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- [00:01]
A
I can't say often enough how on the right and the left you have a whole bunch of politicians who are more concerned about followers than constituents. Their constituents are the people who they are supposed to answer to, but they answer to their followers, many of whom don't live in their district, have no concern beyond, you know, signaling their tribal loyalty online. And this has been bad. This has been very bad for democracy.
- [00:22]
B
And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. When we talk about how the digital world has transformed our lives, it is tempting to think about the big issues, to think about how artificial intelligence will transform the world, to talk about whether or not social media use has driven up suicide among teenage girls. But I think that there is just as important set of questions which is a little bit less dramatic. How has all of our life been transformed by these digital technologies? Have we become less likely to have deep real life relationships? Is there a real decline in the number of social occasions that people organize, as some data suggests? How are social norms changing to, on one hand, normalize things like OnlyFans, and on the other hand, lev a huge social opprobrium on people who have violated some important but broadly breached social norms, like fidelity within a marriage. When you think about the recent viral clip from a couple cuddling at a Coldplay concert. Well, to help us think through all of these questions, I invited onto a podcast, Christine Rosen. Christine is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute Institute as well as a fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. And she is the author most recently of the Extinction of Experience, which gives you a sense of where her head is with these topics. In the final part of this conversation, we talked a little bit about the astounding rise of OnlyFans. According to some statistics, 5% of young women in the United States now offer an OnlyFans account on which they share soft or hard pornography involving themselves. And we also talked about what to do about all of these subjects. How can we have public policies and what kind of actions can we ourselves take to get back to having real experiences of the world that are unmediated by by our cell phones to deepen the social connections we have in our lives. To listen to that part of the conversation, please support the work we do, please become a paying subscriber, Please go to jaschamonk.substack.com. Christine Rosen, welcome to a podcast.
- [03:15]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [03:16]
B
So so there's obviously a lot of concern about how AI is going to change the world. Jonathan Haidt has Been on the podcast in the past and has since written a mega best selling book about the impact that social media has in particular on teenage girls and other people growing up deeply emerged in that kind of culture. You are concerned about a slightly, perhaps less intense, but much broader harm, which is how the experience all of us have of a world is now mediated by all the digital devices which have entered every aspect of our life. Why should we broaden our concern in that kind of way rather than looking at all those poor teenage girls growing up in this completely different environment look in the mirror and say, hey, what are we doing wrong? What's happening in our own lives?
- [04:05]
A
Well, I was fascinated by these seemingly mundane experiences because I just started noticing more and more in the last, I would say 10 years how many of them are mediated that didn't used to be. And part of that's of course because as anyone under the age of 20 knows, I'm an old fogey. I'm Gen X, so I'm this hybrid generation that grew up without a lot of these tools and then embraced them in adulthood. And so I remember the before times, I remember before smartphones, before the Internet. And it just struck me that we were very quickly running towards this assumption that every new thing was going to improve our lives. And I think in many cases that's true. But I think in the case of some of our daily interactions, and in particular our daily human interactions, how we interact with each other both as individuals, as families, as communities and in public space, those were starting to be transformed in ways that I think were worrisome. It wasn't entirely because of the digital technology, but the digital technology was enabling us to eliminate the kinds of friction and discomfort that used to be taken for granted as part of human relationships. And so I thought it was worth exploring other areas of life that we might have too quickly passed over and seen these tools and the smartphone in particular, and Internet and social media platforms as improvements on how to do things and question whether that was the case.
- [05:26]
B
Yeah, so I've wondered about how to think about this subject because on the one hand, I take somewhat seriously the defense of smartphones that they just bundle in one incredibly useful tool all the different kinds of things that we might have done in the past. Right. So earlier we might have had physical books that we schlepped around in order to read, and perhaps we had certain tapes in order to listen to an audiobook, if we enjoyed that. And we had a physical telephone on which we called people up, and then we had a television in the living room on which we, you know, watched the news. And so if you added up all of those different kinds of activities, the they took up probably a lot of hours in the life of somebody in 1990 or 1980. Right. Well, now we've bundled all of these things in one machine. And so, you know, say, oh, you're spending all of this time on your smartphone? Well, actually, I'm spending time brushing up on my Chinese vocab and reading the newspaper and reading a book and listening to a book and speaking to my friends. You know, what's wrong with all of that? Now, on the other hand, of course, there is this sense that because it's all in one machine, I certainly notice I have coffee with somebody and I stuff and look at my phone every few minutes in a way that I wouldn't have suddenly glanced at a newspaper or switched on the television in the middle of a conversation. So how should we think about those two sort of ways of conceptualizing what's going on?
