We said nothing, and then they came for us

Just like the old sectarianism, neo-sectarianism hinges on arcane distinctions that mean little to disinterested third parties. Would you kill your neighbour over 'real presence', 'justification by faith', 'indulgences'? Well, now you are being asked to excommunicate your fellow citizens and destroy their livelihoods over terms like 'Mass Formation Psychosis' and 'Natural Immunity'.

In reality, the substance behind these terms matters little. They are tribal markers used to identify which tribe you are from and to advertise your virtue. Part of McCullough's theory of Mass Formation Psychosis is that at times of 'free floating anxiety' these forces can be accentuated and manipulated so that around a third of the population becomes automatons.

So far Spotify has stood its ground, more or less, trying to be ecumenical, but is this possible when adherence to creeds is high and tolerance low. It's also possible that its staff might revolt, like staff at the New York Times did, or at Facebook.

What can we discern of the possible future, with or without a successful Spotify resistance?

First, firms that rely on selling audiences and audience metrics to advertisers are in trouble. Once you start labelling contentious information as misinformation and play handmaid to government, you will unsettle half or more of your audience.

Then you will lose users and content makers all at the same time.

For the first time in history, for example, Facebook's audience has dropped. So has its share price – by 39 per cent from a peak of $379.38 to $232 today – 27 per cent of it in the last month. Twitter's share price has more than halved in the last year. There are conservative alternatives around with aspects of both like Parler, Telegraph, Gab and Gettr. Their audiences are growing strongly.

If you play the sectarian game, this is disastrous in an industry where companies run at a loss, funded by capital raised on promises of becoming wildly profitable once they have scaled-up. What happens if instead of scaling-up the scales are falling off?

Ironically, without your legacy technology, and with the lessons learned from watching you blaze the trail, new upstart rivals can borrow the IP of your platform to more cheaply, and maybe even profitably, copy and surpass you.

Companies will also tend increasingly towards subscription services (Spotify has that going for it with 90 per cent of its revenues coming from subscriptions, but it still makes a huge loss).

Subscription models like Substack will grow as they guarantee you get an audience that is sufficiently interested in your product to pay up and that won't decamp lightly as a result, while you minimise or eliminate the threat of advertiser boycott.

The downside is that we are disintegrating into a world of silos. Denomination used to be a silo, but radio and TV dragged us back together – we might not have worshipped together, but we had public cultural spaces where we still gathered together.