Two narratives on what's fuelling the woke wars

Why can't we seem to have a sane conversation across ideological lines at all any more.

Here’s one stylized narrative about why our public sphere has gone to crap:

We’ve reached a level of economic and social inequality that makes it impossible for regular folks and elites to recognize one another as members of the same imagined community. The rarified world of elite values, institutions, codes, and lifestyles strikes regular people as utterly alien and bizarre. And elites have become so economically detached from regular people that they lack any sort of insight into the way they live, their aspirations, values, and ideals. The woke wars are an epiphenomenon, the surface-level manifestation of a structural decoupling with its roots in rising inequality.

And here’s another one:

The public sphere is a technological artifact, a function of a given state of technological development. The communications technologies of the 20th century —radio, newspapers, television— were all capital intensive, with huge barriers to entry into the debate. Participation in the public sphere was policed by gatekeepers who defined the boundaries of acceptable speech. Elite gatekeeping kept the public sphere functional at the cost of marginalizing views that lots of people held. The internet, by breaking the monopoly of elite gatekeepers over public opinion, fractured and toxified the public sphere. In a fragmented public sphere, different groups start status-seeking in new ways as separate resonance chamber dynamics take hold. The woke wars are the result of people seeking status in a fragmented public sphere, with progressives competing for status by demonstrating ever higher levels of commitment to social justice ideology while conservatives compete for status by demonstrating ever higher levels of dissent from social justice ideology.

I vacillate between these two accounts on an almost hourly basis. The first one is materialist, the second one is technological-determinist, and my intuition is that a really satisfying account of the forces fuelling the woke wars would amount to a synthesis of the two. Which seems hard to do. But worth trying.