The Power of Weak Ties

How "Useless" Interactions Build Values, Identity, and Culture

Two people are having an argument over dinner that neither of them can win. It started with something on the news (a strike, a court decision, a politician saying something stupid on camera, it barely matters which) and twenty minutes later voices are raised, someone has pushed their chair back from the table, and not one fact has changed hands that either party didn't already have before the cutlery came out. Nothing will be different tomorrow because of this argument. The strike will still happen. The court's decision is already made. Nobody at that table has the power to reverse either one, and both of them know it, which is precisely what makes the whole exercise look so pointless from the outside.

And yet by the end of it, something has changed. Not the world — the two people in it. One of them has said out loud, for the first time, a position they'd only ever half-believed until they heard themselves defend it under pressure. The other has discovered, mid-sentence, that the thing they thought they thought turns out to be something slightly different when a person they love is looking at them like they've lost the plot. Neither of them would tell you this argument was useful. Both of them would be wrong.

That's the pattern I want to spend the next few thousand words on: the interactions that get filed under "pointless" precisely because we're grading them on the wrong ledger.

Weak ties, and the ones nobody counts

You've probably heard of Mark Granovetter, even if the name doesn't ring a bell. In 1973 he published a piece of research that's become one of the most quietly influential ideas in sociology: that when people found jobs through personal connections, the connection that mattered most usually wasn't a close friend or family member. It was an acquaintance. Someone from the gym, an old university classmate you bump into twice a year, the person you sat next to at a conference once. Granovetter called these weak ties, and his insight was that your close friends already know what you know — you swim in the same pool of information, gossip, and opportunity. The acquaintance is the one standing in a different pool entirely, and it's because the connection is thin and infrequent that it can carry something genuinely new across the gap. Strong ties confirm. Weak ties connect you to a world you don't already inhabit.

It's a brilliant idea, and it's about information. The distant acquaintance tells you about the job. The barely-known neighbour mentions the school you hadn't considered. The value of the tie is measured entirely in what travels down it.

But there's a second, less famous kind of weak tie, and it isn't about information at all. It's about formation. I mean the low-stakes, structurally trivial, apparently disposable interactions that we, and our institutions, have treated as ‘friction’ to be optimised away: the argument at the table, the small talk at the photocopier, the shared discipline of a school uniform nobody particularly liked wearing. These interactions don't carry data anywhere because their function isn't to connect you to a fact you didn't have. It's to connect you to a version of yourself — or a group, or a set of values — that doesn't exist yet, and can only be built through repeated, unglamorous (seemingly insignificant) contact.

Granovetter's weak ties widen what you know. This second kind widens who you are. And we've been quietly stripping it out of modern life for two generations, on the entirely reasonable-sounding grounds that it looked, on paper, like it wasn't doing anything.

What the news is actually doing to you

Moonyeen and I spoke about this on our morning walk - as you do. And I said something to the effect that 99% of news is useless since the vast majority of it concerns things you cannot act on.  A war on the other side of the planet. A central bank decision made by people who will never hear your opinion on it. A parliamentary vote you already knew the outcome of before it happened. You will not change any of it by knowing about it sooner, and the research on doomscrolling and anxiety is not exactly ambiguous about what marinating in it does to your nervous system. On a pure cost-benefit ledger — information gained versus capacity to act on that information — the daily news cycle is close to worthless. Media-diet advocates have been making this case for a decade and, taken on its own terms, it's hard to argue with.

But she did get me on to a different take - and that is ‘what would people argue about it if not that.’ 

The old ritual around news; the broadcast everyone watched at the same hour, the newspaper on the same table, the version of events you were all, whether you liked it or not, exposed to together; got dismantled with barely a second thought. Nobody (including me) defended appointment television news as a civic institution while it was dying. Why would you? It looked like dead weight: a shared, inefficient, occasionally boring habit, replaced almost overnight by a feed curated specifically for you, showing you more of what you already click on and agree with.

But something got thrown out along with it. The evening news wasn't valuable because of what it told you. It was valuable because it was the same raw material landing on everyone's plate at once, including the people at your own table who saw it completely differently to you — and that forced an argument that clarified something the news itself never could.

Habermas, writing about the birth of the Enlightenment public sphere, traced a version of this back three centuries, to the coffeehouses of London where merchants and pamphleteers argued out loud over the news of the day, not because any single argument settled anything, but because the habit of arguing out loud, in public, over shared material, is how a population that hadn't yet agreed on anything slowly built the muscle of having opinions and defending them. The coffeehouse chatter wasn't the point. The chatter in the town square was the gym where our culture built muscle.

In the 80’s, in the early days of television, Dallas  was the soap opera du jour, and what everybody talked about on Tuesday mornings. That wasn’t us building ‘high culture’, but it was a tiny shared experience that illustrates the point.

