How to stop doomscrolling — and what to do instead? (w/ Katherine Cross)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "How to stop doomscrolling — and what to do instead?"

Podcast: How to Be a Better Human
Host: Chris Duffy (TED)
Guest: Katherine Alejandra Cross (Ph.D. candidate, tech critic, author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics Almost Never Mix)
Air Date: September 8, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the deep entanglement between our social media habits, political engagement, and mental well-being. Host Chris Duffy and guest Katherine Cross grapple with how online platforms both hinder and occasionally help efforts at building a healthier self, community, and society. The conversation centers on the illusions of political action via posting, the nature of harassment online, and concrete alternatives for meaningful engagement—both on and offline.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Social Media Feels So Hopeless — But Might Still Offer Hope

[00:02–06:45]

• Chris opens with his struggles in reconciling personal values ("being a better human") with online behavior and civic engagement.
• Katherine explains her journey from “techno-optimist” (inspired by online communities and protest movements) to recognizing social media's role in proliferating harassment and cynicism, especially after 2020’s events (e.g., Gamergate, COVID-19, and BLM).
• She cautions against assuming social media will solve our problems for us.

“It’s not that I’ve lost faith in information technology or the Internet. It’s just that the idea that social media is going to do the hard work for us... We have to dispense with those ideas.”
—Katherine Cross, [06:45]

2. Social Media as a False Substitute for Real Political and Community Engagement

[08:22–12:41]

• Social media often tricks users into thinking they are engaged in meaningful collective action.
• Metrics (likes, shares) are not votes, and “politics” is much broader—a daily negotiation about power and resources.
• The nature of social media renders people “completely monadic, individuals pretending that we are part of the collective.”
• Katherine draws on philosopher Hannah Arendt to distinguish true politics (negotiation, compromise, long-term effort) from the illusion of online activism.

“You are always together, alone, in social media.”
—Katherine Cross, [12:41]

3. How Social Media Increases Cynicism and Undermines Sincerity

[15:08–18:40]

• Social media privileges mocking, dunking, and ironic detachment over sincere collective action or celebration of real (if slow) political victories.
• Quiet successes are ignored while failures or faux pas receive disproportionate attention.
• Katherine critiques the attitude that sincere participation in democracy is “cringe.”

“It is easier to destroy than it is to build... to build something much more constructive takes time and effort, and it’s rare that it happens.”
—Katherine Cross, [17:18]

4. Anatomy of Online Harassment and "Third Order" Attacks

[22:03–29:32]

• Katherine presents her three orders of online harassment:
  • First order: Physical threats or harm (e.g., letters, threats to family).
  • Second order: Direct online abuse or trolling.
  • Third order: Indirect but pervasive discourse that legitimizes targeting someone (public debates “about” rather than “at” someone).
• Discusses case studies where innocuous actions (like offering food to neighbors) explode into national internet discourse and real harm for private individuals.
• Even defending or neutrally discussing the target can fuel the fire (“agnostic to intent”).

“Even if you try to defend the target… you are putting fuel on the fire. It is just all completely agnostic to intent.”
—Katherine Cross, [25:48]

5. The Role of Affordances: How Platform Design Shapes Behavior

[29:32–33:12]

• An “affordance” is a feature that suggests how to use something (e.g., a push bar on a door).
• Social media platforms are designed to maximize engagement in ways that encourage specific (often negative or performative) behaviors.
• Structures, not just individual morality, drive much harmful behavior online.

“You’re never going to get very far just telling people to change individual behavior. The real change… comes from changing the structure because it incentivizes and disincentivizes certain types of behavior.”
—Katherine Cross, [31:35]

6. Would We Be Better Off Without Social Media? What About Marginalized Communities?

[33:12–36:17]

• Katherine—if hypothetically possible—believes society would be better off without social media in its current form, but recognizes practical and ethical challenges.
• Advises using social media as more of a “phone book” or index to find people, then build deeper connections elsewhere (private chat groups, etc.).
• Cautions that social media “is not a community; it will eat you alive if something goes wrong.”

7. Is Building a ‘Better’ Platform the Solution?

[37:12–38:27]

• Platform tweaks (like adding friction to sharing) can help, but problems are foundational: “We just are not built to deal with staring into this vortex of millions of people’s ids screaming at you.”

