Social solidarity: history and psychology of human bonds

The Village Square and the Stranger's Face

A man drops in the middle of a train platform at rush hour, and for exactly two or three seconds nothing happens. Bodies keep moving. Eyes flick toward him and away, the way eyes flick toward roadkill, toward a stranger crying on a bus, toward anything that demands a response the observer has not agreed to give. Then someone stops. Not everyone, not even most people, just someone, and within that pause lies the whole unglamorous machinery of what gets called, afterward, in the retelling, an act of human solidarity. Nobody in that crowd was thinking about civilization. Nobody was rehearsing a line from a catechism about loving one’s neighbor. What was happening, in the nervous system of every person who did not stop, was a rapid, almost involuntary cost-benefit calculation running beneath conscious thought: is this my problem, will I be blamed if I walk past, will I be blamed if I stop and do it wrong, is someone else already handling it, am I already late.

This is the texture solidarity actually has, before it gets varnished into a virtue. The psychologist John Darley and the social psychologist Bibb Latané spent years on exactly this question after the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964, a case that entered public memory as a story about thirty-eight witnesses who did nothing while a woman was stabbed to death, a number and a narrative later shown by researchers like Rachel Manning to be substantially distorted by the press. But the distortion is almost beside the point, because what Darley and Latané documented in their 1968 experiments was something more unsettling than mass callousness: the more people present, the less likely any single person is to help. They called it the bystander effect, and its mechanism is not indifference but diffusion, a silent redistribution of responsibility across every witness until the sum of everyone’s share feels like nothing at all. Solidarity, in this light, is not a constant hum of fellow-feeling waiting to be activated. It is a fragile signal that gets weaker the more receivers there are.

This should unsettle anyone who has ever used the word community without flinching. The comforting version of human bonding assumes that people are wired for mutual aid, that beneath the varnish of modern alienation there beats an ancient tribal heart ready to answer distress with instinctive care. But the platform scene refuses that comfort. What determines whether the man on the ground gets help is not the depth of some latent collective virtue. It is proximity, eye contact, the accident of being the first to notice, the absence of other people whose presence would let the noticer off the hook. Solidarity here is not moral, it is situational, and it is precisely this situational, contingent, almost mechanical quality that makes it worth examining seriously rather than worshipping abstractly.

There is a reason the crowd matters more than the individual conscience, and it has nothing to do with character. Anyone in that station might, on a different day, in a nearly empty corridor, be the one who kneels down immediately, without a flicker of hesitation, and calls for help. The same person, multiplied into a crowd, becomes statistically more likely to walk on. This means the question worth asking is not who has a good heart and who does not, a question that flatters the asker and explains nothing, but what conditions summon the reflex of aid and what conditions smother it. The stranger’s collapsed body on the tile floor is not a test of humanity in general. It is a test of a specific configuration: density, anonymity, ambiguity about whether the situation is even an emergency, and the unspoken protocol every city dweller absorbs about not making a scene. Solidarity, approached this way, stops being a virtue word and starts being a phenomenon with a mechanics, a set of triggers and inhibitors that can be traced historically, culturally, and psychologically, the way one traces the conditions under which a reflex fires or fails to fire, rather than the way one traces the biography of a saint.

Durkheim’s Two Solidarities and the Myth of the Cohesive Past

A village elder in nineteenth-century rural France could name every soul within a day’s walk, could recite the lineage of each family back three generations, could predict with total confidence what a neighbor would do in almost any circumstance because there was, in truth, only one thing a neighbor could do. This is the image that lingers in the collective imagination whenever someone laments the loss of community: the tight-knit hamlet, the shared church bell, the sense that everyone belonged to everyone else. Émile Durkheim, writing in 1893 in De la division du travail social, gave this image a name and, unintentionally, a eulogy that generations of readers have mistaken for praise. He called it mechanical solidarity, and he meant something far colder than the warmth we now project onto it.

Mechanical solidarity, in Durkheim’s formulation, is the cohesion of resemblance. It binds people together precisely because they are interchangeable, because their consciences are stamped from the same mold, because deviation from the collective pattern is not merely frowned upon but functionally unthinkable. The individual barely exists as a separate moral unit; what exists is the collective conscience, a shared set of beliefs and sentiments so total that law itself, in these societies, is overwhelmingly repressive. Durkheim’s own evidence came from his study of legal codes: in societies organized mechanically, punishment aims not to correct or rehabilitate but to avenge the violated collective sentiment, to restore the wounded unity of the group through the suffering of the offender. This is not the solidarity of choice. It is the solidarity of a single available mold, enforced by the threat of exile, shame, or death.

