[CliffFletcher]

The specifics of this latest outrage flareup are less interesting to me than where social media is taking us. It has radically transformed public discourse in a couple ways:

* Our nervous systems are now connected to tens of millions of other people. No longer do we go through intermediaries like newspapers to understand what people we don't know are saying and feeling - we get it direct, and we get it from vast numbers of people.

* Anxiety over our rapidly changing economic and social landscape has caused people to withdraw into tribes. And we increasingly define ourselves and our tribe by who we're against, rather than shared interests or activities.

So it has come to matter very much to us what hundreds or thousands of strangers think of us, and as a consequence we've become hyper-sensitive to being associated with the Other Tribe. The way we behave, and the language we use ("toxic"), show that we treat people in the Other Tribe as contagious. Like they carry some kind of taint that can be passed on simply by associating with them in any way.

There's a bunch of other stuff going on around sacred values and a desperate longing for the kind of certitude, piety, and conformity that religion used to provide. For a growing number of people, especially in the Brahmin class, the liberal values of tolerance, diversity, and "do what you like so long as it doesn't harm others" have proven an insufficient principle of social organization.

So where does that leave us going forward? How much further can this ferocious partisanship, the policing of speech and association, go before it crystalizes into something inimical to democracy?

Maybe we'll grow thicker skins and become inured to outrage culture. Maybe people will stop panicking when 400 of their 10,000 followers are upset by something. Maybe we'll manage to get our heads around how incredibly large our social networks are today, and that we can't let the angriest and least tolerant 5 per cent of people dictate our behaviour.