8. What to Do Instead: Authentic Engagement and Clear Goals

[38:27–41:36]

• Don’t equate posting with action. Use social media deliberately, with specific, achievable goals (e.g., fundraising where it’s effective, organizing, etc.).
• Ask: What am I doing? What am I trying to achieve? Is social media the best tool for this, or just a default?

“As long as you have a clear goal in mind and social media is objectively capable of helping you achieve that goal, then maybe you can do something political there. But it’s not just... raising awareness.”
—Katherine Cross, [41:09]

9. The Value of Vulnerability, Long Form, and Admitting ‘I Don’t Know’

[41:36–44:11]

• Chris finds deeper engagement (longform conversation, nuanced writing) more productive than short posts.
• Social media punishes vulnerability and indecision, yet these are vital to real-world community building.
• Nuance is not moral ambiguity; the hard work post-outrage is actually changing things.

“What’s never straightforward in politics is what do you do next?... That is complicated and difficult work.”
—Katherine Cross, [44:13]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On illusions of meaningful action online:
  “What results is a public square where real people can get hurt, but nothing ever changes.”
  —Chris Duffy quoting Katherine Cross’s book, [12:05]

• On moving beyond performative posting:
  “The idea that social media has to be the only domain where you socialize has never been true... use social media as an index or as a phone book rather than as the place you treat as a community center.”
  —Katherine Cross, [34:20]

• On the risks of online vulnerability:
  “[Social media is] such a nasty place. Showing vulnerability is a very difficult thing to do on these platforms without taking an enormous risk.”
  —Katherine Cross, [42:52]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Topic | |--------------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:02–01:00 | Chris’s introduction: social media as a challenge for “better human” aspirations | | 01:02–03:55 | Katherine Cross’s techno-optimist past and the turning points | | 06:02–06:45 | Katherine’s academic background and faith in possibility of change| | 08:22–10:24 | Distinguishing social media “action” from true politics | | 12:05–12:41 | Reading from Log Off on social media as “anti-political” | | 15:08–18:40 | How social media drives cynicism and undermines sincerity | | 22:03–24:18 | Three “orders” of online harassment explained | | 25:48–29:32 | Case studies in viral controversy and the danger of third-order harassment | | 29:32–33:12 | Affordances: how platforms encourage certain behaviors | | 33:27–36:17 | Should social media exist? The case for marginalized users | | 37:12–38:27 | Can better platforms fix it? Platform design limits | | 38:27–41:36 | Better alternatives to posting: goal-oriented, authentic engagement| | 41:36–44:11 | The importance of nuance, longform, and community offline/online | | 44:13–45:05 | Collective responsibility and real political change |

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Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

• Recognize what social media does—and does not—provide: It offers connection but is a poor substitute for deep community or political engagement.
• Be intentional: If using social media for activism, have a clear, actionable goal—and know how the platform can concretely contribute.
• Beware of performative posting: “Raising awareness” without delusion of impact risks wasting time and emotional energy.
• Prioritize vulnerability, sincerity, and nuance—especially offline: Real change is built through relationships and long-term, sometimes thankless, organizing.
• Shift from platform to process: Use social media as an index/finder, not an end in itself. Build relationships and communities in spaces less prone to virality and outrage.
• Understand the structures at play: Most harmful behaviors are encouraged—or at least enabled—by design, not just individual choices.
• Take collective, offline or longform action: Whether through organizing, in-depth discussion, or monetary support, these actions matter more than clicks and shares.

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This episode is essential listening for anyone struggling with the tension between staying informed, being “a good person” online, and actually helping to build a better world. Katherine Cross’s perspective is nuanced, practical, and keenly aware of both the power and the dangers of living digitally.

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Transcript

[A]

You're listening to how to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today on the show, we're going to try and unpack something that I've been personally struggling with for a while now. What does it mean to try to be a better human on social media? Is it even possible? Because so many of the lessons that I've learned from guests on this show feel especially challenging to put into place online. How do you treat other people with respect? How do you set boundaries? How do you take care of yourself? How do you attempt to improve the world we live in while you're on these platforms that have been such a big part of our daily lives for a long time, I would have told you that I just genuinely have no clue how to do that. And I also would have struggled to articulate a reason about why it is so difficult. But then I read a book by today's guest, Kathryn Cross. It's called Log why Posting and Politics Almost Never Mix and Log off is a thoughtful, nuanced and provocative argument that we are going to talk to Katherine about today. Here's a clip.

