Twenty-five years ago we stood in lines to give blood we didn’t have enough of. We flew flags off pickup trucks and front porches and gas station awnings. Strangers held doors for each other a little longer. For about six weeks, nobody cared if you were a Democrat or a Republican, Baptist or Catholic or nothing at all. George W Bush’s approval per Gallop was 91%. Highest ever recorded. We were just Americans, and that was enough.

Twenty-five years later I ask myself, “What the hell happened?” I think the answer is pretty simple actually. We found something better to do with the unity. We cashed it in. Spent it on wars we’re still arguing about twenty five years later, and then, once we’d gotten that out of our system, we turned back on each other with a viciousness that makes pre-9/11 partisanship look like a minor disagreement over a thermostat setting.

Look at us now. And if you want to know who to thank for that, don’t look at your neighbor, look at the channel he’s watching. We didn’t drift apart on our own. We had a lot of help, from an industry that figured out decades ago that a calm, informed public doesn’t generate ad revenue, but a terrified, furious one tunes in every single night. Cable news discovered that the fastest way to grow an audience wasn’t to inform it, it was to convince it one half of the country that they are coming for their guns, your God, or their grandkids and convince the other half to believe the other side is fascist and nothing but racist. Turns out that works great. Ratings up, ad revenue up, blood pressure up.

Then the internet showed up and did cable one better. Why pay anchors to manufacture outrage when an algorithm can do it for free, tailored to you personally, forever? Every platform you scroll is quietly, cheerfully sorting you into a smaller and angrier room, because the algorithm doesn’t get paid for showing you something you’d agree with it gets paid for showing you something you’d fight about. We call it “doing your own research” now, like we’re all suddenly credentialed constitutional scholars, when really we’re just reading headlines a machine picked out because it already knows what makes us mad. There entire business model is convincing you the guy down the street is an existential threat to democracy. We’ve got people who’ll drive three states over for the latest protest of choice and couldn’t pick the Pentagon out of a lineup of federal buildings. We’ve got a Thanksgiving table that’s basically a demilitarized zone now, where you’re better off discussing literally anything except whether the last election was legitimate, whether vaccines are a plot, or whether your nephew’s pronouns are a personal attack on the Constitution.

It has worked beautifully. . We haven’t gotten smarter. We have been marinating in six hours a day of content engineered to make us see our own family as the opposition. Division sells better than unity, sold it, and kept selling it, quarter after quarter, and we bought every bit of it, one push notification at a time

We’ve got more ways to talk to each other than any generation in the history of the species instant, global, free and we’ve used every single one of them to get worse at it. We didn’t run out of common ground. We looked at it, decided it was boring, and went and built ourselves a fresh batch of enemies out of our own zip codes. Congress can’t agree the sky is blue. Strangers can’t agree on basic facts that used to just be facts. The only bipartisan consensus left in America is that the other side is ruining everything.

Twenty-five years after a morning that briefly made us remember we’re on the same team, we’ve built an entire economy media, politics, social platforms, all of it around making sure we never feel that way again.

And the future doesn’t look any brighter it looks worse, if we’re being honest instead of polite about it. We’re not drifting toward some breaking point that finally scares us straight. There is no bottom we hit that fixes this. We’re just getting better at the fight: sharper angrier feeds, a generation coming up that’s never once seen this country agree on anything and doesn’t expect to. They won’t miss the unity, because they never had it to lose. That’s the part that should actually worry you not that we broke something, but that we’re raising people who won’t even know it’s broken, because broken is just what normal looks like to them.

I’d like to think we could get there again without needing another tragedy to do it. I’m not holding my breath. We’ve had a quarter century to prove it, and mostly what we’ve proven is that we’re very good at arguing and less good at almost everything else.

Does any of this really matter? Probably not. AI is going to get us anyway.