Wealth & Money Quote by Mary Douglas

“More and more isolates” lands like a diagnosis, not a lament. Mary Douglas isn’t describing loneliness as a personal failing; she’s pinning it to a system that quietly reorganizes how people relate. The word “infrastructure” does heavy lifting here. It implies that isolation isn’t just a cultural mood or a psychological trend but something built into the material architecture of advanced capitalism: the way work is structured, how services are delivered, how time is sliced, how attention is monetized.

Douglas’s sharper move is naming “electronic communications” as a driver, not a remedy. That’s prescient. She’s not making the simple claim that technology makes us antisocial; she’s arguing that it makes sociality more legible to markets and therefore more easily rerouted. Electronic communication can substitute for embodied interdependence: you can bank, shop, flirt, complain, and be entertained without needing a shared public world. The social bond becomes optional, transactional, and often privatized.

The subtext is classic Douglas: categories shape behavior. When a society’s dominant institutions reward mobility, individual choice, and frictionless exchange, “community” starts to look like inefficiency. Electronic communication then isn’t neutral “connection”; it’s the tool that scales this logic, letting capitalism extract value from micro-interactions while reducing the need for thick, local obligations.

Context matters: Douglas, an anthropologist famous for how societies police boundaries and purity, is warning that modernity doesn’t just dissolve old rituals; it replaces them with new, thinner forms of coordination. The result is a population that can be constantly “in touch” and still structurally alone.