This article critiques traditional social media platforms for promoting fragmentation, polarization, and individualistic "one-to-many" communication structures that the author argues diminish meaningful collective action. The piece contrasts fleeting social media messages with building lasting understanding, describing personal frustrations with Twitter's ephemeral nature and difficulty facilitating coherent group discussions. The author advocates for moving beyond the follower-based model toward what they term "atomic communities" that form around shared interests and thinking rather than personal branding. The article criticizes social media's advertising-based revenue model as creating inherent bias, comparing it to Google founders' 1998 warning about advertising-funded search engines. It contrasts traditional search results with what the author calls "boutique search for understanding" that provides insights and thought connections rather than isolated information fragments, arguing that current platforms waste users' efforts on temporary content rather than building lasting knowledge.