You don't build strength from the one heavy lift you remember. You build it from the hundreds of reps and warm-up sets nobody bothers to count. The low-stakes argument that goes nowhere, repeated often enough that your actual convictions, the ones you'll rely on when it counts, get put under just enough resistance to find out if they hold. Skip the reps and you don't arrive at the big lift stronger. You arrive with values you've never actually tested, which is a more dangerous position than having no values at all, because it feels like conviction right up until the first real pressure reveals it wasn't.

There's a version of this that works like a vaccine too, and I don't think that's a coincidence. Immune systems that are never exposed to anything don't stay pure — they stay fragile, and they overreact catastrophically the first time they meet something they should have learned to tolerate years earlier. A dinner table that never argues about the news isn't a family with settled values. It's a family that has never found out whether its values are settled, and the algorithmic feed that shows each of you a different, friction-free version of the world, curated specifically so nothing you see will make you uncomfortable is the single most efficient tolerance-destroying device anyone has built in the history of the species.

As an aside — and I'll admit this one is backed by nothing more rigorous than casual observation, I'd argue that a genuinely alarming amount of adult political polarisation isn't disagreement getting worse. It's disagreement getting rarer: fewer people are exposed to a different view from someone they love and have to actually sit with the discomfort of it. When the algorithm removes the argument, it doesn't remove the difference of opinion. It just removes your only chance to practise disagreeing with someone you can't simply block.

Nobody sat down and decided to abolish the argument that clarifies values. We just noticed the news was mostly useless and threw out the medium it arrived on, without noticing the medium was doing something the content never was.

The uniform's ghost

Move from the dinner table to the school gate, because the same trade gets made there with an even higher price tag, and it's one most parents I know are living through right now.

The old model: uniform, strict dress code, rigid discipline is a relic of the past deserving its bad reputation. It was often applied with genuine cruelty, it flattened real individuality along with the trivial kind, and defending it wholesale would be dishonest. But look at what it was actually doing, underneath the part everyone hated: it took one entire category of adolescent status competition — what you're wearing, whose logo it carries, how much it cost — and switched it off by administrative fiat. Nobody could be poor in a uniform. Nobody could flex in a uniform. Whatever social sorting was going to happen at that school, and plenty was, it wasn't going to happen through clothing, because clothing had been taken off the table entirely.

The overcorrection is one most of us cheered for: no uniform, minimal dress code, more freedom for kids to "express who they are." It sounds, and mostly still sounds, like an unambiguous good. Individuality should be encouraged. Self-expression is healthy. Rigid discipline for its own sake produces compliance, not character. All true. And yet.

Isaiah Berlin drew a distinction in 1958 that fits this almost too neatly: negative liberty, freedom from interference (nobody's stopping you) and positive liberty (the freedom to be the author of your own life) which requires you to already possess a self worth authoring. Take the uniform off a fourteen-year-old and you've handed them a large and immediate dose of negative liberty. Nobody is telling them what to wear anymore. But the thing that freedom presupposes is a formed sense of who you are, secure enough to survive being looked at. And this is exactly what a fourteen-year-old doesn't yet have, and was never going to have simply because the constraint disappeared. You cannot free someone into an identity they haven't built yet. You can only hand them the job of building it, on the clock, in public, under maximum scrutiny, every single school morning, with real social consequences attached to getting it wrong.

So the freedom becomes a burden dressed up as a gift. The kids I hear about from teachers and parents alike aren't obviously more individual than the uniformed generation. They're anxious about brands, exhausted by the daily calculation of how to present, sorted by their peers on exactly the axis the old system had switched off, and this is happening to children who are, by every account I hear from people actually in classrooms, struggling with a more basic sense of who they are than any recent generation on record. You gave them freedom from constraint at precisely the moment they had the least capacity in living memory to use it. 

And the discipline side of the trade hasn't gone any better: teachers report, more or less universally now, that the room has become close to unteachable, because the low-stakes, unglamorous, endlessly repeated friction of small enforced structures — line up, sit down, uniform checked, this is not up for negotiation — wasn't a boring administrative habit either. It was the medium through which a room full of children learned, in tiny repeated doses, that other people's expectations are real and non-negotiable. Remove it, and you haven't removed the lesson's content. You've removed the only place it was ever taught.

The schoolyard proves the same point from the other direction. Almost none of what a child learns about status, fairness, exclusion, apology, and the actual rules of getting along with other humans is taught in the classroom. It's assembled, badly and repeatedly, out on the asphalt during break, in interactions so unstructured and apparently trivial that no curriculum has ever tried to claim credit for them. That's not a gap in the system. That is the system. Formal schooling teaches content. The unstructured weak ties around it — the yard, the corridor, the shared and largely pointless discipline of the uniform — do the actual work of forming a person capable of holding the content once it's taught.

