The public sphere is not breaking down because people have become irrational, polarised, or careless with the truth. It is breaking down because our systems can no longer support coordination at the speed and scale at which information now moves.
We are trying to govern a world of instant, global interpretation using institutions designed for slow, local meaning. That mismatch is the whole problem. Everything else; misinformation, collapsing trust, platform dominance, institutional fragility; is downstream of it.
Platforms did not simply disrupt advertising ... they exposed a deeper fact that we like to pretend isn't true: the old system only worked because [it] was predictable.
For most of modern history, public life relied on meaning moving slowly enough for institutions to keep up. Newspapers, broadcasters, courts, parliaments, and regulatory bodies did not just report events or enforce rules. They stabilised interpretation. They made it possible for large numbers of people to share a roughly common picture of what was happening, to see how others were responding, and to treat public commitments as meaningful. This was neither elegant nor fair, but it worked well enough to hold democratic systems together.
That world no longer exists.
Information now moves faster than collective understanding can form. Interpretation mutates continuously, globally, and without friction. Events are reframed in real time by millions of actors, each embedded in different contexts, incentives, and communities. Under these conditions, institutions built for slow feedback cannot learn fast enough to remain legitimate. They fall behind, then harden, then lose trust.
This is not a crisis of content. It is not even a crisis of platforms in the narrow sense. It is a crisis of coordination.
Coordination works when three conditions reinforce one another. People need a shared picture of what is going on. They need to be able to see what others are doing. And they need commitments that actually matter. Commitments that can be checked, challenged, and revised. When these conditions hold, systems learn faster than they decay. When any one of them fails, systems fall back on control: more rules, more enforcement, more abstraction, less legitimacy.
The public sphere has lost all three at once.
Platforms did not simply disrupt advertising or accelerate outrage. They removed the stabilising friction that once held public meaning in place. In doing so, they exposed a deeper fact that we like to pretend isn't true: the old system only worked because interpretation was predictable. Editorial filters, institutional delays, and bureaucratic layering were not incidental inefficiencies. They were the only governance mechanisms we had and they slowed meaning down enough for collective life to remain coherent.
Once that friction disappeared, coordination became cheap, instantaneous, and unbounded. Meaning began to change faster than any institution could interpret it, let alone respond to it. Under these conditions, control becomes the most expensive strategy available. Rules that cannot keep pace with interpretation do not stabilise behaviour – they turn into noise. Enforcement no longer generates trust – it undermines it.
This is why the standard responses keep failing. We regulate platforms and legitimacy erodes further. We fight misinformation and coherence dissolves anyway. We expand media literacy and trust does not return. We pursue competition policy and attention remains concentrated. These interventions are not wrong, but they operate on the surface. They treat visible symptoms while the underlying coordination failure continues untouched.
The problem is not that people cannot tell truth from falsehood, but that the system can no longer stabilise shared meaning long enough for truth to matter. When interpretation outruns institutional learning, distortion becomes inevitable. The field does not just fragment; it becomes vulnerable to capture by whatever travels fastest and provokes strongest reaction.
This is why exit has replaced argument as the dominant form of feedback. When a newspaper misleads today, readers do not debate. They leave. When a platform skews discourse, users do not deliberate. They route around it. Exit is faster than voice and speed now dominates everything.
The problem here is that exit destroys shared meaning. It fragments the interpretive field into parallel realities that never have to reconcile. In such an environment, attention becomes the last remaining proxy for coherence. What spreads is not what is true or useful, but what travels. Celebrity economics metastasise across politics, science, and culture because they reward the only behaviour the system still reliably recognises.
This creates a trap. The public sphere depends on cooperation to function, but the system now rewards defection.
This creates a trap. The public sphere depends on cooperation to function, but the system now rewards defection. Actors who slow down to preserve meaning lose ground to those who exploit volatility. Institutions respond by tightening rules and narrowing debate, which accelerates exit, which further erodes legitimacy. The system hardens precisely where it needs to learn.
Many of the theories we still rely on simply assume this problem away. They assume that shared meaning forms slowly and synchronously. They assume that publics can deliberate within stable frames. They assume that legitimacy follows from procedure, and that procedure can be updated incrementally. These assumptions no longer hold. The failure is architectural.
You cannot govern what you cannot interpret. You cannot stabilise a public sphere whose meaning you cannot see. You cannot maintain trust through rules alone when the interpretive surface those rules depend on is fragmenting faster than it can be renewed.
States are discovering this the hard way. Platforms are discovering it too. They helped create a world of radical interpretive volatility, and now find themselves unable to control it. Content moderation, algorithmic tuning, and procedural fixes cannot substitute for the loss of shared meaning. They can only manage the damage.
The way out is not stricter enforcement, better messaging, or renewed moral appeals. It requires rebuilding the architecture of coordination itself: restore shared meaning, make collective action visible, and anchor commitments in processes that can adapt at the pace of change.
This does not mean returning to gatekeeping or nostalgia for a slower media age. It means acknowledging that free information without coordination is not liberating. It is destabilising. Democracy was never just a set of values; it was a system that depended on specific informational conditions. Those conditions have changed and pretending otherwise has become the central failure of governance.
We can continue to catalogue misinformation, polarisation, and institutional decline as separate crises. Or we can recognise them for what they are: the predictable outcome of trying to govern a fast, global, interpretive world with institutions built for slow, local meaning.
Coordination is collapsing. Legitimacy is thinning. Order is turning into noise. The choice is not whether information should be free, but whether our systems can learn fast enough to live with it.