The Dancing Plague of 1518 was perhaps the most famous social contagion in history. It occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (then part of the Holy Roman Empire). A woman named Frau Troffea stepped into the street and began to dance fanatically. She couldn’t stop and for days some 400 people had joined her. Dancing until they collapsed from exhaustion or died of heart attacks and strokes. Local authorities, mistakenly believing the afflicted just needed to dance it out, built a wooden stage and hired musicians, fueling a fire already burning.

In the 1630’s, another social contagion known as The Tulip Mania, saw the contract prices for bulbs of the newly introduced tulip reach extraordinarily high levels. At the peak, a single bulb could cost more than a luxurious home. It wasn’t just merchants caught up in this, it swept through all social strata netting everyone–– people selling land and life savings to participate in the market. By 1637, the bubble burst when buyers simply stopped showing up to auctions, leading to a massive social and financial panic. This may have been the first meme stock.

Jump to 1962 and the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic in now Tanzania. This was one of the most surreal and well-documented cases of Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI). On January 30, 1962, at a mission-run boarding school for girls in the village of Kashasha, students began to laugh uncontrollably. In the weeks that followed the MPI spread to 95 of the 159 students, causing the school to shut down because the students could not concentrate on their studies. When the girls were sent home, they carried the behavior to their villages, sparking new outbreaks in 14 other schools and affecting roughly 1,000 people. The victims weren’t exhibiting happiness, and in fact, these symptoms were physically exhausting, inducing fainting, crying, rash outbreaks and respiratory issues, lasting from hours to weeks.

As a technologist and former marine biologist, I’ve spent my career studying the depth and complexity of both digital and ecological systems. I subscribe to Barry Commoner’s four rules of Ecology, his first rule becoming a personal directive of mine: “Everything is connected to everything else. Understanding how these frameworks interact, I find the “TikTok Tics” phenomenon to be one of the most morbidly fascinating examples of social contagions of modern times–– induced by technology. The phenomenon known as “TikTok Tics“ refers to a sudden surge in functional tic-like behaviors (FTLB) that emerged globally during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically between 2020 and 2021. At that time, there had been a surge in young women exhibiting Tourette-like tics during the pandemic. Tourette Syndrome usually begins in childhood and is about four times more common in young males, but this global onset of tics in young women was sudden and explosive with a rapid progression of motor and vocal tics. The vector behind this was created when school closures and forced social isolation, turned teenagers spending unprecedented amounts of time on TikTok. And the vector behind the vector is TikTok’s algorithms. When a person stops to watch a particular clip, the algorithm takes note of that pause, then curates more of the same. So when young teenage girls stopped to watch clips of a real person with Tourette Syndrome, who were innocently describing what their daily life is like, young girls began to create their own clips, with their own bespoke tics, and the algorithms made this collection into yet one more MPI.

Is it possible that our current civil polarization isn’t necessarily a series of unique, intentional conflicts, but rather a mechanical reaction to a kinetic chain? What makes people who are comfortable in their life, surrounded by all the amenities and worry less thoughts, react to a text directing them to a meetup, get on a school bus, gather on a bridge, holding signs they did not make themselves and often can’t define what the meanings of those signs are?

When you see it like that, It’s a lot like throwing a pebble into a pond. Once that pebble hits, the ripples are inevitable. We react to the reaction of the reaction. By the time we reach the outer rings, we’ve forgotten what the “pebble” even was; we’re just bobbing in the chop. That initial splash could be a single event—a piece of legislation, a viral video, a technological shift (like the birth of the algorithm), or a mutation of initiative to boost advertising gone addictive. We just witnessed the outcome of the Meta/Google lawsuit (P.F., et al. (K.G.M.) v. Meta Platforms, Inc., et al.) brought on by the plaintiff K.G.M. — our modern day Frau Troffea.