Against this, Durkheim set organic solidarity, the cohesion characteristic of industrial modernity, born not from sameness but from differentiation. As the division of labor advances, individuals become dependent on one another precisely because they are unlike one another. The baker needs the miller who needs the farmer who needs the tool-maker, and this chain of mutual need replaces the suffocating uniformity of the earlier form with something that permits, even requires, individual variation. Law shifts accordingly toward the restitutive: contracts, civil codes, the machinery of cooperation between differentiated parts. Durkheim was not naive about the dangers of this transition. He worried openly about anomie, the state of normlessness that could emerge when the division of labor outpaced the moral regulation needed to make it humane, a concern he would return to with even sharper anxiety in Le Suicide of 1897, where he showed that both excessive regulation and its collapse could drive people toward self-destruction. But the crucial move, the one modern nostalgia keeps refusing to absorb, is that Durkheim did not rank organic solidarity as a decline from some purer mechanical unity. He saw it as a different architecture of belonging, one that at least made room for the individual as something other than a replaceable cell in a single organism.

The myth that persists, despite this, is the myth of the cohesive past: the idea that somewhere behind us, in villages or clans or tightly bound parishes, human beings enjoyed a solidarity that industrial and post-industrial life has corroded. This myth survives because it is emotionally satisfying and historically convenient, but it depends on mistaking coercion for closeness. The cohesion of small, homogeneous communities was frequently maintained through surveillance so total it left no private self to speak of, through gossip networks that policed behavior more efficiently than any court, through the very real threat of ostracism in contexts where survival outside the group was nearly impossible. Historians of early modern Europe, including work associated with the Annales school and its attention to mentalités, have documented how communal conformity often functioned as a mechanism of control over women, over the poor, over anyone whose difference threatened the appearance of unity. What nostalgia remembers as warmth was, for many who lived it, an absence of exit.

The Evolutionary Ledger: Kin Selection and Reciprocal Altruism

You call your sister at two in the morning because her marriage is collapsing, and you do not think, not even for a fraction of a second, about why you answer that particular number on that particular ring. You just go. You book the flight, you cancel the meeting, you sit on her kitchen floor while she cries, and somewhere underneath the tenderness you feel, something older than tenderness has already made the decision for you. William Hamilton, publishing in 1964 in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, gave that something a name and, worse, a formula. Hamilton’s rule states that a gene for altruistic behavior will spread through a population when the cost to the actor is less than the benefit to the recipient multiplied by their coefficient of relatedness. Written out, it looks like accounting because it is accounting. rB > C.. Your sister shares roughly half your genome. Your cousin shares one eighth. Hamilton was not describing sentiment. He was describing a ledger that has been running silently for hundreds of millions of years, and your sense of who deserves your midnight flight is one of its outputs.

The unsettling part is not that the ledger exists. It is that you experience its arithmetic as love. Natural selection did not need you to calculate coefficients of relatedness consciously; it only needed you to feel a disproportionate ache for the people who carry copies of your genes forward, and it built that ache directly into the machinery of attachment. Hamilton’s own life carried a strange echo of his theory: he died in 2000 from complications following a research expedition to the Congo, still chasing questions about the origins of altruism and disease, having spent decades mathematically formalizing why a ground squirrel will shriek an alarm call that draws a predator’s attention to itself, sacrificing its own body to protect siblings and cousins nearby. The squirrel does not know algebra. It has been rigged by generations of selection to behave as though it does.

Solidarity toward non-kin required a separate invoice, and Robert Trivers wrote it in 1971 in a paper on reciprocal altruism published in the Quarterly Review of Biology. Trivers, working at Harvard in his late twenties, proposed that organisms would help unrelated individuals when the expected future return, discounted for the risk of being cheated, exceeded the cost of helping now. He illustrated the model with cleaner fish that remove parasites from larger fish who could easily eat them but do not, and with vampire bats who regurgitate blood to feed roostmates who failed to feed that night, a behavior later documented in detail by Gerald Wilkinson’s field studies in Costa Rica in the 1980s, which showed bats preferentially feeding those who had fed them before and withholding from known cheaters. The bat is running a credit system in the dark, tracking debts across a colony, punishing defection. Trivers was explicit that this required cognitive machinery for detecting cheaters, remembering past interactions, and calibrating trust, and he argued that much of human emotional life, guilt, gratitude, moral outrage, friendship, suspicion, is the felt experience of that machinery operating in a species intelligent enough to need it elaborated far beyond a bat’s memory for blood debts.

