I'll go with a more innocuous one, simply that our generally increasing quality of life (which may conflict with economic statistics), allows us to separate from others in ways that were previously impossible. Many people can telecommute (i could have done 90% of my work in my internship in Washington from my apartment there), and we have more ways to entertain ourselves and sustain ourselves, despite the fact that in many ways we're more interdependent than ever: for instance in food: a man with an apartment with zero capacity to grow or raise his own food can now order groceries from the grocery store, so he doesn't have to leave his home or interact with anyone to feed himself if he chooses not to
Now this is seperate from any divination of whether this is good or bad, or whether this plays into other political agendas (like, say, if this is an exploitative conspiracy on the part of big business to seperate us so that we are more susceptible), but its true that our increasing independence has weakened the effectiveness of social structures, like grass-roots political movements, for instance
One of the major theories of International Relations, the "Liberal" theory, pretty much runs with this. It theorizes that history moves forward such that increasing individuality on all levels of the international sphere (from the wealthy countries to the poor countries and in between) is going to fundamentally undermine the system of sovereign statehood that has been in place since the Peace of Westphalia. Much like how terrorism now has no boundaries, crime has no boundaries, business has no boundaries, the acts of people are becoming more and more independent of state structures, which have been shown to undermine their effectiveness.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
