The fragmentation flywheel

Why the Fourth Industrial Revolution resists political response

Sixty years. That’s how long it took Americans to organize a coherent political response to the predations of 19th- and early-20th century industrial capitalism. From the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 to the codification of the New Deal in the late 1930s, the country lurched through Grange halls and union massacres, through Populist defeats and Progressive victories, through muckraking exposés and constitutional amendments. The response, when it finally came, was a genuine transformation: antitrust law, labor protections, financial regulation, the administrative state itself.

But the response to the latest economic revolution in the United States—the fourth, if you’re counting—marked by the internet, social media and AI, has so far not been as productive. We have disruption, polarization, a youth mental health crisis, and an economic concentration of wealth that would make the robber barons think maybe we’ve gone a little overboard. What we lack is a coherent political movement that offers a real alternative. Bans on phones in schools and Australia’s crackdown on social media for kids, along with a few lawsuits here and there, represent the most visible stabs at reform. But they feel less like the beginning of a genuine movement in the mold of the old trust-busting Progressives and more like the exertions of passengers trying to bail out a sinking ship with teacups.

The usual explanations for the tech industry’s dominance–regulatory capture, a polarized and gridlocked political environment, and the sheer complexity of digital technology–have merit. But they miss an even larger problem. The absence of a mass-scale, coordinated response isn’t necessarily a failure of imagination or political will; it may be a feature of the system itself.

To see this at work, start with the Big Tech business model and the concentrated wealth it generates. Cory Doctorow’s framework of “enshittification“ has become something of a meme, but underneath the coinage lies a sophisticated diagnosis. Platforms follow a predictable arc: At first, they’re good to users to achieve growth. Next, though, they exploit users to court business customers such as advertisers and publishers. Finally, with everyone locked in, they squeeze them all to satisfy shareholders. In 2008, Facebook promised not to spy on us; today, Facebook is a rent-extraction machine optimized for engagement metrics that correlate well with human misery.

But Doctorow’s framework needs an amendment. After the extraction phase, something else often happens. Not all that captured wealth goes into manipulating the regulatory environment to increase profits. Some is plowed back into the next wave of disruption, like Google Ventures, Microsoft’s $13 billion OpenAI bet, Amazon’s $8 billion Anthropic investment, and Meta’s pivot to AI (up to $65 billion in spending in 2025 alone). The enshittification of Platform A generates the venture capital financing for Platform B, thus creating a self-fueling flywheel.

The system doesn’t just extract and decay; it extracts, decays, and innovates, often simultaneously. That innovation makes it hard to dismiss the current system as one of mere corruption (although it certainly is corrupt). The corruption, for better or for worse, funds further innovation. And the innovation, in turn, resets the cycle: A new platform, a new promise, a new wave of users being treated well until they’re not.

This new dynamic represents a virtuous cycle for tech capital, but a vicious one for everyone else.

Add politics to the mix and the picture gets even grimmer. Tech wealth buys lobbying power. Lobbying power prevents regulation (or captures it, which amounts to the same thing). Unregulated platforms accelerate the extraction of wealth, which fuels another spin of the flywheel, each faster than the last. We’ve watched this play out with Section 230, with antitrust enforcement that arrives a decade too late, with privacy legislation that somehow never quite passes.

The flywheel, in other words, includes a political capture loop in its rotation. And unlike older forms of regulatory capture, it generates innovation while also extracting rents. The railroad barons could only lay so much new track. The platform barons keep building new products, finding new frontiers, dominating new markets.

There’s another, more profound difference. In the Gilded Age, economic and narrative power were separate.

The media industry wasn’t consolidated like it is today. When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle or when Ida Tarbell exposed Standard Oil, people like railroad magnate and financier Jay Gould might have been able to bribe or threaten individual editors, but they couldn’t suppress the story everywhere. Muckrakers like Sinclair and Tarbell found outlets. Populist newspapers reached farmers. Gould could buy legislators, manipulate shipping rates, and deploy strikebreakers against his workers, but he couldn’t control what farmers thought about him. The media environment was too diffuse and fragmented. The robber barons’ attempt at corruption simply couldn’t scale.

