The collective nervous system is withdrawing from itself

The social exit, the analog renaissance, the micro-community turn, the subculture revival, the return to reading, the flip phone, the vinyl record, the knitting circle — these are not lifestyle trends. They are a nervous system pulling back from its own amplification circuits. The collective spent fifteen years building the most powerful signal-processing infrastructure in human history — social media, algorithmic feeds, attention economies — and is now, measurably and globally, withdrawing from ...