The Baseline Sorrow of the Connected Age

A continuation of the previous post.

One of the oldest drafts on this blog that I never published was titled Wall Economy. It dealt, in the beginning (which also shows how old it is), with the lucrative business of international application-aid providers. People who derive immense riches from “University Walls”—information gaps between students and parents seeking access to good, predominantly American, schools, and the schools themselves, which struggle to truly gauge international applicants’ qualities and capabilities.

Whenever there is a wall, efforts to destroy and maintain it inevitably arise, and much of history is about their interaction. Perhaps I have been an unwitting beneficiary of a wall myself—I did watch one get erected about my childhood world, and proceeded to enjoy the luxurious liberty of growing up believing I was outside of it. I thought I had an angle.

Just recently, in January 2025, a wall of such kind appears to be dissolving—or at least becoming more porous. There has been a massive ingress of American and European internet users onto Chinese domestic platforms, where people share their interests and life struggles on a previously unseen scale. It is not just curiosity; it is as though, at least for a moment, the illusion of otherness has shattered. People see others—those they were taught to regard as distant or alien—as individuals like themselves. They share jokes, insecurities, aspirations.

Opinion exchanges resume or cease being unidirectional. Letters from decades ago are answered. People relate.

This phenomenon might have been unthinkable even a few years ago. Cultural silos, linguistic barriers, nuclear-powered propaganda machines, and political anxieties kept the ecosystems apart. But now, enabled by a transient phase of geopolitical serendipity and a growing exhaustion with the internet’s old town squares, millions find themselves in conversations they never expected to have. They see that people across the supposed divide also worry about their careers, feeding their families, and feel a quiet loneliness in the middle of the night (that’s where time differences also help).

And yet, a sense of sorrow remains for me. The baseline sorrow as I have come to call it. Even as people recognise each other’s humanity, the walls do not crumble. The great conversation itself can be weaponised as a structural stress test. Noise versus noise, enabling spontaneous connections, but also illuminating hidden corners wherein each other’s weaknesses and unpredictabilities originate. Calculating underneath warm smiles. We all are.

Sorrow that the people who maintain the systems of distrust and animosity stand. Governments still draw lines, and institutions still fortify their positions. Information flows, but power calcifies. And despite all of the resonance, as countless travellers in countries their homeland would later war might have felt, some day, these people sharing memes and recipes and cat photos with one another may—perhaps do—still kill one another on a battlefield.

This is the sorrow I speak of. That even in an age of unprecedented digital intimacy, the weight of history, ideology, and power coagulates, and the path to a true understanding is evasive. Walls with watchtowers and machine guns.

But does that make the connection meaningless? I am not so sure. Perhaps, one day, the cumulative weight of these interactions will tilt the scales. Perhaps not. Either way, the fact that we even find ourselves at this crossroads suggests something is shifting.

The question is: toward what?