That’s no longer the case. Elon Musk owns a platform used by around 200 million people a day, including tens of millions who get their news there. He can, and does, algorithmically boost his own posts, suppress his critics through shadow-banning, and test messages in real time to see what resonates. He doesn’t need to bribe columnists. His engineers can just decide what those columnists’ audiences see or even if they see the columnists at all.

This poses severe challenges to one of the Gilded Age’s primary mechanisms for reform. Sinclair’s Jungle changed federal law because as powerful as they were, the lords of Packingtown couldn’t make the book disappear; they didn’t own the presses (for the most part). But platform barons like Musk and Zuckerberg today exert immense sway over the means of information production and distribution both, giving them outsized control over the media environment. The muckraking that forced Standard Oil to accept regulation doesn’t work when the monopolist owns the megaphone.

And yet, the political and social paralysis can’t be explained solely by an information stranglehold. People are genuinely angry. Scroll through any social media feed and you’ll find raw fury at tech companies, algorithms, and the attention economy devouring childhood. The energy and desire for a political movement seem to exist. So why doesn’t it gel?

Look at what the Progressive Era’s response actually required: Lots and lots of patient, face-to-face, grinding work. Meetings at settlement houses and union halls. Investigative journalism sustained over years, not news cycles. All of it depended on repeated in-person contact, trust-building, and the slow accretion of solidarity despite racial and social differences.

Social media, on the other hand, is optimized for precisely the opposite. Outrage gets engagement; nuance doesn’t. Identity politics fragment potential coalitions. Viral moments dissipate like flash paper before anyone can form durable organizations around issues. Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life, which became a “manifesto of Progressive beliefs,” according to the New Republic, took nine years to write and publish. Today we have Substack and 280 character limits.

The irony is obvious. The technological tools we could use to build a resistance infrastructure are controlled by the very forces we need to resist. We’re forced to organize on digital terrains owned by the very forces we seek to rein in. And when things get too hot for the platform barons, they shift the terrain. By the time you’ve built a coalition around one grievance, the platform has already moved on, generating new harms and new distractions.

In short, the flywheel generates disruption faster than responses can form. The platforms shatter the coalitions that might demand their regulation. Each turn of the cycle produces more capital for the next wave of innovation that atomizes the public further.

The Progressive Era was 60 years of patient organizing. Try getting someone to watch a TikTok reel of more than 60 seconds.

The Progressives found success when the crisis of the Great Depression met decades of organizing and capacity building. But they had to go through hell to get there. The Populists lost. William Jennings Bryan lost not only while leading them, but twice more while leading just the Democrats. The labor movement was shot and beaten for 40 years before the Wagner Act. Perhaps we’re in the “failing repeatedly” phase. That would be historically normal.

But what if the flywheel’s velocity has changed the math? Maybe the cycle now spins fast enough to outrun patient preparation. Maybe the platforms now so thoroughly control the online equivalents of union halls, where organizing might happen, that we can never quite prepare the ground. If that’s the case, then the politics adequate to this moment may never arrive.

The missing response isn’t an accident or a failure of nerves. The system in need of reform is the same system that prevents reformers from organizing. The flywheel spins, the opposition scatters, and the politics we need keep slipping out of reach.

So what can we do? The historical precedent offers cold comfort, but it’s not entirely bereft. Union organizing is having a small renaissance in the form of workers at Starbucks and Amazon. The most effective movements will combine offline solidarity with online amplification. And local politics are still relatively unmediated. The platforms haven’t entirely colonized every organizing space

Capacity-building will matter when a crisis hits, even if we don’t know what an equivalent crisis might be. It could be a catastrophic platform failure, an AI incident, a tech-driven financial collapse. But that capacity-building during the losing phase still matters. The Progressives didn’t know the Depression was coming, but they were ready when it did.

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Christopher Allbritton is the executive editor for The Media Copilot, covering AI adoption in journalism and newsroom transformation. He has covered conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, and Pakistan, including the killing of Osama bin Laden as Reuters’s Pakistan bureau chief.