The Secret Life of Polarization

by Jan Wellmann | Aug 25, 2025

A few researchers in Amsterdam ran a trial. They built a bare-bones social network–no ads, no recommendation engine, no algorithm in the shadows. Just three buttons: post, follow, share. Then they unleashed five hundred AI bots, each with a made-up personality, and let them wander.

What happened was unpredictably human. The bots fractured into cliques. They amplified one another’s extremes. And then, almost without pause, they submitted themselves to a small elite–an accidental aristocracy of influencers who ruled the conversation. No one wrote code for hierarchy. It bloomed on its own.

We should ask ourselves a question. Is what the bots did simply what matter and life have always done? Maybe there is no grand conspiracy. Maybe it’s not a puppet master pulling strings, but the natural wave we spin as a collective.

Physics exhibit the pattern. Take iron. Heat it and every atom jitters in drunken disarray–random, leaderless, decentralized. Cool it just a little and suddenly they snap into step, arrows aligned. The block becomes a magnet. Out of noise, a single direction emerges.

Biology does the same. A fertilized egg starts as a blank sphere. Then a small asymmetry tips the balance: this end becomes head, that end becomes tail. Cells fall in line, building a body through feedback alone. There’s no foreman, no blueprint, only a cascade of neighbors copying neighbors until structure hardens.

Brains follow suit. Billions of neurons fire in chaotic scatter. Then one cluster of signals overtakes the rest and a thought surfaces: a memory, an image, a decision. Centralized order born out of electric storm.

Bacteria aren’t immune. Drop them in sugar water and at first they scatter like marbles. But one twitches longer toward the sweet patch, another copies, and soon the swarm flows as one. They’ve crowned a leader without ever holding a vote.

And of course, human crowds. Soccer hooligans. A few chants rise in a square. Others join. The sound thickens, amplifies, and suddenly the mass roars in unison. Consensus born from feedback, not planning.

The cycle is everywhere:

1. Noise–random scatter, no center.

2. Amplification–small quirks get louder.

3. Polarization–clusters form, lines are drawn.

4. Domination–a small elite takes over.

5. Collapse/Reset–entropy creeps in, shocks or decay loosen the order, and the wheel begins again.

Centralization when ties are strong and noise is low. Decentralization when ties weaken and chaos rises. The cycle is a law, not a theory.

The AI World Order

Now zoom out. Billions of us are wired into the same feeds, amplified by AI that loops at light speed. The outcome is predictable: centralization at planetary scale. A few corporations pull money, speech, and attention into orbit. Governments want in too. What if it isn’t conspiracy–but physics?

What if we are reaching peak density in centralization–the total freeze on sovereignty? Then the countering forces must be equally formidable in terms of collapse and reset, by law.

Heat melts magnets, fire clears overgrowth, catalysts shift reactions, stray signals break a brain out of its loop. And in society, the reset comes from a handful of people who have thoroughly pondered this formidable dilemma. How close we’re willing to stand to that edge, or how long we’ll keep convincing ourselves the center is safer.