The Shape of Sorting
I've drafted articles I didn't post. Not because they were wrong, but because sending them would require translation I didn't want to bother with—and I figured no one reading would meet me half way. That hesitation, felt before it's named, is what this essay tries to map.
In earlier essays, I asked what it means to remain human under durable constraint—what kind of person you're willing to be when the ledger stays unresolved. This essay asks a prior question: what shape does the constraint itself take? How does the sorting actually work?
I.
"Polarized nation" appears everywhere—pundit vocabulary, op-eds, Thanksgiving think-pieces. The word assumes a single field with two poles: one axis, one spectrum, one argument everyone is part of. The proposed fixes follow logically: dialogue, temperature-lowering, bridge-building, meeting in the middle.
But those prescriptions only make sense if we're in the same room, disagreeing about where to stand.
What if the problem isn't distance on a line, but membrane permeability between adjacent worlds?
We're not polarized. We're ecologically sorted—clustered into what I've been calling cosms, each with its own assumptive environment, its own sustaining stories, its own sense of what's obvious and what requires defense. The membranes between these cosms are thickening. Crossing has become expensive. And the usual prescriptions—talk more, listen better, find common ground—assume a shared field that may no longer exist.
Polarization assumes we're in the same room, disagreeing about the furniture. What if we're in different rooms entirely—and the doors are getting harder to open?
II.
When membranes thicken, several things happen at once.
Transition costs rise. Entering another cosm no longer requires just civility; it demands fluency, emotional labor, risk. Missteps aren't small—they're evidence. Curiosity reads as infiltration. Silence reads as hostility.
Exit costs rise. Leaving your cosm—or lingering at its edge—starts to feel like betrayal. Loyalty becomes moralized. Ambiguity becomes suspect. The membrane doesn't just keep others out; it keeps members in.
Signals replace substance. Because shared reality thins, people rely on markers—language, symbols, signage, consumption choices—to determine safety. These signals aren't about persuasion. They're about orientation: Is this space mine? Will I be understood here?
Travelers become suspect. People who move between cosms are illegible to both sides. They're accused of complicity by one and infiltration by the other. The interloper gets attacked by both immune systems.
The state exploits the gaps. Enforcement systems don't need universal legitimacy; they need cosm-specific legitimacy. If one cosm experiences bureaucracy and another experiences terror, the system is working as designed. Impermeable membranes prevent shared outrage from cohering.
What often goes unnoticed is that membranes don't thicken because cosms are unified. They thicken because conflict within the cosm becomes too costly to surface. Disagreement gets coded as disloyalty. Complexity becomes risky. People retreat to the safest subset of their own world—which hardens the boundary from the inside.
The doors aren't locked. They're just heavy enough that fewer people bother.
III.
Cosms and policies co-produce each other in a loop that's hard to interrupt.
From one direction, cosms generate policy preferences almost automatically. Inside a low-demand cosm that values legibility and procedural fairness, policies framed as "law and order" feel morally obvious. Harm, when it registers, appears as a natural by-product—collateral to a necessary system. Inside a care-oriented cosm, those same policies read as selective, punitive, dehumanizing. The harm isn't incidental; it's diagnostic.
From the other direction, policies reshape cosms. When enforcement creates conditions of suspension—lives held in adjudication limbo, unable to plan or even visualize a future, exposed to policy shifts—those conditions become environmental facts. People reorganize around them. Over time, the policy stops being a "policy" and becomes "how things are."
Once the loop closes, disagreement stops being about outcomes and becomes about reality itself. Evidence doesn't travel cleanly across membranes. Data that feels dispositive in one cosm is suspect or irrelevant in another. Each side thinks the other is denying what's plainly true—because they're inhabiting different policy-shaped worlds.
This is why incremental reform so often disappoints everyone. A policy tweak that softens harm without changing the underlying structure feels like progress inside one cosm and capitulation inside another. The membranes stay thick. The bulldozer keeps running, with lenticular decals that shift depending on perspective.
And policies persist not because they work well universally, but because they work well enough for the cosms that legitimate them. Universal consent isn't required. Cosm-specific coherence is enough.
You're not arguing about what should be done. You're arguing about what is happening. And you're both right, inside your own rooms.
IV.
The "sorting machine" isn't a machine. It's an ecology of mechanisms that don't require coordination.
Mechanisms within cosms: Purity tests, explicit or implicit. Loyalty cascades, where public commitment pressures others to match. Narrative enforcement, where questioning the cosm's sustaining stories reads as betrayal. Social cost asymmetry—staying is frictionless; leaving is expensive.
Mechanisms between cosms: Algorithmic curation that shows you your cosm's best and the other's worst. Outrage economies where cross-cosm visibility peaks when it's inflammatory. Translation decay—same words, different meanings, until conversation becomes impossible. And the treatment of bridgers as suspects by both sides.
Mechanisms outside cosms: Geographic sorting through housing markets and zoning. Economic sorting through labor markets and credentials. Educational sorting through tracked curricula and campus cultures. Media fragmentation into separate factual universes. And the enforcement apparatus—the bulldozer—delivering different experiences to different populations.
Mechanisms that cross all layers: Fear, which thickens membranes at every level. Status competition, which drives purity performance. And exhaustion—because permeability is labor, and fatigue drives retreat.
Some mechanisms don't just thicken membranes; they determine which membranes you face. Economic position and visible marking—race, accent, documentation status, embodied difference—function as pre-sorters. By the time you're navigating a cosm, these forces have already decided which cosms you're allowed to approach, which will surveil you, which will see you as threat before you speak. These aren't variables among others. They're the terrain beneath the terrain.