The forty seconds by the kettle

Nobody needs the case against the old commute-in, sit-in-an-open-plan-office model rebuilt from scratch. Two hours a day lost to traffic. Meetings that could have been an email. An entire architecture of presenteeism where being seen at your desk mattered more than what you actually produced. When remote work arrived in 2020 and companies discovered, to their genuine surprise, that output didn't collapse (and even improved), the conclusion looked obvious and the maths looked unanswerable. Cut the commute, cut the real estate, keep the deliverables. What exactly was the office doing that a laptop and a decent internet connection couldn't replicate?

Here's the uncomfortable answer for anyone running the numbers: measuring output and measuring culture are not the same exercise, and only one of them shows up on a dashboard. This is the McNamara fallacy in its native habitat — named for the U.S. defence secretary who ran a war by body count because body count was countable, and simply stopped attending to the things that weren't. He assumed that anything real would have found a way onto the spreadsheet by now. You measure what's measurable. You start treating the measurable thing as if it's the whole picture. And eventually you start behaving as though whatever refused to show up in the numbers was never actually there.

Culture is exactly the kind of thing that refuses to show up in the numbers, right up until the week it's gone and everyone can suddenly feel the chilly winds in the lifeless corridors. Nobody could ever have put a KPI on the forty seconds two people spend waiting for the kettle to boil, in which one of them mentions, almost as an afterthought, that a client's gone quiet in a way that reads as trouble; and the other one, hearing it completely by accident, adjusts how they handle their own account that afternoon. Nobody scheduled that. Nobody could have. It only happens because two people who don't report to each other, who had no reason to be in the same room, ended up standing next to each other for less than a minute with nothing else to do. That's not a meeting. It's closer to a river shaping its own bank — no single pass of water does anything you'd notice, but run enough of it past the same point for long enough and the whole shape of the ground has changed, not because of one dramatic flood, but because of thousands of contacts too small individually to matter.

The smoke break used to do this job and everyone who's worked in an office with smokers in it knows the open secret: the real negotiation happened outside, in the five minutes away from the meeting room, not in the meeting itself. The agenda was the content. The car park was the medium. Take the office away entirely, and you haven't just removed a place people worked from. You've removed the one recurring structure that let norms permeate an organisation without anyone having to hold a meeting about norms — the shared unwritten sense of what's actually urgent here, who you can push back on and how, what "we don't do that" quietly means this month even though it's written nowhere. New hires used to absorb that by osmosis inside their first fortnight, mostly without noticing it was happening. Now it has to be explicitly taught, in a Slack message, by someone who has to first notice it's missing before they can write it down — and plenty of it never gets written down, because nobody realises it needs to be until a decision goes sideways for reasons nobody can quite point to.

This loss isn't unique to the office. It's the modern chapter of a much older story: the front porch, the village square, the corner shop you had no actual reason to visit except that everyone did and spaces that existed for no stated purpose except being in, where culture got transmitted sideways between people who weren't trying to transmit anything. We've been dismantling third places for the better part of a century, one at a time, always for a locally sensible reason, and the office was simply the most recent and most economically defensible one to go.

The medium was never the point

Line the three up and a strange shape underneath them emerges. In every case, something got judged on its content, found wanting, and discarded — and in every case, the medium turned out to be doing a job the content was never asked to do and couldn't have done anyway.

The news is mostly useless as information. It was never the point; the argument it starts is the point, and the argument clarifies values you already half-hold but haven't yet had to defend out loud. The uniform is arbitrary and often oppressive as a piece of clothing policy. It was never really about the clothing; it was suppressing one channel of adolescent status competition and providing, alongside the discipline surrounding it, thousands of tiny repeated doses through which a person learns that structure is real — which is exactly the raw material identity formation needs and currently isn't getting. The water cooler conversation is trivial as content, weather and weekend plans and complaints about the printer. It was never about the content; it was quietly transmitting the culture an organisation already has, sideways, to the people who hadn't absorbed it yet.

The news clarifies values you already hold, half-formed, and forces you to find out what they actually are under pressure. The uniform, and the structure around it, forms an identity that doesn't exist yet, by giving a young person somewhere to stand while the rest of them get built. The office transmits a culture that already exists into people who haven't caught it yet. Clarify, form, transmit. Not the same mechanism wearing three costumes, but three different jobs, all of them done by the same unlikely tool: repeated, low-stakes, apparently pointless contact - weak ties.

