted that you stopped noticing.
You watched what was changing around you, found the language for it, and said it plainly.
We need more of that.
We need people willing to look beyond whatever political fight is being served to us today and ask what is happening underneath it.
Who benefits from our division?
Who gains power while we are fighting?
What are we slowly accepting as normal that we would have rejected twenty years ago?
Those questions belong to all of us, regardless of party.
A better world is not one where everyone agrees.
That has never been democracy.
A better world is one where disagreement does not require hatred, where technology serves human beings instead of quietly governing them, and where people remain citizens rather than becoming an audience to be manipulated.
Perhaps the greatest gift my friend gave me was not the two words themselves.
It was the reminder that he is still looking forward.
At 81, he did not tell me the fight was over.
He asked me to keep fighting for something better.
I intend to…and so should you.
With gratitude to every reader who is still paying attention—
Nina Linh
True North | WonderSeed Foundation | A New Way Forward