Last night I was driving home a different route. Usually, I can listen to NPR from one city to another without any problems. The route I was taking didn’t seem to like my choices. NPR wasn’t coming in clearly and the voices were garbled. I changed the channel. The music wasn’t my taste out this far in the country. There was country and even more country. I learned there are different kinds of country- classic, pop-rock, and folk and Christian. There are probably more.

Here’s another thing I learned: The Democratic party is a train-wreck. It’s also a car-wreck. Apparently, it is some kind of tragic accident. If I had stayed in the area long, it might be a plane-wreck. The Tea Party talk show I had tuned in on was the only non-country, non-Christian ministry radio station that came in with any strength. What I heard was downright weird. “Thad, Thad, Thad… listen to me Thad.” The talk show host- whose name I can’t recall- repeated this incessant chant as he railed against the Republican party, listing names of high-profile politicians. Recently, “Establishment Republican” Thad Cochran won his primary in Mississippi and the Tea Party is not happy about it.

But soon enough, the “Thads” became crackly and I changed back to NPR. Other radio stations- pop, hip hop and rock- all returned. I was even able to change the channel and found a nice interview about how America’s revolution was actually a conservative counter-revolution against an increasingly liberal British Empire. I was approaching the city. I had let the conservative Twilight zone.

It is no surprise that a liberal, college town is full of liberal, college radio and that the rural, middle of nowhere is empty, except for the odd, loud voice of an old, angry white man. What is surprising is how clear and fine that line across the interstate is in real life. Try it yourself: drive south on I-10 from Lake City, Florida. Find the most conservative thing you can. As you approach Gainesville, if you change the station for just a few seconds, you will not be able to find it again. You’ve passed the line.

Or, if I may be metaphorical, you have passed through a technological wall and into a different ideological city. We live in an increasingly polarized political environment. The two political parties are more ideologically divided, there is less overlap, they hate and fear each other and, most critically, this is happening in popular ideology. It makes sense for politicians to be more ideologically divided. There is more money than ever thanks to Citizens United that they have to fight over and “Bipartisanship” was sacrificed on the altar of the Affordable Healthcare Act. But! … but why is the average, hardly engaged American becoming more polarized?

There are two primary forces that I have identified, and I call these “Technologies of Ideology”. One is common and you’ve heard it wherever people have discussed political ideology: Confirmation bias. This basic psyche 101 cognitive bias doesn’t stand alone. On the other hand, we have a very different idea that I borrow from Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You. He calls it “The Sleeper Curve” but I would like to call it “The Technologies of Complexity.”

Technologies of Complexity

Johnson’s idea of the Sleeper Curve is straightforward. Pop culture, for various reasons, is getting more complex, more nuanced and more interesting. This increasingly complexity is making people smarter and better able to appreciate the content. Johnson uses this argument to defend a lot of stuff that we disparage. He defends reality TV shows like The Apprentice and Joe Millionaire because they are sort of pseudo-game shows, but have a rich social graph. They make the viewer think. He defends sitcoms, which were once slapstick but, he says, have increasingly become witty and “post-modern” (see: Seinfeld).

Why is pop-culture getting better? One of the forces is technology. First TV had three channels battling it out, but as technology made production cheaper and distribution easier, there was an explosion in content, the way to distribute content, and the ways of viewing that content. Steven Johnson points out how the concept of the rerun, aside from being extremely profitable for the producers, allows a show to be more complex. You can watch it again and again if you miss something. The Betrayal episode of Seinfeld has to be watched more than once to understand, because of its complexity and absurdity. Rewatchability means that least objectionable content theme in media was not necessary anymore.

Johnson was writing in 2006, which was on the precipice of the touchscreen and social media revolutions. His book misses out. Not only did he ignore TV shows of his era like, The Wire, but he could not possibly have also referenced modern, ingenious shows like Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, etc.

What is a technology of complexity? Its any technology that allows the content of a show to have more information per second transmitted at the viewer over the entire existence of a piece of content. For example, reruns let a viewer watch a show again and again. TiVO came along and let shows be recorded at-will, but also let entire segments of the show be rewound. If a viewer missing something, they can just go back. With YouTube leading the way, online media allows a viewer to put a bullseye on the content and information of a show. With social media, the information content of a show gets shouted in an echo chamber of tweets, gifs, and “picture perfect” still frames.

The thing about these technologies of complexity is that they are useful for any kind of television content. Sitcoms, reality TV shows, dramas, or crime shows all benefit from being able to rely on the viewer having the technological means to absorb the tons of information thrown at them.

And so does the news.

The News and Technologies of Complexity

We like to make fun of the cable news networks. Watch the Daily Show and once a week you will see them making fun of the fancy, explosive graphics that the stations are using to compete against one another. Holographic plane? Check. Giant iPads? Check. Holographic people yelling at each other in a room? We are not there… yet.

However, Cable news relies on the very same technologies to retain viewers that the rest of the entertainment industry does to retain their viewers. While they may not rely on the “rewatchable” technologies, they do have an assumption of continuity and community. If you watched The Office, the show assumes you know who the characters are so it will not have to introduce them. If you watch The O’Reilly Factor, the show assumes you know what values and arguments Bill is making so he will not have to completely rebuild the entire argument. Opinion-based news shows, channels, and radio stations are all built on this technology of continuity. They assume you have been listening and watching and that you always have.