Read Trivers next to Hamilton and the picture sharpens uncomfortably. The people you would die for and the people you merely trust turn out to run on two different accounting systems, one keyed to shared genetic material, the other keyed to tracked reciprocity, and both operating beneath the threshold where you could intervene even if you wanted to. You do not choose to feel your gut twist when your brother is in trouble any more than the ground squirrel chooses to shriek. You do not choose the specific warmth reserved for the colleague who has covered your shifts three times without asking anything back. What you experience as the free unfolding of your character is, in Trivers’ own later reflections on the paper’s reception, closer to a set of psychological adaptations “designed by natural selection” to solve recurring problems of survival and reproduction, adaptations that arrived in you fully installed, waiting only for the right sibling, the right roostmate, the right ring at two in the morning.

The In-Group Machinery: Tajfel's Minimal Groups and the Manufacture of Us

Give a group of schoolboys in Bristol a coin toss, tell them it revealed a preference for the paintings of Klee over Kandinsky, and something clicks into place that no one asked for and no one can quite explain afterward. This is not an exaggeration of what happened. It is the experiment itself, run by Henri Tajfel in 1971, stripped of every ingredient we assume must be present before human beings start treating each other as kin or enemy. There was no history between the boys assigned to the Klee group and the boys assigned to the Kandinsky group. No shared suffering, no rivalry, no competing interest, not even a real aesthetic preference, since the paintings were barely shown and the boys mostly couldn’t tell one abstract canvas from another. And yet, within minutes of learning which meaningless label they had been handed, they began allocating rewards in a way that favored their own label and shortchanged the other, even when a strategy of mutual benefit was sitting right there on the response sheet, mathematically obvious, and ignored.

What Tajfel had built was not a study of prejudice in any classical sense. It was an autopsy performed while the patient was still very much alive, a dissection of belonging reduced to its most minimal possible unit, so minimal that psychologists still call the paradigm exactly that: the minimal group. He wasn’t trying to prove that humans are tribal in some vague poetic sense that everyone already suspected. He was trying to find the floor, the lowest possible threshold at which categorization alone, absent any of the usual suspects like history, competition, or ideology, could generate favoritism. And the floor turned out not to exist, or rather, it turned out to be so close to zero that a coin toss could clear it.

This matters because it dismantles a story we tell ourselves constantly, the story that our loyalties are earned, that we belong to our nation, our team, our family of political opinions, because something real and substantial binds us together, some shared past dense enough to justify the loyalty tax we pay in return. Tajfel’s boys had no shared past. They had a slip of paper. The mechanism generating solidarity within the group and hostility toward the outgroup was not measuring anything about the groups themselves. It was measuring something about the machinery of the perceiving mind, a mind that apparently cannot tolerate the bare fact of division without immediately converting it into a moral hierarchy, our side quietly better, deserving, correct.

Tajfel had personal reasons to be haunted by this question that go beyond academic curiosity. Born in Poland in 1919, Jewish, he survived the Second World War partly by disguising his identity within a French prisoner-of-war camp, avoiding the fate of nearly his entire family, who did not survive. He returned to find that the category he had been assigned by history, the one that got relatives sent to death camps while he lived, had been every bit as arbitrary in its origins and every bit as lethal in its consequences as a coin flip deciding who liked Klee. The minimal group experiments were, in a sense, an attempt to isolate the psychological reflex that had made the Holocaust possible without needing centuries of accumulated hatred to fuel it, only a label, an administrative category, a badge sewn onto a coat.

What this reveals about solidarity is uncomfortable enough to resist, which is presumably why it resists so well. If belonging can be manufactured from nothing, then the warmth we feel toward our own, the genuine warmth, the kind that makes people give up weekends for their neighborhood, donate blood for strangers who share their flag, feel a lump in the throat at an anthem, is not proof of any deep or ancient connection. It is proof that the connection was never the point. The label was always doing the work, and the feeling of ancient kinship arrived afterward, dressed up as origin, when it was only ever an effect.