No one is operating a central console. The mechanisms reinforce each other without anyone being in charge.
V.
The sorting impulse is ancient. The current infrastructure is not.
Humans have always clustered with the familiar, marked boundaries between in-group and out-group, competed for status within their circles, punished defection, controlled information. The Inquisition had purity tests. So did the Soviet Communist Party. So does your local PTA.
What's new is the machinery:
Speed. You encounter contrary cosms hourly now, algorithmically optimized to provoke response. The metabolism of sorting has accelerated by orders of magnitude.
Scale. A cosm can be continental and fragmented simultaneously—millions sharing an assumptive environment while physically dispersed.
Disintermediation. Traditional sorting was mediated by institutions with their own interests in cross-cosm contact. Platforms have no such interest. They optimize for engagement, and engagement is maximized by membrane thickening.
Collapsed shared reality. Different cosms now maintain separate factual universes, not just different interpretations of shared facts.
Financialization of attention. Your fear, your outrage, your tribal loyalty—these are revenue streams. There are institutional stakeholders in membrane thickening.
We posit that nostalgia is misguided. There was no golden age of permeable membranes—just different sorting, different mechanisms, different exclusions. Techno-optimism is insufficient; every new communication technology has been captured by sorting dynamics. Techno-pessimism is also insufficient; the mechanisms are contingent, not human nature. They can be changed.
The desire to sort is human. The machinery that sorts us is not. One can't be changed. The other can.
VI.
The work of navigating membranes—code-switching, managing signals, performing fluency—is labor. It requires cognitive load, emotional regulation, energy reserves, and somewhere to decompress. Not everyone has these in equal measure.
Who can't carry the weight: The neurologically divergent, for whom masking is unsustainable. The traumatized, whose bandwidth is consumed by basic regulation. The economically precarious, who lack slack for curated self-presentation. The visibly marked, who are sorted before they speak—race, documentation status, embodied difference determining which membranes they face before agency is possible. The young, whose regulatory architecture is still developing. The old and ill, whose capacity has depleted.
Who won't carry the weight: The principled refusers, for whom performance costs more than social penalty. The burned out, who could once but can't anymore. The exit-oriented, who retreat rather than flatten to fit through the doorway.
The ethic has to hold this. Those with capacity steward; those without are held. Care must sometimes be asymmetrical, non-reciprocal, patient beyond expectation. The soup is made by someone and received by someone else. The weight is carried—but not by everyone, and not alone.
Not everyone can carry the weight of the world. The ethic has to hold that, or it's just another sorting mechanism.
VII.
This model has limits. It may overstate cosm coherence—people are messier than the framework suggests, code-switching constantly, holding contradictions. It may overstate the novelty of the current moment. It may overstate membrane impermeability; cross-cosm relationships persist despite the friction.
It may minimize material conditions—cosms are built by money and force, not just narrative. It may minimize power differentials—some cosms run the bulldozer; others are run over. It may minimize collective agency—movements have forced permeability at scale before.
It ignores institutions that once forced mixing: schools, workplaces, military service, jury duty. Their erosion matters. It ignores the global dimension—cosms don't stop at national borders.
The model is a diagnostic heuristic, not a complete theory. It offers a lens—permeability as the key variable—that clarifies certain dynamics. It's worth knowing what it sees and what it doesn't.
VIII.
If the geometry is wrong, the question is wrong too.
"How do we depolarize the nation?" assumes a single conversation to be had, a gap to bridge on a shared surface. That question may be unanswerable because it misdescribes the situation.
Better question: In a world of hardening cosms, which membranes will you keep permeable—and for whom—without letting yourself be flattened in the process?
This isn't governance. It's stewardship of permeability. The lever isn't alignment; it's interruption—creating pockets where policy logic doesn't fully dictate relational logic.
Care isn't the only lever that has ever existed. Movements have forced permeability at scale. Institutions have been designed to mix. Policy has reshaped terrain. But when those levers are jammed or captured, care is what remains—not because it's sufficient, but because it doesn't require permission.
Care slips through because it doesn't optimize for any of the variables the mechanisms track. It's illegible to the algorithm, unproductive for the outrage economy, non-compliant with the purity test. That's not a strategy. It's an orientation.
The question isn't how to depolarize the nation. It's which doors you're willing to keep open, knowing you can't open them all.
IX.
We are a sorting species. The impulse is constant. The mechanisms are contingent.
The current mechanisms are faster, more scalable, more profitable than what came before. Membranes are thickening. Refuges are shrinking. Some people can navigate this with adaptive flattening—sucking in the gut to fit through doors. Others can't carry the weight. The ethic that emerges is not "resist the sorting" but "tend the permeability you can."
Somewhere, someone is making soup. Someone is extending the invitation again. Someone is holding space for a person who can't carry their own weight right now. Someone is keeping a door open that would be easier to close.
Not because it will change the outcome. Because it's who they're willing to be while the ledger stays unresolved.
We're a sorting species. The question isn't how to stop. It's how to tend the openings that remain—and who we're willing to carry through them.
This essay draws on work by Robert Putnam, Bill Bishop, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Zeynep Tufekci, Charles Taylor, James C. Scott, Pierre Bourdieu, Jane Jacobs, and others who have mapped the forces that sort us. What it adds, if anything, is the particular lens: permeability as the key variable, the sustaining stories we live inside, the enforcement apparatus as bulldozer, care as what slips through.
For the weirdos. You know who you are. ❤️