Think of it as scaffolding. Nobody photographs the scaffolding on a building site. Nobody puts it in the brochure. It's ugly, it's in the way, and the entire purpose of a construction project is to eventually take it down and reveal the thing it was holding up. But you take it down when the structure can stand on its own, not before, and half of what's gone wrong across all three of these examples is that we tore the scaffolding away and mistook the unfinished building underneath for the finished one. The scaffolding was never the building. Nobody ever claimed it was. It just turns out you can't build the building without it, and you don't find that out until it's already down and something starts to lean.

Or think of it as compost, if you'd rather a slower and less mechanical image. Nobody would eat the compost heap. It's rotting food scraps and dead leaves and it looks, to anyone standing over it, like the very definition of waste. But it's the only reason anything grows in the bed next to it. The seemingly useless matter doesn't get discarded because it converts, slowly and invisibly, into the one thing capable of supporting new life. The dinner-table argument, the uniform nobody liked, the small talk by the kettle — none of it looks like anything while it's happening. It's the soil the actual thing grows in, and soil, by its nature, never announces its own importance.

What this isn't

Not every weak tie is doing good work. Some of them are doing active harm: the gossip network that flows through an office is also a weak-tie structure, and it's frequently how bullying, exclusion, and reputational character assassination move through an organisation faster than any manager can track them. The schoolyard that teaches social norms also teaches cruelty with genuine efficiency; ask anyone who was on the wrong side of it. The uniform that suppressed clothing-based status competition also, in less charitable versions of the same institution, suppressed dissent, individuality worth keeping, and sometimes enforced a much uglier kind of conformity than "nobody can tell who's poor." None of this is a reason to pretend the old systems were secretly fine all along. They weren't. Some of what got removed deserved to go, and we are tempted to say good riddance to it. The problem is that we’re doing so without really understanding exactly how the bullying actually strengthened your character.

We made the changes because of the negatives of appointment-only news and no algorithm at all, a discipline regime run by fear, the two-hour commute, and it turns out a myriad of weak ties resulted in as many negative unintended consequences. But this isn't a black-and-white case for turning the clock back, even if it were better, it is not possible.

What I am arguing against is the assumption that removing friction is free. It isn't. It has a bill, and the bill just happens to arrive somewhere the accounting was never set up to look. If you're going to strip the medium out because the content looked worthless, the right question is to ask what else was riding on it, and to build something to replace that specific function on purpose — not to assume that because you can't see a function, none existed. 

The slow boil

What makes the whole thing hard to catch in real time is that none of this shows up as a single event. It's not a switch you can watch get flipped.

The benefit of a dinner-table argument, a uniform, a kettle conversation, was never going to show up the week it happened. It compounds — slowly, invisibly, over many years — into a person with tested values, a formed identity, an organisation with a shared culture nobody had to write down. Which means the cost of removing it compounds the same way, at the same unhelpful pace. Nobody's values collapse the week the algorithm replaces the shared newscast. 

No fourteen-year-old's sense of self visibly shatters the day the uniform policy changes. No company culture evaporates in the first month of remote work, and every early study said as much, which is exactly why the case for the change looked so solid. You're not looking at a wall falling down. You're looking at water finding its way, slowly and without drama, into a foundation nobody's checked in five years, and by the time the crack is visible from the outside, the actual damage happened long enough ago that almost nobody thinks to connect the two.

And this is precisely why the McNamara fallacy is so dangerous rather than merely a curious cognitive bias: it doesn't just make us blind to what we can't measure. It makes us optimise it away first, systematically, ahead of everything else — because the things that matter most to a person, an institution, or a culture are very often exactly the things that resist being counted, and a system under any kind of pressure will always cut the thing nobody can point to a number for before it cuts the thing that shows up on a chart. Which means the things you'd protect first if you could see them clearly are, perversely, the things that go first precisely because you can't.

So what

So here's the practical version, stripped of the metaphors, for anyone deciding right now whether to cut something that looks like dead weight — a ritual, a habit, a piece of unglamorous structure in your family, your school, your team.

Don't ask only what the thing produces. Ask what it's quietly the medium for, separate from its stated content — because those are two different questions, and only one of them is visible from where most decisions get made. If the answer turns out to be nothing, cut it without a second thought; plenty of friction really is just friction, and I'm not asking you to sanctify every tedious ritual on the grounds that it might secretly be scaffolding. But if you genuinely don't know what it's for, that's not evidence it's for nothing. It's evidence you haven't looked hard enough, and the cost of being wrong here doesn't arrive as a bill next week. It arrives as a slow, compounding one, presented to someone else, much later, who will have no idea why the foundation feels the way it does.

The two people at that dinner table are still there, still not agreeing, plates cleared, the argument technically unresolved and by any sensible measure a complete waste of an evening's peace. 

But, that, my friend, is because we don’t really know what ‘winning’ truly is.