Durability Under Duress: The Blitz, Disasters, and the Myth of Panic

A woman in Bermondsey, September 1940, stands in the doorway of what was her kitchen twelve hours earlier, and instead of screaming she is handing out cups of tea to men she has never met, because the urn survived the blast even though the wall didn’t, and this detail, recorded almost incidentally by a Mass-Observation interviewer sent to document morale, turns out to be less an anomaly than a pattern so consistent that it eventually became an entire subfield of sociology nobody had thought to fund before the bombs made it necessary.

The Ministry of Home Security in 1938 had commissioned psychiatrists to estimate psychiatric casualties from aerial bombardment, and the numbers they produced were staggering by design: three to four psychiatric casualties for every physical one, hospitals overwhelmed not by shrapnel wounds but by shell-shocked civilians, a nation reduced to gibbering paralysis within weeks. This was not idle pessimism. It drew on the only precedent available, the trench psychiatry of the First World War, and on a deeper conviction, inherited from Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 treatise on crowd psychology, that the individual dissolves under stress into the irrational mass, that civilization is a thin membrane over panic. London built seven new psychiatric hospitals in anticipation. They stood mostly empty. The Blitz killed over forty thousand civilians and left vast stretches of the East End in rubble, and psychiatric admissions in London actually fell during the heaviest bombing months, a finding so contrary to expectation that the physician Aubrey Lewis, reviewing the data in 1942, had to explain to his own colleagues why the predicted epidemic of hysteria had simply failed to arrive.

What happened instead was something the American sociologist Charles Fritz would spend the following decades trying to name. Fritz had served in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey after the war, interviewing German civilians who had endured Allied raids far heavier than anything London suffered, and he arrived at the same paradox from the opposite direction: total devastation, and no collapse of the social fabric. By the 1960s, running the Disaster Research Center with Enrico Quarantelli, he had accumulated case after case, tornadoes in the American Midwest, floods, industrial explosions, and the pattern held with disturbing regularity. Fritz’s unpublished 1961 manuscript, later excavated and discussed by the writer Rebecca Solnit, argued that disaster produces not the panic of Le Bon’s crowd but something closer to its inversion, a temporary flattening of the ordinary distances between strangers, what he called a community of sufferers. People in the wreckage of Halifax’s 1917 munitions explosion, in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, in the flooded streets of countless towns, organized rescue, distributed food, opened their homes, before any official agency arrived to tell them to. The scarcity was rarely of compassion. It was of resources, and later, cruelly, of trust in the institutions meant to manage the recovery.

What Fritz eventually concluded was more unsettling than the data itself: that peacetime society, not disaster, might be the anomaly requiring explanation, since ordinary life isolates people into private, competitive units, while catastrophe strips away the very structures that produce that isolation, briefly returning people to something like the mutual dependence our species evolved inside. The panic elites feared was not a fact about human nature under pressure. It was a projection of what the elites themselves believed about the crowds beneath them, a fear articulated with unusual candor by disaster researchers who noticed that the institutions most anxious about looting and chaos were rarely the disaster survivors themselves but the authorities watching from a distance, the ones for whom social order had always meant order imposed from above rather than order improvised from below. Quarantelli would later catalogue this as elite panic, a term meant to invert the entire framework: it is not the crowd that loses its head in the rubble, it is the command structure, terrified that its own authority has become irrelevant precisely when people need each other most and need it least.

The Architecture of Exclusion Inside Every Bond

You are standing in a hospital waiting room at three in the morning, and a stranger you have never met hands you a coffee because your hands are shaking, and for a moment the two of you are bound by something that feels ancient and unearned, a solidarity that asks for no explanation. Neither of you notices the door you have just closed behind that gesture. The nurse who walks past without stopping, the man in the corner who is also waiting and also shaking but receives nothing, exist now on the other side of a line that the coffee itself drew. This is the part nobody wants to look at directly: the same motion that pulls two people together pushes a third person away, not as an accident of the gesture but as its structural precondition. You cannot include without simultaneously excluding. The circle of warmth has a circumference, and a circumference is, by definition, a boundary.

Georg Simmel understood this with a clarity that still unsettles anyone who reads him seriously. In his 1908 essay on the stranger, later folded into his sociology of forms, he described a figure who is neither fully inside the group nor fully outside it, someone present but not organically belonging, close in space and distant in essence. What makes Simmel’s analysis so uncomfortable is that he does not treat the stranger as an unfortunate byproduct of social organization, an accident that better institutions might correct. He treats the stranger as constitutive. The group needs this figure the way a sentence needs a period. Without someone who is not-us, the category of us has no edges, no way of knowing where it starts and stops, and a category with no edges cannot generate the warmth, the mutual obligation, the sense of shared fate that we call solidarity in the first place.