- [06:49]
A
Well, you're absolutely right to point out that the way we spend our time hasn't entirely changed and that all of these things are pursuits that human beings will continue to do whether they have the technology or not. I think the real, the qualitative difference here, though, is important. And that's because the mobility of the technology means we these sorts of things are no longer place and time specific. And it turns out that how we interact as people, whether it's with our friends or with our families or at the office or wherever, that those boundaries of time and space tend to actually form our how the quality of interaction plays out. So if you're having coffee with a friend and no one has a smartphone, you're going to pay, most likely pay attention to each other. And it would be rude to put a book in front of your face while your friend is talking to you. But somehow, as we navigate these new norms, people checking their phones under the table while their friend is talking to them, some people might find that rude, and others might just say, I'm checking my messages. So the urgency and the nowness and the must respond on demand forms of contact are really new and the speed with which we can transform time and space. So what that means is that our individual experiences, I think, in many ways have been improved in all of the ways you describe, but our collective experiences have become impoverished in important ways. So if you think about public space and the sort of subtle signals and rules that we have about how to behave in public space, when someone walks in a Crowded elevator, you make eye contact, the polite ways we interact. If you bump into someone, you both say you're sorry. These actually are the grease, the wheels of social interaction in a way that once they're removed, we start to notice and feel more anxiety, more tension, more frustration in those interactions. And we see this play out in odd ways. You know, road rage rates are increasing. People are expect on demand experiences all the time in public space. So in those very subtle ways, the technology encourages habits of mind and ways of behaving that are quite new and that I think we're still working out the details of whether or not they're good for us or bad for us.
- [08:53]
B
Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I'm thinking through sort of what impact this has had on our collective experience. And one of the really striking things is that when the Internet is invented in the 1990s, what the Internet evangelists believe, but what most people think is that it's going to connect us to each other. It's going to connect us to each other in the sense that it's going to just make it easier to speak to each other. I mean, in the 1990s, if you have a family member on the west coast and live on the east coast, it's expensive to speak to each other on the telephone. I grew up in Germany with family in Denmark and Sweden, and my grandparents would call me up for two or three minutes every few days or once a week. And that was a very significant expense to them. So it's very reasonable to think, hey, once we are able to speak for no money or very, very little money, those family relationships are going to deepen more broadly, we think, you know, why is a prejudice against people in the world? Why are people tribal? Well, it's really hard to speak to somebody in Kenya. It's really hard to speak to somebody in Afghanistan. They're too far away, it's too expensive. You can send them a letter and, you know, that'll be delivered at relatively little cost, but it'll take, you know, weeks. And then till you hear back, it's a month. And, you know, how can you actually communicate? Once we're going to be able to just hang out through Skype or whatever on the Internet, all these pleasures are going to fall away. Of course, what's happened instead is this kind of weird resurgence of identity. And so that's a weird paradox of the Internet, right? Like we blast the cost of communication out of existence, but rather than deeper family relationships, more social activity, and greater understanding across cultural barriers, what we get is alienation, less time spent with each other, and a retreat into these kind of tribal forms of organization, which, you know, I think very few people would have predicted at the time. Now to double click on the first part of this. Why is it that this online experience seems to make it so much harder to find the time for in person physical experience? You know, some of the statistics that are going around about that are about teenagers who spend much less time hanging out with each other and perhaps as a result also have many fewer of the kind of landmarks of adulthood. Were less likely to drink, we're less likely to be in romantic relationships, and so on. But some of it is about adults. I saw a very interesting statistic recently that there's pretty convincing evidence to suggest that the number of parties, dinner parties, barbecues, et cetera among adults has radically reduced over the course of the last 20 years. I think it's down by something over 40%. What explains that?
- [11:21]
A
Well, I'm glad you mentioned what I call the Kumbaya history, the Kumbaya moment in the history of the Internet, the very early and I remember these days, and I was as enthusiastic as the next person at the very beginning. This idea that connection would open up opportunities for people to really understand others better and connect more often. And the ease of communication would also ease our relationships with each other. But of course, that failed to really deal with human nature. And the problem as I saw it in real time unfolding decade after decade with the Internet and then the smartphone, was that everyone could be heard, but fewer and fewer people actually wanted to listen. And this goes to your question about in person interactions. In person interactions aren't always easy. They're often difficult. Learning how to read others social signals, their facial expressions, their hand gestures, all these ways that we communicate that are actually not verbal, that we learn by practicing from a very young age. The first thing a baby looks at is a face they want to look into. The actually the depth perception of an infant and newborn is just about the journey from lying in the crook of someone's arm to look at their mother or father's face. So we are hardwired evolutionarily to seek out the human face and to understand each other in this important way. So when you introduce a barrier to that, a screen of some sort, and social scientists have been studying this for decades now, you start to have things called the online disinhibition effect, where you're more willing to say and do things because you know you have this barrier and you're not Actually accountable in person, in physical space with another person, that you'll say and do things that you never would do before. And that's even when you're acknowledging your own identity, to say nothing of them. The additional screen of anonymity.