[B]

So for many years I've been something of a techno optimist. Like, I got into researching technology because I was overwhelmed with the sense of possibility of identity reinvention and possibility that emerged from places like online role playing games, for instance, which is how I discovered a lot about myself. And so I had this overriding sense that there was a lot about these emergent technologies that could be used for good, and I wanted to pursue that. And then by 2013, 2014, we began to see these long simmering harassment campaigns that had been directed against women and people of color in the gaming space explode from seasonal storms into just an on running radioactive event in the form of Gamergate, which seemed to presage something very dark that was moving slowly but surely to the center of our politics and civic life. But I tried to maintain faith, looking particularly at the protest movements that also were proliferating around the world in the last decade. All over the planet there seemed to be these leaderless horizontalist protests that emerged almost sui generis from the Internet, from the will of the people manifesting without leaders or traditional hierarchies and all of that, and toppling longstanding established regimes. And so I was trying to place my hopes in that. And then 2020 happened where there was at last the social media called to one last great charge on behalf of civil society. On the one hand helping the public understand the threat posed by COVID 19. And on the other, the the 2020 George Floyd protests being the new sort of apotheosis of Black Lives Matter. And in the aftermath of 2020, the sense I was left with was that these initiatives had very largely failed for a lot of reasons. And having been extremely online during that period, as many people who had the luxury of being able to work from home were extremely online more than ever, I realized that there were a lot of patterns that I had been lying to myself about over the last several years, the last decade, about how bad things were getting, why they were getting so bad. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that it wasn't just me being extremely online, but millions and millions of people, particularly in positions of power and influence, being extremely online. And I began to realize that this was not the solution to our problems, but quite possibly the cause of them.

[A]

We're going to be right back with more from Katherine and her book. Log off in just a moment, but first a few ads, so please stay logged into this show.

[C]

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[A]

Today on the show we are talking with Katherine Cross about the complicated, messy world of being a human online.

[B]

Hi, I'm Katherine Alejandra Cross, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, researching online harassment for my sins, and a widely published tech critic and assistant editor at Liberal Currents, also author of Log Off.

[A]

There's so many things that I loved about the book Log Off. I think you are very clearly not a cynical pessimist. You very clearly believe in the possibility of positive change. And I think that that is not often paired the idea that social media is a problem and yet there are ways that we could make things better. But I also see that you responded in a way of like, I don't know if I actually do believe in change.

[B]

No, no, I actually, I really genuinely do. It's like I say at the end of the book, like, it's not that I've lost faith in information technology or the Internet. It's just that the idea that social media is going to do the hard work for us, is going to organize us automatically in predictable and enduring ways that will lead not only to change, but also take all of the difficult work, the busy work, guesswork out of organizing around what comes after a big change event. We have to dispense with those ideas. For instance, a scholar at my university, Katie Pierce, did research on Azerbaijan and its civil society in the early 2010s, at the apex of optimism about the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall street and the fair protests that were burgeoning throughout South America in Chile and Brazil. But she was pointing out that in Azerbaijan on authoritarians were already rather expertly manipulating social media memes and exposing people on the Internet, harassing investigative journalists. And it was a clear warning sign that this idea that authoritarians were always going to be sort of these old fuddy duddies who didn't know which way was up on a smartphone was not going to hold for very long and the dam was already breaking. But that's not pessimism, that's recognizing what has gone wrong and that is the first step towards building something new again.

[A]

I'm curious if you would agree, but to me I read Logoff as in one part an argument against social media and in another quite large part an argument for the day to day hard work of politics and of community building.

[B]

You know, I love Social media, I think it, you know, it's hilarious, it can be very fun and funny, but what it's not is a substitute for the hard work of politics, and it never can be. But we've often treated it that way, where we see social media metrics as equivalent to votes or even to polling data and things like that. And that has, I think, led us woefully astray. Led us all woefully astray. You know, I, at the end of the book, sort of tease a bit about my own dissertation inciting Hannah Arendt and her own work on what politics really means. She's often misunderstood and not easy to claim by either the right or the left, and much criticized by both sides of the political spectrum, partially because of the way that she conceives of politics as this continuum of the individual and the collective and argues that you can't dispense with either. What social media does is render us completely monadic, individuals pretending that we are part of the collective. And so long as you and a thousand other people are staring at the same Rorschach inkblot and seeing your private desires being met, you can act as a mass. But the moment that illusion dissipates, and it always does, the whole thing falls apart, and then there's nothing holding you together, not even ideology. Why is there, after all, so much leftist infighting on social media, which is not a new phenomenon, of course, but wildly and dramatically accelerated, thanks to social media, to ever more destructive potential? So that's where I'm coming at with all of this.

