Third Step: Isolate Them
A person without strong bonds stands alone before the system
A divided person is not necessarily a lonely person. They may hate a political opponent and still return home to family, friends, neighbours, a community, an association, a parish, a club or a circle of people who know them without a username and password. Those bonds may be the last defence against total dependence. When a person loses a job, family can help. When authority fails, a community can protect them. When the market fails, there is a neighbour. When the official explanation of the world collapses, there are people with whom one can speak face to face.
That is why something even more important comes after division: isolation. No one necessarily has to order it. There is no need to ban family, religion, friendship or local community. It is enough for them to become weaker, rarer, more distant and more replaceable by digital approximations. A person can live in a city of millions, have a thousand online contacts and still have no one who would open the door for them at two in the morning. Such a person is connected to a network, but not necessarily connected to people.
When contact becomes a signal instead of presence
This is not merely a feeling among older generations who miss the past. In a major 2025 report on social connections, the OECD showed a long-term shift: across 21 European OECD countries, the share of people who met relatives outside their household in person every day fell from 17 percent to 11 percent between 2006 and 2022; for friends, it fell from 21 percent to 12 percent. Over the same period, remote contact through phones, messages and digital channels became more frequent.[1]
This does not mean the telephone destroyed friendship or that every online contact is inferior. The OECD explicitly cautions that the shift from in-person to digital contact does not by itself prove causal harm and that technology can also help people maintain relationships across distance.[2] But the direction matters: more of the relationship moves through infrastructure, less of it takes place without an intermediary. A conversation that once required only two people and a place increasingly requires a device, an account, a platform, a network and a company that sets the rules.
That changes more than the method of communication. An in-person relationship is harder to switch off remotely. It does not require an update to terms of service. It does not disappear because an account has been suspended. It does not rank a conversation according to the probability of engagement. And above all: in a real relationship, you do not see a person only as a political opinion, a profile or one controversial statement. You see a face, tone, embarrassment, doubt, history and all the contradictions that make a person larger than a label.
Loneliness is not a marginal problem
In 2025, the World Health Organization published the report of its Commission on Social Connection, according to which roughly one in six people worldwide reports loneliness. The highest estimated rates are among adolescents and young adults. WHO links social isolation and loneliness to serious physical and mental-health consequences and treats them as a public-health issue, not a private inconvenience.[3]
The OECD reaches a similar conclusion: social connections affect health, education, employment, financial resilience and civic engagement. Most people still have supportive relationships, but a meaningful share of the population does not have enough of them; in European OECD countries, some people report having not even one close friend or person they can rely on.[4]
This matters for our road. A person without a support network is more vulnerable to every shock. If they lose income, there is no reserve circle of people. If they face a problem with a child, health or housing, the first address becomes an institution or a commercial service. If they need company, they buy it through a platform. If they need an answer, they look to an algorithm. If they need a sense of belonging, they can find it in a digital tribe that gives them the same enemy and the same sense of moral certainty every day.
When community weakens, the system does not need to seize its place by force. The empty space invites it in.
First the small things disappear
Social breakdown rarely begins with a great decree. It begins with people not having time. With work being farther from home. With not knowing the neighbour. With driving a child from one organised activity to another while the child almost never remains alone with peers in the courtyard. With family seeing one another less often. With a club, association, community space or local shop disappearing because it is more efficient to order everything through a centralised platform. With Sunday conversation replaced by endless scrolling.
The U.S. Surgeon General has defined social infrastructure very broadly: it includes local spaces, parks, libraries, sports groups, voluntary and religious organisations, associations and other environments in which people actually build relationships. The recommendation was not more digitalisation of relationships but almost the opposite: investment in community, regular relationships, volunteering, belonging and direct human connection.[5]
That is almost an acknowledgement of something we long treated as self-evident. A person does not need only housing, food, internet access and health insurance. A person needs people. Not an audience. Not followers. Not contacts in an address book. People who know them well enough to notice when something is wrong and are willing to do something without a contract, an app or payment.
What if this is precisely one of the most important things the modern system is gradually losing? Not because one command exists saying: “destroy family and community.” It is far more effective if the breakdown occurs as a side effect of thousands of rational decisions: mobility, work, urban planning, markets, screens, individualism, polarisation and convenience. In the end, it does not even matter whether every individual shift was planned by someone. What matters is the result: the person stands increasingly alone against systems that grow increasingly large.
When belonging is replaced by identity
A person who belongs to a real community has many identities at once. They are a son, a mother, a friend, a neighbour, a co-worker, a member of an association, a believer or non-believer, a musician, a gardener, a craftsperson, a volunteer. Political disagreement is only one part of life. Digital society, however, often compresses a person into a few attributes that can be classified and monetised. What they follow. What they buy. What they support. Which camp is theirs. Who they oppose.
When real bonds weaken, this kind of identity becomes more important. A person can lose a friend because of the opinion of someone they have never met. They can break with a relative over a political story that will be forgotten two years later. They can spend more time in conflict with strangers than in conversation with the people with whom they share a life. This is the perfect extension of the previous step: first divide people into camps, then enable them to sever, because of the camp, the very bonds that could keep them together.
And then you get an individual who appears very strong because they owe nothing to anyone. They choose alone. Buy alone. Live alone. Entertain themselves alone. Inform themselves alone. But at the first serious crisis, they discover that “independence” is not the same thing as solitude. An independent person knows how to do something and has people with whom help is mutual. An isolated person has only themselves and service providers.
The system most easily replaces what a person has already lost
If you have no community, a platform offers you one. If you have no friend, it offers a chatbot. If you have no place of belonging, it offers an online tribe. If you have no time for a child, it offers a screen. If you have no local knowledge, it offers an app. If you have no person to advise you, it offers an algorithm. Each of these things can be useful. The problem begins when the substitute stops supplementing a real relationship and starts replacing it.
Here the essence of the third step appears. A person does not have to be physically imprisoned to be separated from others. It is enough for their most important relationships to become rarer, more fragile and more mediated through systems they do not control. Such a person has fewer informal sources of help, fewer places where reality can be checked against other people, and fewer communities able to say: “No, this is where we stop.”
That is why isolation is more than a psychological problem. It is also a question of practical power. Family, neighbourhood, associations, religious communities, friendship networks and the local economy can give a person something centralised infrastructure cannot provide without conditions: a fallback route.
And that is why the next step begins only once that fallback route has been weakened enough. A person who is lonely and divided from others starts searching for a new point of certainty. Someone who will tell them what is true. Who is trustworthy. Which information is permitted. Which source is safe.
Then we reach the next stage: Break Their Trust.
Sources and further reading
- OECD — Social Connections and Loneliness in OECD Countries (2025), chapter on trends. Documents the long-term decline in the share of in-person meetings with family and friends and the rise of remote contacts in 21 European OECD countries Source
- OECD — Social infrastructure and digitalisation as drivers of (dis)connection. Discusses the benefits and risks of digital communication and explicitly cautions that the observed shift from in-person to remote contact does not by itself establish causation Source
- World Health Organization — From loneliness to social connection: charting a path to healthier societies (2025). WHO estimates that roughly one in six people globally reports loneliness and treats social disconnection as an important public-health problem Source
- OECD — Social Connections and Loneliness in OECD Countries, executive summary. Documents links between social connectedness and health, employment, education, financial well-being and civic engagement Source
- U.S. Surgeon General / HHS — Social Connection. Defines social infrastructure broadly, including family, local organisations, sports and religious communities, libraries, parks and volunteering Source