Aesop's Reels
Barely a month ago, the United States and Iran signed a Memorandum of Understanding that read, in substance, like a near-total American capitulation. Yet in a digital culture, nothing should be taken at face value — least of all a signed document. What was agreed three media cycles ago is already ancient history. Words were once a form of capital: you spent them carefully because your reputation depended on their weight across time. Aesop understood this. So did every culture that built its authority on the keeping of oaths. The digital revolution has liquidated that capital. We are now in a world where the Hippocratic oath is updated regularly, where signed memoranda dissolve within weeks, and where the most powerful man in the world governs by tweet. It is the operating logic of a new cultural regime — and we are only beginning to understand its physics.
The world could be hard to predict but at least we had feet on solid ground. It appears that it is no longer the case. The digital revolution is deleting the fabric of culture in real time. Let’s address first the mechanic of this new culture.
Quicksand
There is a strange irony in the fact that computers are made of silicon. They are just another kind of quicksand. You can’t run or even walk on quicksand. Before you know it, your feet are stuck and you are sucked into the mud. Every move just makes it worse. A quagmire. The only way out is to accept it, lie down and start swimming your way out.
We have reached this point in the digital revolution. Several hot wars are raging, the immigration crisis is leading to riots in many places (Europe but also in South Africa), sovereign debts are reaching untold levels… It is becoming increasingly hard not to see formidable obstacles wherever you look. Problems accumulate and not a single one is solved permanently. The MOU that was supposed to settle (or be the path to a solution) the particular issue of the Strait of Hormuz just held for a few weeks. Just like in the quicksand, every move appears to make the situation worse. Are we going to drown? Is there a way out?
Non-Newtonian fluid
Quicksand is what is called a non-Newtonian fluid. It appears as a solid, but it is in fact a colloid in which water and solid particles are mixed. This gives this material very counter-intuitive properties, one being that going down and up (with relation to the gravity field) in quicksand doesn’t work the same. It is a highly non-isotropic field. Other non-Newtonian fluids exhibit different behaviors regarding the speed with which you are trying to move inside: they can behave like a liquid or a solid.
Digital culture is like a non-Newtonian fluid. It is because communication is highly non-isotropic as well. When Musk posts, it is not the same as when I post. Because he has hundreds of millions of followers, his words don’t have the same properties as mine. Yet both are social media posts. A kind of open letter on the internet. But as in the case of non-Newtonian fluids, they don’t behave the same given a specific path: Elon’s posts and their replies aren’t the same thing. These non-isotropic properties of social media communications explain how we have changed times. What used to work no longer works.
There is an extra layer. Trump understood, even if only intuitively, the power of social media before the rest of the elite class. This is why he was elected in 2016. But there is a thing: in the process, he changed his status from being a media celebrity to becoming a head of state. He continued to apply the same playbook once elected. I am sure that he is shocked to see that it doesn’t work anymore. Dealing with Iran’s leadership isn’t like a domestic election campaign. No kidding… The hard point is that the old way to do things, say in the pre-internet era, doesn’t work either.
The natural question is: what should/could be done? Are we stuck in the quicksand forever?
The Iceberg and the Tanker
The first rule when caught in quicksand is to stop making random movements in the hope of a quick fix. Culture is not a speedboat — it moves like a supertanker. You can only alter its course by a few degrees at a time; what matters is the steadiness of the hand on the wheel and the compounding of small corrections over time. This is the complete inverse of the behavior we have witnessed during this Iran war: a conflict that has been “won” several dozen times and restarted as many, each spasm of action making the next move harder — exactly like the thrashing of someone sinking into quicksand.
But there is a deeper problem. Like an iceberg, what drives a culture is mostly invisible from above the waterline. Institutions see only the surface—laws, elections, GDP figures—while the mass that actually determines direction lies beneath: language, shared memory, the rhythm of collective life, the internalized norms that function without enforcement. Current institutions are not only failing to steer the supertanker—they are actively destabilizing it by trying to impose digital control mechanisms they cannot themselves implement. The vaccine passport episode was revealing: what would have happened if Google had refused to carry the verification app in its store? The institutions were pushing a sovereignty claim while depending entirely on a private actor’s goodwill to execute it. This is not a temporary dysfunction—it is a structural contradiction that will not hold indefinitely.
The intermediate conclusion is uncomfortable but clear: the new culture will not emerge from existing institutions. It will have to be bootstrapped from below.
But there is an even deeper paradox to solve: how will society reorganize itself without passing through institutions? I have some ideas about this question, that I have explored here. The way I see things is this: concerned people will gather together to form consistent communities in which they will provide stability. It is a kind of inverse apartheid. Maybe a new version of Konkin’s agorism (a ‘70s variant of libertarianism centered around counter-culture and silent revolution) but rooted in shared culture and centered around education. There is this X thread that is one of the best low-level signals:
It is written by a French citizen and is the perfect illustration of what is discussed here (you can find a translation on X). Basically, the level of public education is crashing in France, so he decided to move out. Indeed, homeschooling is too expensive (because of income lost). The state can no longer deliver what it promises, and it shows.
It is an inverse apartheid because it is not going to come from institutions and be imposed on citizens; it is going to emanate from citizens and will impose itself on institutions. The result will be equivalent in the sense that society will fragment, and the understanding of the “common good” is going to change. Right now, people think that moving elsewhere is the solution, but I bet that will quickly change too. Digital culture is a global revolution—there is no country left to escape to.
Another intriguing inversion of this revolution lies in the fact that now it is the institutions that appear to move more erratically than individuals. Stability is not found where it is used to be.
Is the tanker going to crash into the iceberg? Will it be the subject of a new Titanic movie of the next century? In this version, will the Heart of the Ocean be dropped into the water, or are institutions going to try to hold onto it as long as possible?
Aesop's fables marked the passage from an oral culture to a written culture. Basically he used the new technology of the time, writing, to recollect the traditional knowledge. We have reached again this point in time.