[A]

What is the simple, quick definition of politics when we talk about it?

[B]

Politics is the debate that you and I have about power and resources in our society. And so that takes on any number of forms. You think about how much falls under the heading of power and resources. It's pretty much everything, right? And it's therefore the air we breathe. The discussions that we have about, you know, whether a park should be built in our neighborhood are political. The discussions about how often does the recycling get picked up are political. The discussions about, you know, whether you get to have pets in an apartment building are political. But that also scales up to all of the issues that affect your life and mine in very profound ways. People get together in that way to ban books about LGBT people from their local library, for instance, but they also band together to defend those books or come together on behalf of a, say, child is being bullied at school for being different. Politics is social. At the end of the day, politics is always bigger than one person. That is a huge part of politics. And so in order to achieve that, you can't just stand up and be your own little petty potentate on a street corner. You have to negotiate and network with other people, your neighbors, members of your community. That is the work. It's always social work.

[A]

People sometimes talk about tech and everything as political. You say that social media may be anti political. I'm just going to quote from the book here. How could that be? Because it demobilizes and scatters the polity. It makes it harder to come together, deliberate and effect change in our communities. Worse, social media tricks us into thinking that that's exactly what we're doing. What results is a public square where real people can get hurt, but nothing ever changes. You talk later in the book about how social media is a place where you can make hate speech and harass someone, but you can't come together to build a community center.

[B]

That's really what I mean when I say that it's anti political. And I use that provocative term very deliberately. It comes from my work with Hannah Arendt and thinking about what she means by politics and then saying that sort of social media is very antithet. Critical to that. Everything that I described earlier. Social media is a space that tricks you into thinking that you are engaged in collective action. You are always together, alone in social media. This idea of modernity making people feel alone in a crowd, it's not new. It's a part and parcel of philosophy and sociology and psychology as it has been discussed since the turn of the last century. Century people turn to social media as a quick and easy substitute for what used to happen through congregations and community organizations and activist groups and volunteer community groups and so on. You've seen a decline in civil society organizations, or perhaps you are the only queer person in your town. And a place like Blue sky is the only place where you can talk to other queer and trans people on the regular and feel like you're a part of this larger community. And it's not that people are stupid necessarily. It's that they feel like they have no alternative. But then, because they feel like they have no alternative and they become more dependent on a space like this, they have to sort of retroactively justify why they're investing so much energy into it. And it can't just be that I feel alone or lonely. It has to be I'm helping to save the world by doing what I'm doing. And that can lead to the more extreme manifestations of bad social media behavior. In certain instances where people imbue their actions online with this righteous fury, it has to be that I'm saving the world, I'm defending the whole of this marginalized group, or I'm defending democracy or opposing a tyrant. And that is there are only so many hours in a day, there are only so many things that you can do, only so much energy you have. And at some point it does become a zero sum game where you investing time into all of that is time you're not spending doing more meaningful, real political work.

[A]

So can we talk more about that for a second? The ways in which it has pushed us away from sincerity, caring and drawn us towards a contempt for this kind of political day to day work.

[B]

