alt Hacker News". . . but our social scripts telling people to produce social fabric . . ."
The author of the article may benefit from reading "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam. Although it's now in a class of books on American history, it explores this topic in depth.
afaik, a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric." Of course, the Internet (or technology), by its nature, is actually collating society while keeping many comfortable through its economics, and thus the script is to keep isolated.
I also believe Jim Morrison, the lead of The Doors, made the prediction of technological music collation some 60 years ago.
"a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric.""
Good point - the linked article, and the article it itself links to, essentially, but without realizing it, indicates the American experience of WWII.
The entire country suddenly and powerfully altered to support total war. Every fit man under 40, pretty much, shipped off to be in the military (you can see hints of this in late-war films, where each male actor has a line explaining why they are in an American setting vs being in foreign lands ("I'll be shipping in out in two months, so I have time to solve this murder mystery til then")).
All industry shifted to produce the massive needs of the war, vast swathes of the female populace brought in from being a housewife to become factory workers creating the materiel for combat at a truly astonishing scale.
All of this jarring shock to the entire country creating the novel collective experience of total war that temporarily upended and transformed the society. All this creating that "collective crisis."