This is not cynicism, it is arithmetic. Every act of collective belonging distributes people into at least two sets, and the emotional intensity felt by the first set is frequently proportional to the sharpness with which the second set has been cut away. Émile Durkheim, writing decades earlier in his study of the division of labor, noticed something adjacent when he examined how societies punish crime not primarily to correct the criminal but to reaffirm, through the ritual of collective outrage, the boundaries of the moral community itself. The criminal is useful to the group precisely because condemning him lets everyone else feel, briefly and intensely, what it means to belong. Solidarity does not simply tolerate an outside; it manufactures one when none is conveniently available, because the feeling of cohesion is starved without it.

Consider how neighborhoods organize disaster relief, how a flood or an earthquake produces astonishing outpourings of mutual aid among people who, the week before, ignored each other on the same street. The sociologist Charles Fritz documented this pattern in his research on wartime bombing and natural catastrophe, describing what later scholars would call the disaster utopia, a temporary collapsing of ordinary hierarchies into fierce cooperation. But the same studies quietly note who gets left out of the relief networks that form so spontaneously: the undocumented resident afraid to appear on any list, the person already marked as outsider before the disaster, who often receives less help precisely because the emergency solidarity organizes itself along preexisting lines of who counts as one of us. The catastrophe does not erase the boundary. It reactivates it under pressure.

There is a reason wartime nationalism produces both extraordinary self-sacrifice and extraordinary cruelty in the same population, sometimes in the same week, sometimes through the same people. The soldier who would die for the man beside him has usually been trained, explicitly or through cultural osmosis, to regard the enemy as somewhere beneath full humanity. These are not two separate phenomena occurring in parallel. They are the same psychological structure viewed from either side. The intensity of the bond and the dehumanization of what lies outside it are correlated variables, rising and falling together, because the nervous system does not seem to know how to produce one without the other in any sustained, high-stakes way.

Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and the Erosion of Bridging Ties

You join a bowling league in your thirties because someone at work mentions it offhand, and for four months you show up on Tuesday nights and learn the names of people whose politics, income, and worries you know nothing about, and then the league dissolves because not enough people renew, and nobody calls anyone else again. Nothing dramatic happened. No one betrayed anyone. The thing simply stopped existing, the way most things stop existing now, not with rupture but with quiet non-renewal, and you go back to your apartment and open an app that shows you, with great precision, the opinions of four hundred people who already agree with you.

Robert Putnam gave this phenomenon its name and its data in 2000, in a book whose title became so quotable that people cite it without having read past the introduction. Bowling Alone tracked a specific American collapse: membership in the Elks, the Rotary, the PTA, bowling leagues themselves, all declining by thirty to fifty percent across the final decades of the twentieth century, even as the number of people who bowled recreationally stayed flat or rose. Americans were still bowling. They had simply stopped bowling together in the organized, recurring, semi-obligatory way that used to force them into rooms with people they had not chosen. Putnam measured this through what he called social capital, a term he borrowed and sharpened from earlier sociologists, and inside that concept he drew a distinction that matters more than the book’s famous title: bonding capital versus bridging capital.

Bonding capital is the solidarity of the like-with-like. It is the family, the ethnic enclave, the fraternity, the congregation of people who already resemble each other in belief, background, or grievance. It is real, it is warm, it produces enormous loyalty and mutual aid, and Putnam never dismisses it. Bridging capital is different in kind, not just in degree. It is the solidarity that forms across difference, the bowling league that puts a plumber next to a schoolteacher next to a retired accountant, the union hall, the civic association, the neighborhood board meeting where people with nothing in common except a shared street have to negotiate, argue, and eventually cooperate. Bridging capital is what generates the diffuse trust that lets a society function among strangers, and it is precisely this kind that Putnam found collapsing, while bonding capital, in some corners, was intensifying.

This is the part that gets lost when the book gets summarized as a lament about lost community. The argument is not that Americans stopped being social. Church attendance data, membership surveys, and time-use studies Putnam compiled show people still gathering, still forming groups, but increasingly among the already-similar. The erosion was selective. It hollowed out the middle distance of social life, the ties that required tolerating people you had not selected, while leaving intact or even reinforcing the tight, homogeneous clusters where agreement is assumed at the door. Solidarity did not vanish. It retreated into its most comfortable, least demanding form.