Now, I want to be very clear about this and say that yes, there are very good reasons that people have become more cynical about politics over the last 40 years. There have been a lot of very real broken promises. Liberal democracy having been battered and in some cases stripped for parts on all sides, has led to in some ways a failure to deliver on certain critical promises. But the flip side to that is that efforts to fight back, efforts to use the levers of politics to make real change have sometimes flown under the radar on left of center social media, where if a politician, say, from the Democratic Party makes a silly statement or appears to throw a minority group under the bus or throws their hands up and says, well, we can't do anything about X, that gets a lot of attention, that drives a narrative that gets a lot of rage clicks. But when there are quiet successes, then sudden and very meaningful ones, they remain quiet because they don't catch fire on social media, because they don't fit into the narrative of ironic detachment that allows people to make this really funny dunking post on kind of Dick Durbin or Chuck Schumer type figure. The Biden administration, for all of its sins, stopped the, you know, drone war in Yemen, at least before October 7, 2023. And so, you know, there was no credit given for any of that, nor any attempt made online to sort of build on successes, the rare successes that we could get out of government. And it reinforced this sense of cynicism. It made it seem, as I said, cringe to ever suggest that democracy was an unalloyed good, that liberal democracy was this cool thing worth defending. And I see some revisionist history percolating across social media about the first Trump administration where people were trying to argue that, oh, no one protested that liberals didn't protest. All they did was make those stupid pink pussy hats and I'm just like, how can you remember the hats and not remember the protest that they were famously associated with? It is easier to destroy than it is to build. And that's part of the reason in that it seems like the bad guys have more immediate successes than people trying to actually change the world for the better. But to build something much more constructive takes time and effort, and it's rare that it happens. One of the few examples of it is something like crowdfunding, but even that is very transient and itself a kind of rearguard action. The most popular type of go fund me is a medical fundraiser. And, you know, what does that say about our larger society? For instance, that's not social media solving a problem. It's, you know, maybe at best a tourniquet aspect of our society that's bleeding out.

[A]

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[A]

And we are back. Today we're talking with Kathryn Alejandra Cross, a researcher on online harassment and the author of the book Log off why Posting and Politics Almost Never Mix. You've talked also about how in your academic research you say that you tried to give analytic rigor to the idea of a harassment campaign and that in some ways social media is uniquely well designed to harass individuals because it's they have three qualities, these harassment campaigns. What they are able to do is to have these you call them third order harassment. So maybe you can just talk about the three orders of harassment and how social media is so well situated to make that happen to an individual.

[B]

You have first order harassment, which is very extreme harassment that bleeds over into the physical world. So say dead animals in one's letterbox or people threatening your parents, say, or showing up at your child's school or sending in a bomb threat to where you work. Second order harassment is what most people think of as online harassment. People saying mean things to one another, directly to the target on social media. And third order harassment is sort of my innovation here where I argue that it's sort of this, this indirect but widespread layer of discourse about the targets of harassment that doesn't necessarily target them directly, but provides the moral substrate for the harassment, the permission structure, the discourse that says it's okay to go after this target, even if I don't personally do it. I'm having the discussions in public that help reinforce the idea of that this harassment target is a legitimate target. You can think of first order harassment as things done to the target, second order harassment as things said to the target, and third order harassment, things said about the target. And that helps to create a sort of base layer that justifies and allows itself to be built on to these ever escalating layers of harassment and abuse.

[A]

And these situations, they arise so often online that there are in some ways it's hard to pick an example. One example that you talk about in the book is a woman who, she put something on into social media about how she has some college aged boys who live next door and they've been very quiet. And so she likes them as neighbors. She thinks that they're very sweet neighbors, but she also notices that they've ordered in pizza five nights in a row. And so she writes something along the lines of like, I kind of feel very, you know, caring towards these people. Maybe I'm going to cook them a big pot of chili and bring it over. And somehow that pretty innocuous message then becomes blown up online with people saying that this is the embodies all the problems of sexism and patriarchy, that this embodies the problems of, you know, white privilege. This is all these different pieces get, start getting blown up online. And so there's direct attacks, but then there's also this next level which is people, people discussing like, is it actually okay? Is it not okay? What does it mean? What responsibilities do you have towards your neighbors? And I think something that I had never thought about before, that you make the point with this third order harassment is that even when people are not directly criticizing this woman, just by discussing the idea of like, what does it mean to be a good neighbor, they're circling the energy around her so that she is more and more and more in the field of discussion, which causes all this negative attention and hatred to come her way.

