Certain About Everything, Agreed on Nothing
What three decades of technology did to our capacity for productive disagreement, and what skilled leaders can still do about it.
Note: this is my last Substack for a few months. I’m taking the summer off to brainstorm and begin planning a fall Substack series. New commentary will be out starting in August, 2026.
Long before social media, the media industry discovered that outrage outperforms deliberation. Cable news and the confrontational programming of the 1990s built audiences not on conversation but on conflict, performed loudly and repeatedly. The formula worked across the political spectrum. And when the Internet arrived, it did not invent this dynamic. It inherited it, scaled it, and put it in everyone’s pocket.
What the Internet added was not a new idea but a new scale. It took the outrage model that cable and talk radio had proven out, stripped away the last remaining gatekeepers, and handed the formula to every individual with a connection. In today’s Dispatch, I unpack how that shift perfected zero-sum posturing and slowly eroded our capacity for relational capital, leaving everyone more anxious, more lonely, and less able to find common ground with people who see the world differently.
The big picture
We live in a zero-sum world. The failure of compromise is observable everywhere; policy advocates cannot seek consensus because consensus has become synonymous with betrayal. This public breakdown is paralleled by a deep private crisis. Research confirms soaring rates of anxiety and loneliness, especially among younger adults. These are not coincidental conditions. The loneliness and the polarization are not separate problems. They are the same problem expressed at different scales, and they share a single structural root: the collapse of relational competence.
Negotiation is the deliberate practice of managing constraints and seeking alignment with people whose interests differ from your own. It is not a business skill or a diplomatic technique reserved for formal settings. It is a foundational human competence, the mechanism through which individuals, institutions, and communities resolve conflict without resorting to force or withdrawal.
That competence is eroding. The zero-sum posture that the media industry has normalized now too often governs the relationship between employees and the managers who lead them, and between organizations and the communities around them. Maximalist demands have replaced opening positions. Extreme anchors are no longer strategic bids. They have become sincere expressions of what people believe they deserve. This is not primarily a failure of character. It is a failure of culture, driven by structural forces that most people experience without being able to name.
The Three Shifts that Broke the Bargain
The technology did not install new human tendencies. It allowed existing ones to scale in ways they never could before, in three distinct waves.
The first came in 1993. The early Internet offered direct connection, bypassing the institutions that had set the norms for conflict and debate. Newspapers, civic groups, academic institutions, and professional bodies were imperfect mediating structures, and not always trusted ones, but they enforced shared scripts for acceptable disagreement. When they became optional, accountability and shared social context disappeared, replaced by speed, volume, and the ability to find an audience that always agreed with you. The cost of extreme anchors dropped to nearly zero.
The second shift came in 2007. The smartphone put the Internet in our pocket and made digital confrontation continuous. It replaced face-to-face engagement with compulsive scrolling and reacting, rewarding emotional reactivity, and the instant counter-assertion. The deliberate pause that good negotiation requires, the moment of sitting with another person’s position before responding to it, became not just inconvenient but actively punished by social networks that measure silence as disengagement. Every interaction became a potential public performance, and every concession became visible to an audience trained to read it as weakness.
The third shift came in 2022. Machine learning models personalized the noise. Algorithms now determine what people see, hear, and read, reinforcing existing beliefs and reducing complex realities into oppositional camps. What these three shifts produced together was not simply a coarser public culture. They changed the conditions under which people form beliefs, and by doing so, they changed what people bring to every potential collaboration before the first word is spoken.
The Problem of Digital Certainty
The most consequential product of these three shifts is digital certainty: the manufactured sense of being correct, delivered not through earned authority or shared deliberation, but through algorithmic reinforcement. The algorithm is not confirming your position because it is true. It is confirming it because your confirmation is profitable. The result is not genuine conviction. It is a simulation of certainty, continuously renewed, and optimized for engagement rather than accuracy.
Digital certainty has a behavioral signature that senior leaders will recognize immediately in any consequential conversation. It is the refusal to acknowledge shared constraints. It is the attribution of bad faith to any counterpart who introduces limits. It is the experience of compromise as personal defeat rather than problem-solving. And it is the belief, held with complete sincerity, that any outcome short of total victory represents either incompetence or betrayal on someone’s part.
The deeper problem is that the algorithm does not simply give people information. It substitutes for judgment. When the social environment tells you what to believe and how firmly to hold it, extreme opening positions stop being tactics. They become authentic expressions of what the person believes the situation requires. That distinction matters enormously for how a skilled leader should respond. A tactical extreme anchor can be countered with a counter-tactic. A sincere one requires something different: shared reality must be restored before any positional movement is possible. No negotiation technique resolves that impasse until the parties can first acknowledge they are operating within the same set of constraints.
