A Structural History of Dissolution reconstructs the long arc through which human developmental coherence has progressively weakened over the past sixty years. The paper argues that dissolution did not begin with smartphones or social media, but with the introduction of television in the 1960s—the first large‑scale, non‑relational signal environment. Television replaced reciprocal, local meaning structures with one‑way national signals, initiating a slow erosion of the relational mechanisms that had stabilized identity for centuries. Across the 1970s–1990s, mobility, suburbanization, cable segmentation, advertising, early computing, and 24‑hour news further thinned the metabolizable environment. Between 1997 and 2003, the internet became the primary information environment, producing a transitional period in which identity became portable, disembedded, and stretched across incompatible contexts. The decisive rupture occurred between 2007 and 2012, when smartphones and algorithmic feeds individualized the developmental environment entirely. For the first time, no two children grew up inside the same signal ecology. This shift eliminated the conditions under which coherent identity formation had historically been possible. The paper formalizes a structural model of dissolution, showing how changes in signal architecture reshape the developmental manifold and destabilize identity formation. It argues that the rise of anxiety, identity disorders, fragmentation, institutional distrust, and polarization since 2012 are not cultural failures or generational traits, but predictable consequences of a non‑relational, non‑metabolizable signal environment. Generation Z is identified as the first cohort raised entirely inside this dissolved environment, providing empirical confirmation of the model. The paper offers a structurally modest but unifying explanation for contemporary developmental instability and outlines why relational, metabolizable environments cannot be replaced by algorithmic ones without producing systemic incoherence.
Denis Bailey (Wed,) studied this question.