[B]

In my brief gloss on third order harassment, I focused on people sort of justifying the abuse in a very direct way to one another that they could then bring to the target. But another critical point I make, and one that's morally difficult for me, never mind for other people, is recognizing that even if you try to take defend the target or you try to have some sort of neutral discussion about the issues raised by the harassment campaign, you are putting fuel on the fire that it is just all completely agnostic to intent. In that particular incident with the Chile woman, there was even like a Washington Post lifestyle piece about the ethics of making food for your neighbors. And I say something in the book along the lines of just imagine how awful it must be to have this offhanded thing that you did out of kindness suddenly be debated in the pages of one of the nation's largest newspapers. Another example that I can point to was from a couple of years ago, this major TikTok blow up. It was this innocuous video of a bunch of young college age men sitting on a couch like watching a movie or something. And then one of their girlfriends comes in by surprise. She'd been away on a trip or something and came back early unexpectedly. And the young man seemed almost nonplussed. It was just like he had a bit of a deer in headlights reaction. It was fairly ambiguous, but that was the problem. It was ambiguous and therefore everybody wanted to debate and have an opinion about it. Oh, is he cheating on her? Does he not really love her? Are they about to break up? Is he a serious real killer? This metastasized into this unbelievable life ruining discourse about this one poor guy. He ended up writing a first person perspective piece for Slate magazine about how much it had upended his life. And he was relatively sanguine about it and tried to be good natured, but he didn't sugarcoat how incredibly disruptive and even violent this had been becoming. This huge TikTok meme that was sort of dissecting this brief moment in time, time for him. And that also is a clear example of the sort of third order at work. There were certainly a lot of people just talking about him, making videos and remixes about him that were not directed at him. They didn't personally send it to his inbox, but it kept the fire going. It kept the meme going, which kept him at the center of all of this. It kept him at the eye of the storm. And that's sort of the dynamic that I try to pick apart here. The difference between me and other people who've criticized social media is that they often dwell on issues of individual morality and ethics. Like you are choosing to rot your brain, therefore you are a bad person, or there's something wrong with you, or you are an addict and things like that. And I don't want to say that there's never any salience for that kind of discussion. I never want to say that individual responsibility is completely passe, but I try, I'm sociologically trained, I try to shift the focus to the larger social why do we do what we do? What are the strings by which we have been moved? And that has always fascinated me far more about social media. There is this structure there as much as the structure of a city or highway network.

[A]

This is also, I thought, such an, for me, a really eye opening insight about social media. The idea of affordances, an affordance is.

[B]

Basically you can think of it as a feature of a designed object that suggests how to use it. So the example that I always use with my students is think about, like how you open a door, right? If you see a push bar, it suggests that you have to push it to open. If you see a handle, it suggests that you have to pull it up or down in order to open the door. And you see a knob, you twist it. The shape, the way it looks suggests how it is meant to be used. And that scales up varying degrees of complexity up to and including social media. So how social media is designed suggests how you use it. I use the analogy of road design. So for example, in many countries there are raised crosswalks. You think about how if you live in the US or Canada, you're used to stepping down into the street to cross. But in other countries the crosswalk is raised so the level is the sidewalk and cars have to go over a speed bump essentially whenever they cross a crosswalk, which incentivises them to slow down. And this is why you see, for example, a country like the Netherlands has a lower traffic fatality rate than the United States. It's not because the Dutch are better, more moral people or better drivers, is because the design of roads influences behavior that you can start to see scale up at the level of society. And that's the thing that I've always thought about as a scholar of the Internet, is that you're never going to get very far just telling people to change individual behavior. You're never going to get terribly far with that. The real change, the structural change, comes from changing the structure because it incentivizes and disincentivizes certain types of behavior. And a lot of it is because the spaces we participate in provide these incentives to behave in a certain way, right? When you see a link preview that has a headline, right, you can click through it and see what the article actually says. But you're much more likely to just read the headline only and react to that. And the thing is, that's an incentive on your part because of how the interface is designed. That incentivizes them to create maybe misleading or provocative headlines. And so that's all social media affordances all the way down. It's not about individual morality. Resisting it as an individual is exceptionally difficult because we all want to participate in society. We all want to participate and have fun and be part of something. And so it can be easy to let yourself get secondarily socialized into certain social media patterns, certain ways of behaving, ways of approaching things, ways of talking about certain issues and ways of interacting just because you see everybody else doing it and because the design of the platform itself incentivizes it. People are not more brutish or cruel or stupid than they were in centuries past. If anything, I think, frankly, the opposite is true. But it's that we are being channeled into these series of structures that incentivize certain behaviors, and you have to swim upstream in the channels of those structures in order to avoid the direction that these affordances are kind of steering you into.