Shows also rely on social media as a technology of complexity. Take the Simpsons: each episode has tons of extra allusions and gags that one person simply cannot decode all by themselves. However, decoding is fun, and online you will find Wikias for not just the Simpsons, but tons of other shows. Each of these social media sites is constantly decoding a show for its viewers, allowing the show to add in more information. Likewise, news websites rely on their conservative social media to fill in the gaps. “Oh, you don’t know who this character in the Benghazi scandal is? Paul from Mississippi wrote a comment for you.”

Steven Johnson ended his book fearing that future technologies would get rid of books. He feared that people would not consume long, in-depth arguments made to them in a single book. What he did not seem to count on was that long, in-depth arguments could be made over the course of a week, month, or even a year. The technology of continuity really does allow for complex, meaningful, and intelligent conversation.

Technologies of Biases

The Confirmation Bias is just our irrational human tendency to weed out information that goes against our beliefs. We continue to believe what we believed, even when presented with evidence to the contrary. Indeed, we believe more. Evidence that supports our claims is held onto. It makes us physically feel good to have our beliefs maintained. Hearing “You were right!” is an awesome feeling whether or not the logic we used to get there is valid.

It is not hard to understand how technology has given us an unprecedented filter, and, as I said earlier, others have written about it: We choose the channel and we choose who to follow on Twitter or Facebook. If my old high school buddy posts a disparaging piece about Obama, I can unfriend him. If I post something defending Obama, you can bet your ass he will unfollow me (and many old Republican friends have!) These technologies of bias simply did not exist twenty or thirty years ago. When one of my mom’s friends said something she did not agree with in her tiny town, she was stuck with that person as her friend. They had to moderate one another. Nowadays, I control a stream of political information that is used more to bring me the pleasure of “I was right” than it is used to inform me.

The Ideological Fantasy Land

Imagine the pre-cable and pre-Internet world of political ideology: your opinions were formed based off what you read in the newspaper, which was either a moderate national paper or a local paper. Your opinions formed when you talked to your friends. Your opinions were formed when you watched one of the very few half-hour news shows that gave you quick stories before your simple, single-threaded drama came on. If there was a Democratic “camp” and a Republican “camp”, neither had a very complex universal message and both were very sparse. This was a feudal ideological environment.

Then slowly, but naturally, the ideological environment began changing. Ideologically-inclined media outlets began to weave “narratives” that criss-crossed shows and spanned weeks. These narratives, like castles and battlements, were built up in their opposing camps. They were complex and well-defined. Not only did they exclude the ideological opponents, but they sharpened their ideological swords. Two Republicans could fight, come to a good logical conclusion, and add it to the growing architecture of thought. They could discard what, within their framework, was a bad idea.

At the same time, the proliferation of sources and the ability to tune out expanded. The act of pressing up or down on the clicker was a choice, and that choice meant you could stay in a city or outside of it. When sufficiently doused in the smog of media of your choice, the other city would become unintelligible. The narrative would be too towering- too interconnected- and the walls would be too high.

This ideological fantasy world changed from one where thoughts and ideas were interchangeable between the two parties into one where interaction itself became impossible at both the levels of the elite and those of the popular masses. Like dark matter emitting no light, the complexity of and protective wall of television and social media turns a person’s brain stuff into “red matter” and “blue matter”, between which there can be no interaction. The result is a polarized landscape constantly at war but where any movement in the war is impossible because of the technological innovations that made it so.

No Solutions

As I was leaving the Twilight zone, the words of the right-wing talk show host (whose name I still cannot recall) still rang in my heads, “Thad Thad Thad.” And again, “Thad thad thad thad thad thad thad thad thad.” The man sounded mad to me. He sounded like he was insane, like Darl Bundren from As I Lay Dying. Surely a conservative, perhaps driving in his pick up truck beside me, did not think so. Likewise, if he was still with me down the road, he may have taken the black historian’s remark that the American revolution was not really done until 1861 as an offense. The historian may have sounded pompous, arrogant and annoying. But the conservative in the pick up truck probably was not going to be listening to him at all!

These two sets of technologies- those of complexity and those of bias- have to be acknowledged and understood. They give an explanatory answer that does away with capitalist or conspiratorial reasons. Why is it that a conservative and a liberal can hear the same fact and come to dramatic different conclusions? They’re plugged into two different, but equally dynamic and descriptive, continuties. The problem with modern news isn’t that its shallow. It is too deep, too full of itself, and too self-assured, like a good T.V show drama.

There are no solutions to this political polarization. Stopping Citizens United may moderate the Congress but it would not moderate the American people. The technologies and their effects are driven by the fundamental right to choose and the fundamental desire for more and more information. World War One started 100 years ago today, and while that was not an ideological war, it was a war of attrition. It was a battle where technology made defensive battle easier than offensive battle, just like the two types of media technologies do today. Ultimately, one of America’s ideological camps is going to simply not have enough people, like Germany, or one of them will collapse on themselves, like Russia.

American political polarization is not going anywhere anytime soon.