I watched my nephew throw a real tantrum in on the road some years back and his mother walked a step ahead of him and pretended not to notice and the older woman selling bangles from a cardboard box glanced at him and kept sorting her inventory and he lay on the cold floor for what felt like a long time before he got up on his own and brushed himself off and trailed his mother quietly out the door and nobody said a word to him because there was nothing to say.

That is how my grandmother would have handled it, which is to say the answer to a tantrum in any community I grew up around was always the same, which was less of everything. Less attention, less engagement, less willingness to make the noise the centre of the room. The louder the kid screamed, the more invisible the adults made him, until he figured out that being loud did not work and being civil did. The whole village was an engagement algorithm in reverse, where kindness got you in and cruelty got you nothing.

I have been turning this over for a while because the conversation about social media keeps circling around screen time and dopamine and attention spans, and those are real, but they sit on top of a deeper problem, which is that the system we built online has reversed the rules that make any group of people function at all. The platforms did not just ignore the rules of how communities work, they engineered the precise opposite, on purpose, because the opposite is what sells.

In every community I have ever lived in, in Bengal, in Delhi, in Bangalore, in the small Indian towns I have passed through, civility was the price of admission, learned the way you learn to drink water, which is to say through a thousand small rituals you performed without thinking — greeting the stranger you would never see again, asking after someone’s mother even when you had nothing to gain, sharing a meal with the neighbour whose politics you found deplorable — because being part of a room came at a cost and nobody had to teach you the price because the village had already taught you. The kid screaming about being wronged got gently removed and the quiet kid who was kind to his sister got the leftover sweets, which is to say the village was always quietly choosing which behaviour to amplify by the simple act of choosing which behaviour to ignore.

I keep noticing how every successful community I have lived in has quietly agreed that a tantrum deserves less, never more, and the platforms run on the opposite contract. The algorithm does the precise opposite of what the grandmother did, which is to say it puts the loudest person in the centre of the room and hands them a louder microphone the moment they behave worse, and the tantrum wins because the only metric that matters is engagement and engagement is what you get when you wound someone or outrage them or make them feel small, while a grandmother would have quietly led the tantrum-thrower into another room and the algorithm puts them on the stage and turns the volume up.

I have watched this in my own feed. A friend posted a thoughtful reflection about her divorce and it got a dozen likes, and the next day she posted a joke at her ex-husband’s expense and the likes poured in, hundreds of them, and the algorithm noticed and rewarded and the next post was sharper still, the cuts deeper, the wounds bigger, the room smaller. She is no worse than the rest of us and the algorithm has simply taught her what attention comes from and what attention does not come from, and she has dutifully moved toward the light as have most of us, and that is the part I cannot shake, because I have done the same.

In real life this kind of behaviour used to carry a cost. You throw the tantrum anywhere the community is small enough to remember — the office, the family WhatsApp group, the school pickup line — and you become a person nobody wants to be around, because your reputation walks ahead of you and you cannot outrun it. People share stories about you over coffee and by Monday your name means something quietly worse and your invitations get thinner, which is what the word community used to mean in any functional sense, which is that the community is small enough to remember.

I have noticed that online there is no small enough because the tantrum-thrower is anonymous, because they could be three thousand kilometres away and wearing a fake name and a stolen photo, and so the consequence never arrives and the price is zero and there is no pressure to be any better, which is why the worst behaviour calcifies into the default, which is the part the loneliness research keeps pointing at even when the researchers do not quite say it that way. The platforms are full of people and empty of community.

What gets me is that the platforms know this and have known it for years. The engagement team is not stupid. They have read the same research as everyone else and watched the loneliness curves climb in their own usage data, and they have seen what happens to teenagers and to elections and to entire countries when you optimize a feed for the worst version of everyone, and they keep doing it anyway because the alternative is a smaller number on a quarterly report and a smaller number is the only sin these companies have been told to avoid, so what they have built is in many respects a machine of slow erosion, and they know it and do not seem to mind.

We know how to fix it because we have built things like it before, in libraries and newsrooms and the public square, which is to say places whose job is to give more room to the careful voice and less to the careless one, and none of those places ever made as much money as the algorithm does, which is the problem in a single line. The thing that would make us less lonely and less polarized and less cruel to each other is the thing that would make the platforms less rich, and we have decided, quietly, as a civilization, that richer is more important than sane, and the algorithm is happy to keep the spotlight warm for us in the meantime.

I keep thinking about that market and that boy on the floor and the silence of the room, and I keep wondering whether the algorithm that comes for him in ten years will have learned anything from how he was handled in the cold aisle, or whether by then every tantrum will land on a stage and every grandmother will be out of a job. I do not know. I would just like to think he has a chance.

Talk to me on Twitter if any of this lands. I am @troysk704.