The Erosion of Relational Capital
Effective negotiation depends on relational capital: the accrued trust, patience, and willingness to confirm understanding that develops between parties over time. Digital certainty undermines it, and Chris Voss’s framework makes clear precisely how.
Voss built his method on tactical empathy: slowing the conversation down, labeling what the other party is feeling, mirroring their language back to them, and confirming their perspective before moving toward resolution. These are not techniques for being agreeable. They are tools for restoring enough shared reality to enable productive movement. They work because they signal to the other party that they have been genuinely heard, which is the precondition for any willingness to move.
The architecture of digital culture makes this extraordinarily difficult to sustain. The pause that tactical empathy requires, the deliberate silence after a label lands, feels dangerous to anyone whose sense of correctness comes from continuous digital certainty rather than internal judgment. Silence produces no confirming feedback. It reads as falling behind. The person who has learned to engage by watching social media cannot sit quietly across a table, because quiet in that context means losing ground in a contest the other party is still running. Voss’s method asks the negotiator to do the thing the digital environment has made most psychologically costly: create space, absorb pressure, and resist the impulse to immediately respond with certainty.
This is why relational capital is so difficult to build and so easy to destroy in the age of social networks and mobile devices. A disagreement where one party treats any concession as defeat, a relationship that hardens into posturing rather than dialogue, a negotiation where the opening offer is entirely disconnected from reality: in each case, the underlying dynamic is the same. The same patterns that dominate social media are now creeping into public hearings, association meetings, and workplace conversations. Digital certainty has replaced shared reality, and no positional progress is possible until someone in the room decides to slow down and restore it.
What the Skilled Leader Can Still Do
The structural forces described above are real and durable. Social networks and digital certainty are not going away anytime soon. But individuals with experience, skill, and developed judgment can consciously narrow the gap between what the technology environment produces and what deliberate practice makes possible. The house still has an advantage. That does not mean the skilled player is without options.
The first requirement is diagnostic. Before choosing a response to an extreme anchor, the effective leader must determine whether they are facing a tactical gambit or a sincere belief. Voss’s calibrated questions are the right tool. “How am I supposed to do that?” and “What would it take to make this work?” do not concede anything. They require the other party to engage with constraints rather than simply restate demands. If the extreme anchor is tactical, that engagement will produce movement. If it is sincere, the response will reveal what shared reality needs to be rebuilt before movement is possible. The diagnostic step is not optional. Applying empathy to a tactical gambit can inadvertently legitimize it. Applying counter-tactics to sincere belief will harden it. The skilled leader distinguishes the two before choosing.
The second requirement is deliberate engagement with human friction. The specific setting matters less than the pattern: working across constituencies with competing interests, navigating ambiguous authority relationships, staying in rooms where agreement is not guaranteed, and exit is tempting. These experiences, accumulated over time, are what develop emotional intelligence and relational capacity. Reading what another person actually needs beneath what they are demanding, managing your own reactions under pressure, restoring trust after it has frayed: none of that is learned in a classroom. It is learned by staying in difficult situations long enough to develop judgment about them. The leader who has built that capacity carries a competency no algorithm can replicate, and no shortcut reliably produces. These skills can be developed anywhere and are honed anytime they are practiced.
These competencies are not the exclusive property of any particular career path. They are available to anyone willing to engage seriously with human complexity, absorb accountability when things go wrong, and resist the easier path of performing certainty rather than building understanding. But senior leaders carry a disproportionate responsibility regardless of background. They set the conditions in which others either develop these skills or abandon them. How a leader behaves in a difficult room matters more than any policy they write or process they design.
The final word
The extreme posturing that digital culture rewards is not a character defect. It is a rational adaptation to an environment that has made maximalism feel safe and restraint feel dangerous. Understanding it structurally is what allows a skilled leader to respond to it effectively rather than simply reacting to it. The leader who can accurately diagnose whether they are facing sincere belief or tactical posturing, choose the appropriate response, and remain patient enough to let the other party move, is not simply demonstrating virtue. They are doing something important for the organizations they lead and the people who depend on them. In an era when digital certainty is the default, that capacity is not a soft skill. It is the core competency that separates leaders who build lasting alignment from those who accumulate positional victories at the cost of relationships. That is true whether the room is a boardroom, a council chamber, an association meeting, or a campus senate.