[A]

Do you believe that we would be better with no social media if social media was banned or could somehow you could snap your fingers and social media could. Would stop existing in its current form? Do you think that would be better?

[B]

Yes. I don't believe that there's a good way to do that that would not empower governments in the worst way, but sort of mutatis mutandis, magic wand waved. Yes, I think that we might actually be better off.

[A]

Let's kind of address some of the arguments that I think people would make against that. So one of them is this argument that if I am a person from a minority community or a marginalized community, and I live in a place where there are not people who I can directly connect with. Say I am a trans person in a small town. There's no one else who I know of who is trans in my neighborhood. That. That is like the quintessential argument for social media on the liberal side, well, then you get to connect with people out there in the world. How do you respond to that? If. If you think that social media as a whole should not exist, if it couldn't exist?

[B]

What I tell people is that, you know, obviously we're not going to be able to wave a magic wand to get rid of social media. So working with the world as it is, which is very important to me as a political first principle, I say you can use social media to meet people, but then really find your people. It is not a community. It will eat you alive in ways that you can't even begin to imagine if something goes wrong. The idea that social media has to be the only domain where you socialize has never been true. There's nothing stopping you from having a chat room, from having a signal chat. I mean, if it's good enough for the Secretary of Defense, it's good enough for you, right? So it's like I'm not saying deny yourself, but I am saying that maybe the best way to use social media is as an index or as a phone book rather than as the place that you treat as a community center. Hey, this is Jonathan Fields, host of the Good Life Project podcast. Boost Mobile reminds me of what I love when someone reimagines what's possible. Offering reliable nationwide coverage backed by a 30 day money back guarantee. While other carriers spend millions on flashy super bowl ads, Boost Mobile puts those dollars towards what matters more. Delivering reliable nationwide coverage at prices that make you wonder why we've been paying so much for just $25 a month. You get unlimited service that will never go up in price. Not next year, not ever. And they're so confident you'll love it, they back it with a 30 day money back guarantee. No questions asked. Want to see if Boost Mobile is right for you? Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store or boost mobile.com customers who cancel within 30 days of activation will have Boost service fees refunded, activation fees if applicable, and phone payments will not be refunded.

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[B]

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[A]

So what about then what of someone who says, I hear what you're saying, I understand, I agree with it. The problem is the platforms that exist as they exist. What we need is a better, different platform. What do you say to that person?

[B]

I will say that I was that person for the better part of the 2010s enthusiastically. I pointed out earlier, for example, the whole thing about clickbait. One of the last good things that Twitter did before Elon Musk took it over was that they put in a speed bump where if you click, you tried to retweet something that included an article link, you got a pop up that asked you, hey, did you read this? Did you click through this? Make sure you do that before sharing this around. And that kind of thing can be very useful for providing what's called friction to slow down the worst aspects of virality. There's lots of things you can do to improve, but I don't think you'll ever completely solve the problems because the problems are baked into the fact that we just are not built to deal with. Staring into this vortex of the raw power of millions of people's IDS screaming at you all at once.

[A]

This is where the power of your argument that it is not just log off from social media, but that it is also get involved in politics, get involved in community building, that doesn't have to be in person, it can be on the Internet, but it is not a social media only thing. So for example, it's not saying that I shouldn't post an Instagram story condemning the latest atrocity in whatever war it is. That's not saying that I get to not do anything, far from it. It's just saying that that isn't the most effective thing that I can do and that what I should be concerned with if I'm. And please critique me if I'm not getting this right, but it's that what I should be concerned with is doing something that actually matters, not doing something, period.

[B]

Yes, exactly. But what I also say in the book very clearly is to say that you can even still use social media as long as you have a clear picture in mind with clear answers to critical questions. What am I doing? How is it connected to the movement? What is the goal that I am trying to achieve? Is social media that the best tool or a good tool to use to achieve that goal? Right. And if you can answer those questions with more than vague pabulum appeals to personal morality or appeals to something vague like raising awareness, then you might be onto something. Right. When I was writing the book, one of the people that I cite extensively is the journalist and drone researcher Fain Greenwood. And they were running a very successful fundraising campaign for a Palestinian man, and his family was trying to get them out of Gaza. Right? And it took a significant amount of money to do this. This was well vetted. Fain knew and had worked with this man before reporting on Israel, Palestine. It was a very worthy cause that they had been criticized by some keyboard warriors for some of the same things that perhaps you've been criticized for. And they turned that harassment into attention for this fundraiser in a really successful act of social media jiu jitsu that raised goodness. I forget the exact figure, but I think it was like $50,000 Canadian dollars or something like that. It was quite a lot of money that ultimately got raised for this man and his family. And, you know, I think that that was a clear instance of I know what I'm doing and I'm going to use social media to achieve a narrow but clear goal that social media can achieve. I always say again, that as long as you have a clear goal in mind and social media objectively is capable of helping you achieve that goal, then maybe you can do something political there. But it's not just, you know, pissing into the wind raising awareness.

