Fragmenting Societies: The Centre Cannot Hold

According to new research from The Future Laboratory, the very infrastructure of collective life – trust, shared reality, civic participation – is being dismantled, often by the same actors positioning themselves as the fix.

‘It began as a story about polarisation,’ says The Future Laboratory co-founder and head of strategic foresight Martin Raymond. ‘But what we’re witnessing now goes deeper than that. The infrastructure of democratic life is being actively dismantled, and the entities doing it are often the same ones proposing to fix it.’

And, as our Fragmenting Societies driver indicates, historic voting patterns back him up. In Spain, the two mainstream parties held 84% of the vote in 2008; by 2019, just 49% (source: Aston University).

‘The infrastructure of democratic life is being actively dismantled, and the entities doing it are often the same ones proposing to fix it.’

France has seen a similar decline. Economist Gary Stevenson calls it the shattering of a 200-year democratic settlement. Gallup, meanwhile, finds political and governance failure now ranks among the most cited problems worldwide – evidence that when people stop trusting institutions, they stop participating in them.

The Future Laboratory identifies eight interlocking forces driving this collapse: Blatant Politics, New Feudalism, Fractured Nationalism, the K-Economy, Culture Wars, Nostalgia Rising, Neighbourhood Journalism and Me vs We Culture.

‘None of these are new individually,’ Raymond points out. ‘But what has changed is the speed of acceleration, and how one is increasingly affecting the other to the point that so-called liberal democracies are becoming the exception rather than the rule – their demise ushered in not by enemies of the state, but by increased number of techno-oligarchs running and ruling it.’

Take New Feudalism: some 93.8% of the world’s internet users access social media platforms monthly, while three companies – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – control over 60% of global cloud infrastructure (sources: DataReportal, Synergy Research Group). Similarly, Elon Musk’s personal wealth now exceeds South Africa’s GDP (source: BusinessTech).

These systems, built to monetise attention rather than serve society, function as what the University of Notre Dame’s Lisa Schirch calls a ‘silent pilot steering human behaviour’ – sorting people into fragmented, self-confirming realities.

Layer economic bifurcation on top and the picture darkens further. The World Inequality Report 2026, for example, found that fewer than 60,000 people held three times the wealth of the poorest half of humanity.

Despite this, as our report suggests, an appetite to correct these inequalities is on the rise: 68% of adults across 17 G20 countries support a wealth tax, according to Ipsos, and New York’s new Pied-à-Terre levy – backed by 93% of residents – shows policy beginning to catch up.

Meanwhile, nostalgia is filling the vacuum where shared narratives used to live. Across 30 countries, people would rather have been born in 1975 than today, by nearly two to one – despite never having lived through it (source: Ipsos). ‘When nostalgia becomes the dominant political currency,’ notes Chris Sanderson, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, ‘the future stops being a shared project and becomes a battleground.’

Perhaps the most quietly devastating force is the erosion of collective belonging itself. Religious affiliation has dropped at least five points across 35 countries since 2010 (source: Pew Research Center).

In the US and Canada, more than half of people now say talking to AI feels easier than talking to a person – even as longitudinal research links social chatbot use to rising loneliness (source: ZipHealth).

‘When nostalgia becomes the dominant political currency, the future stops being a shared project and becomes a battleground.’

For brands, concludes Sanderson, the implication is clear: the stable, aspirational mass-market consumers of the past 50 years have not disappeared – they have fragmented into groups defined more by values than demographics – and if brands can help them better understand these values, and guide them towards a more equitable and democratically balanced path, they have everything to win.

‘But if, like Amazon and the Musks of this world, they do as they are doing – we have a pretty big fight on our hands.’