Compression Before Enlightenment
Compression is the number one driver of innovation and change. In our personal lives, in business, in government… you name it. When compression starts to get unbearable and undeniable, something gives; and the change becomes inevitable. Over the course of the last twenty years or so (I might even say from the rise of the Internet), the ceiling between lower class and high class has stopped significantly and it continues to drop, pushing against the people between it and rock bottom. This is compression.
In my last post, I talked about the questions faced by enlightenment thinkers in each of their eras and offered my question for the thinkers of today: What is community?
Today, though, I want to talk about the enlightenment period we are preparing for in and of itself.
We are living in the pressure cooker.
Every historical enlightenment emerged not during prosperity, but during profound discomfort—when existing systems could no longer contain the complexity of human experience. The original Enlightenment didn't emerge because monarchy was working well; it emerged because the contradictions became unbearable. People couldn't unsee what they'd seen, couldn't unknow what they'd learned, couldn't continue pretending the old order made sense.
Our compression looks different, but the mechanics are the same. We have unprecedented access to information while trust in institutions crumbles. We can connect with anyone, anywhere, yet loneliness is epidemic. We've created tremendous wealth while the mechanisms that once distributed it have been systematically dismantled. We have tools for coordination that our grandparents couldn't imagine, yet we struggle to coordinate anything beyond our immediate circles.
The middle class—that post-war buffer zone that promised stability and upward mobility—is being compressed out of existence. Not slowly, not invisibly, but with increasing velocity. And when the space between "making it" and "barely surviving" shrinks to nothing, people stop playing by the old rules because they can't afford to anymore.
This is where things get interesting.
Compression doesn't automatically produce enlightenment. History is full of moments of intense social pressure that resulted in violence, scapegoating, and authoritarian backsliding rather than philosophical breakthrough. The space between the ceiling and the floor can fill with ugliness just as easily as insight.
What transforms compression into enlightenment is what gets thought in the squeeze.
The Enlightenment thinkers didn't just complain about discomfort. They used the pressure to ask fundamentally different questions. Not "how do we restore the old order?" but "what if the old order was never legitimate in the first place?" Not "how do we make monarchy work better?" but "what gives anyone the right to rule over others at all?"
They created new frameworks—democracy, human rights, scientific method, separation of powers. These weren't just policy proposals; they were entirely new ways of thinking about what humans are, what we owe each other, and how we organize collective life.
So what are we thinking in our squeeze?
Most of the discourse I see falls into two camps: nostalgic restoration or techno-optimist acceleration. Either we need to return to some imagined stable past, or we need to innovate our way forward with better apps, better AI, better platforms. Both miss something fundamental.
We don't need better tools for the old frameworks. We need new frameworks entirely.
The question "What is community?" isn't just one question among many—it's the foundational question for our moment. Because what's being compressed out of existence isn't just the middle class economically; it's the entire social infrastructure that once gave "community" meaning. Churches, unions, civic organizations, neighborhood institutions—the places where community happened have been systematically hollowed out or made obsolete.
And here's what's wild: we haven't replaced them with anything coherent. We have digital networks that simulate connection without proximity. We have interest groups that gather around shared preferences but lack any mechanism for navigating difference. We have platforms that extract value from our social interactions while contributing nothing to the social fabric that makes those interactions meaningful.
The enlightenment we're preparing for has to reckon with this.
It has to ask not just "what rights do individuals possess?" (though that matters) but "what obligations do we have to each other?" Not just "how should government be structured?" but "what even is the unit of social organization anymore?" Not just "what can we know?" but "how do we know things together, across difference, without devolving into epistemic chaos?"
These aren't comfortable questions. They don't have obvious answers. And that's precisely the point.
Enlightenment thinking emerges when the old answers stop working and the pressure becomes too great to ignore. We're there. The ceiling is dropping. The contradictions are undeniable. Something is going to give.
The question is whether what emerges will be enlightenment or something darker.
That depends entirely on what we're willing to think, what frameworks we're brave enough to question, and whether we can resist the seductive pull of either nostalgia or naive techno-optimism long enough to build something genuinely new.
The compression is the gift, if we're willing to use it. Not to restore what was, but to imagine what could be.