[A]

But I will just say that when it comes to, for example, Gaza and the war there, for me it has been, I think, significantly more productive on my end to engage in longer form ways rather than in shorter form ways, to read articles, to write about it in a long form way, to have conversations on a podcast where we can talk for an hour rather than to try and summarize in a sentence or two. Because I still to this day struggle to summarize anything about any of these complex geopolitical situations in one sentence, because it seems like it's in some ways flattening and exploitative to me to try and say, here's my one hashtag phrase about it. And I think the other piece, though, in addition to the length of the form, is social media seems to me to be, among many other problems, uniquely bad at saying, I actually don't know enough. I don't know all of the details. It is, you know, I come at this from the world of comedy. And as a comedian, the number one thing you're supposed to do on stage is have a strong opinion on anything, right? Like, you don't bring something up unless you have a strong opinion. It doesn't work. And I think social media invites that same thing.

[B]

It's one of my first rules for interacting on social media. But that's because it's, it's like such a nasty place. Showing vulnerability is a very difficult thing to do on these platforms without taking an enormous risk. I mean, honestly, that was part of what happened with the Chilli woman. Right. There was a lot of vulnerability and kindness being expressed there. And that was almost an invitation. Right.

[A]

And the irony, of course, being that vulnerability and kindness are the number one ways to in face to face interactions, to build a connection, to build solidarity, to actually build a community.

[B]

Yes, exactly. I think that these in person interactions are indeed the way forward. You're right, certainly that there's a lot to be said for the fact that we're not allowed to say, or at least not easily say, oh, I don't know enough about this. Right. And that longer form engagements or productions are generally just better for capturing. And the thing is, sometimes when you say, oh, it's nuanced, people think that you're excusing, say, a war crime or something like that. We can say that the morality of that is straightforward. What's never straightforward in politics is what do you do next?

[A]

Yes, yes.

[B]

How do you change the circumstances surrounding these immoral acts? Right. That is the complicated conversation. I will never say that there's anything morally complicated about murdering a family of civilians. Right. What is complicated is how do you change the world for the better such that this stops happening reliably? That is complicated and difficult work. It is important that people like you get involved in these complex geopolitical discussions because it involves things that might be done in your name, done with your tax dollars, done under the color of your country's flag. That matters. And there is a certain collective responsibility that we all have to take there, but you're not going to achieve that fullest bloom of citizenship on social media.

[A]

Well, Katharine, thank you so much for being on the show and thank you for writing this book. It was such a pleasure talking to you.

[B]

Thank you so much for having me, Chris. It's always a pleasure to talk about this.

[A]

That is it for today's episode of how to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Kathryn Cross. Her book is called Log why Posting and Politics Almost Never Mix. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other [e-mail] how to be a Better Human is put together by a team who mix quite well. On the TED side, we've got face to face communicators Daniela Ballorezzo, Banban Chang, Michelle Quinn Quint, Chloe Chauchat, Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tenzika Seungma Nivong, Antonia Ley and Joseph de Bruyne. This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Mattea Salas, who are a disinformation campaign's worst enemies. On the PRX side, we've got long form, grace and nuance in human form. Morgan Flannery, Norgill, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. Please share this episode with a person whose thoughts you particularly appreciate. Someone you never want to log off from. We will be back next week with even more how to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care.

[C]

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[B]

What's up Grace? From the Working Hub podcast here and I want to tell you about something exciting you're watching every dollar and Walmart Business helps you stretch each one from office supplies to snacks and cleaning gear. You'll get everyday low prices plus easy bulk ordering and fast delivery. And with tools like spend tracking and multi user accounts, staying organized is simple. Save time, money and [e-mail] it's free to sign up.