What replaced the bowling league was not solitude but curation. The digital environment did not arrive to empty rooms, since Putnam was writing before social media existed in any recognizable form, but everything he measured predicted exactly what would happen when the technology for perfect self-selection became available in every pocket. Mark Granovetter had already shown, in his 1973 paper on the strength of weak ties, that acquaintances rather than intimates are what circulate job information, opportunities, and new ideas through a social structure, precisely because weak ties cross into different clusters that strong ties never reach. A society optimizing for bonding capital and abandoning bridging capital is a society whose members are more comforted and more informationally isolated at once, more certain of being right because agreement has become structurally guaranteed rather than earned through friction with people who see the street, the budget, the argument differently.

Digital Tribes and the Simulation of Belonging

You open the app before your eyes have finished adjusting to the morning, and within four seconds an algorithm has already decided who you are angry at today. Not who you love, not who you owe, not who you would carry a stretcher for. Who you are angry at. This is the raw material now offered in place of belonging, and the substitution has happened so gradually that most people would resist calling it a substitution at all. They would call it community. They would call it finding their people.

Christian Rudder, one of the founders of OkCupid, published in 2014 a book called Dataclysm built entirely on the analytics harvested from his own dating platform, and buried inside it is a quieter finding than the one that made headlines: engagement metrics reward not affection but friction. Users who provoked mild controversy in their profiles received more attention than users who presented themselves as agreeable. The pattern generalized far beyond dating. By the time Facebook’s internal researchers were examining their own recommendation systems in 2016 and 2018, in documents that would later surface through congressional testimony and journalistic investigation, the conclusion was nearly identical: content that triggered moral outrage traveled farther and faster than content that did not, regardless of what the platform’s stated values claimed to reward.

This is not an accident of engineering. It is the engineering. Engagement, the metric that determines advertising revenue, is maximized not by satisfaction but by activation, and activation is most reliably produced by threat. A feed that makes you feel safely surrounded by allies keeps you scrolling less than a feed that makes you feel besieged by enemies who must be answered. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt, writing with Tobias Rose-Stockwell in a 2019 essay for The Atlantic, described social media as a machine tuned to reward moral grandstanding, where each user learns, through the blunt pedagogy of likes and shares, which performances of virtue and which performances of contempt will be paid attention. The lesson is absorbed faster than any classroom civics unit ever managed. You learn what your tribe wants to hear, and you supply it, and the supplying feels, from the inside, exactly like loyalty.

The political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood gave this phenomenon its clinical name in a 2015 study: affective polarization, the tendency to feel warmth toward one’s own political group and active, visceral hostility toward the opposing one, a hostility that has grown in the United States to rival or exceed racial and religious prejudice as measured on the same scales. Their data showed something specifically damning: policy disagreement explains only a fraction of the animosity. People report disliking the opposing tribe’s members even when they cannot articulate what those members actually believe. The hatred has detached from its supposed content and now floats free, self-sustaining, requiring only the tribal marker as fuel.

What gets manufactured here wears the exact silhouette of the bonds Durkheim once located in the shared effervescence of ritual, the same shape Putnam mourned in the vanished bowling leagues, but hollowed of the substance that made those bonds costly and therefore real. Nobody sacrifices a Tuesday evening for a hashtag. Nobody misses a paycheck to keep a subreddit alive. The medium offers the neurological signature of solidarity, the dopamine of being recognized by the in-group, without extracting the price that solidarity has always demanded of its members: presence, risk, the boring maintenance of people you did not choose and cannot mute.

Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist who has spent four decades studying human relationships with machines, wrote in her 2011 book Alone Together that people are increasingly choosing the sociable robot and the curated profile over the demanding friend precisely because the former can be adjusted to specification while the latter cannot. The tribe assembled by an algorithm is a tribe that never disagrees with you about anything that matters, because it was never real enough to disagree.

So the question that remains, unresolved and possibly unresolvable, is whether what pulses through these networks deserves the word solidarity at all, or whether it is something closer to its taxidermied double, mounted and lifelike, arranged in the exact posture of the thing it replaced, except that nothing inside it breathes, and no one asks what happens the day the feed goes dark and there is no one left standing beside you who did not arrive there by an algorithm’s arithmetic.

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Putnam’s Bowling Alone: Analysis

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