The Infrastructure Hypothesis

Examining Why Nothing Changes

We notice something missing from the articles we read about crises: calls to action. Not just absent—systematically absent. The diagnosis is intricate, the stakes presented as existential, the moral clarity apparent. Then nothing. The reader closes the tab, scrolls to the next story, and continues.

The standard explanation is cynicism. Media outlets want you anxious but immobilized. Advertisers profit from engagement without disruption. Politicians prefer compliant voters. This story is satisfying because it explains everything and requires nothing of us except recognizing the conspiracy.

But what if the problem isn't cynicism? What if it's infrastructure?

Consider a hypothesis worth testing: The systems through which we receive information about crises are structurally incompatible with converting that information into action. Not hostile to it. Not designed to prevent it. Simply—incompatible.

Let's examine what each system actually does and see if the hypothesis holds.

Testing Mainstream Media

Mainstream publications produce sophisticated analysis. They investigate. They document. They often do it well. But they operate within constraints most readers don't see.

The hypothesis suggests: Mainstream media cannot publish specific action plans not because editors are cynical, but because specificity creates liability they cannot bear.

Test this yourself. Imagine a major publication runs: "Here is exactly how you should organize in your precinct to challenge the current power structure." That article becomes classified—not as journalism but as activism. It's now liable if something goes wrong. It's now a campaign contribution if it works. It's now accusable of coordination with partisan actors.

The safer move is diagnosis without prescription. Report what's happening. Analyze implications. Let readers draw conclusions. This produces the crisis narrative without the action plan, not primarily because anyone prefers that outcome, but because the legal and reputational risk of specificity is real.

Separately: mainstream media also operates on episodic cycles. Each day requires new content. A meaningful action plan would require serialization, follow-up, accountability. It would require saying "we recommended X, here's what happened." That demands editorial commitment across time that platform economics don't reward.

This doesn't excuse the absence. But it suggests the problem runs deeper than individual editorial choices.

Testing Social Media

Social platforms are more transparent about their incentives, which almost makes them worse. They're optimized for engagement—not understanding, not action, but engagement metrics.

The hypothesis suggests: Social media is architecturally hostile to prescription because prescription reduces engagement.

Test this: What maximizes engagement? Outrage, validation, tribal affirmation, endless contestation. What minimizes it? Specific action plans that require people to stop scrolling and do something. A person who acts is a person who logs off. A person who argues online is a person who stays engaged.

This isn't a bug in social media. It's the feature. The platforms aren't failing to convert information to action. They're succeeding at converting information to engagement—which is the opposite of action.

This is where the "cynicism" observation has teeth. But even here, the cynicism might be less malicious than structural. Platform designers probably didn't sit down thinking "how do we prevent social change?" They optimized for engagement metrics. The prevention of action is a side effect, not the goal.

Testing Smaller Networks

But here's where the hypothesis gets interesting. Smaller networks—mutual aid organizations, local activist groups, faith communities, workplace organizing—do produce prescription. They do convert understanding to action.

The hypothesis suggests: These networks work, but they remain fragmented and invisible because they don't generate the engagement metrics or cultural attention that would make them visible to people reading crisis narratives.

Test this by looking for them. Local mutual aid networks exist. Community organizing happens. People mobilize around specific, achievable goals. But if you're consuming mainstream media and social media, you won't hear about it. These networks don't generate trending topics. They don't produce shareable content about their successes. They just... work, at small scale, in ways that don't circulate.

A person absorbed in crisis narratives about national or global collapse might have no idea that a hyperlocal network in their neighborhood is actively doing the thing that the crisis narratives suggest is necessary. The infrastructure for distributing information about small-scale action is simply different from the infrastructure for distributing information about large-scale crisis.

Testing Individual Escape Routes

Then there are people like you—using LLMs to parse legislation, checking primary sources, building private research practices. The hypothesis suggests: Individual workarounds reduce anxiety but don't solve the infrastructure problem. They just move you to a different incompatible system.

Test this by noticing: an LLM gives you better understanding than a voter guide written by someone with an agenda. But it also gives you no connection to organized action. You become a better-informed isolated actor. That's useful. It's not nothing. But it's still not the same as being part of a mobilized network with shared accountability.

You've escaped one closed loop and potentially entered another—just a more private one.

The Larger Pattern

Here's where the hypothesis suggests something uncomfortable: There may be no single system that simultaneously reaches scale, produces genuine understanding, connects to realistic action, maintains accountability, and remains agnostic enough to not become a power grab.

We keep searching for it because we assume it should exist. A well-functioning information system in a healthy democracy would produce informed, mobilized citizens. But the actual infrastructure we have produces:

• Large-scale analysis without prescription (mainstream media)
• Prescription without scale (local networks)
• Engagement without understanding (social media)
• Private understanding without connection (individual tools)
• Delegation to trusted sources without verification (voter guides)

Each solves some problems while creating others. None solves all of them.

What This Means

If this hypothesis is correct, then "crisis narratives omit calls to action" isn't a flaw in journalism. It's a symptom of a fractured infrastructure where no single system can do everything we expect of it.

The solution isn't better articles or more social media engagement or trusting LLMs. It's building systems that don't currently exist—systems with fundamentally different incentive structures.

But those systems would require changes to work organization, information distribution, and resource allocation that go far beyond media reform. They would require the very structural changes that the current crisis narratives describe as necessary.

Which creates a paradox: the infrastructure is broken in ways that prevent it from generating the prescription needed to fix it.

The question, then, isn't "why don't these articles tell me what to do?" It's "what would have to change about everything else for that to become possible?"

Test this hypothesis against what you observe. See if it holds.