- [13:09]
B
And incidentally, I think that's a lot of what went into that strange cultural moment in 2020, with all of the irrational cancellations and all of those things. It's one thing to sit in a conference room of 20 people and say, this person over there is an evil racist. Even for like a nice member of a community who's never done anything particularly bad, it's somehow a lot easier to type that into a chat or write that on Slack.
- [13:31]
A
Absolutely. Well, because the consequences are not immediately felt by you. And you can also feel you exercise an enormous amount of control. And this is actually where, again, in human relationships, we cannot control the other person. And if we are habituated by spending hours and hours in mediated interactions, whether that's on a social media platform or in a Slack channel, we become habituated to this expectation that we should be able to just delete someone or a scale, you know, cancel them or all. I mean, look at the buttons on your computer. They actually are escape. Cancel, delete. We cannot treat each other this way, but we spend most of our time communicating with these tools. So this is the old, you know, the medium is the message. This is like we become more machine like in our interactions rather than making machines that help us become better humans. That's, that's, I think, where we see cancellation and all these sort of really radicalizing behaviors rewarded by these platforms. The platforms are designed to reward those kinds of interactions, not to reward thoughtfulness, ambiguity, and grace in conversation.
- [14:34]
B
But shouldn't that create the opposite effect? I mean, again, you go back to first principles, and nearly everybody who was only presented with first principles rather than with empirical evidence in the 1990s got this wrong. So there seems to be a strong a priori logic which suggests one kind of conclusion, and that's just not the conclusion that is empirically played out. But you'd think, think that if on the one side the experience of being online is potentially scary and threatening, can lead to all of these conflicts. And at the same time, the ease of communication has become much greater. It's much easier to organize a get together. It's much easier to say, hey, I have a free evening. Let me spontaneously reach out to my friends and invite them to come along. What you'd expect is for people to flee into the offline world for there to be more barbecues, for there to be more people hanging out. And instead what you seem to get is less and less of that. Now I know. I guess part of that it's just the addictive nature of algorithms and so on. I find it hard to really feel that from my own behavior. I certainly know that it's easy in a moment of idleness when you are in between doing something, to think, I'll just check my Instagram. And then suddenly, like half an hour later, you realize you've wasted half an hour watching random stupid reels. But I've never had the experience where I sort of am like, oh, I have this appealing social invitation, but you know, I'd rather stay at home and watch reels. And so it's a little hard for me to sort of understand how this aggregate effect comes about. Why is it that this online experience ensnares us collectively so much or changes the social incentives so much, or perhaps makes people so wary of real life interaction that, you know, we get a 50% decline of people having backyard barbecues or something?
- [16:19]
A
Well, I would say one thing is that you're likely of the generation that got to practice those skills before a lot of this was mediated. And so there is a real generation. Each new generation is spending less time face to face with each other. And I think that's in part because these are skills you practice. We used to take for granted that we didn't even think about it as practice. It was the only way of doing things. When you introduce an alternative one, that makes it much easier to communicate without any of the burdens of leaving your house or getting dressed or getting on a bus or all of the challenges of just basic social interaction. Human beings will choose the easy path every time. We know this about ourselves and, and sometimes that's fine. But I think if you think about the younger generations where all of their, or at least a majority of their interactions from a very young age were in this mediated environment, it becomes, and I have a lot of sympathy for these kids. There's a lot of anxiety in actually doing it the old fashioned way. And I've spoken to a lot of kids who talk about this, that they want to get together with their friends, but first of all, getting enough people to sort of agree to that, and then everybody kind of going and putting their phones down and having those interactions. They enjoy that, and many of them do that, but they have, It's a skill they have to practice now. They have to choose it deliberately. They have to overcome Whatever concerns they have logistically and about the inconvenience of it. And I do think that, again, human nature will choose the easy path, which means we still have emotional experiences in these mediated environments. We're feeling real things, even if we're sitting by ourselves in our room scrolling Instagram reels. And we're willing to accept that, I think qualitatively limited experience over the qualitatively richer one because it's more convenient, it's right there, and we don't have to think much about it.
- [18:05]
C
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- [18:33]
B
think I'm just gonna keep posing the same question to you over and over because it just puzzles me so much. I mean, what about just some of. You know, I feel like the urge of teenagers to hang out with friends is just so strong. And obviously, when you look at the decline of romantic relationships, the urge for romantic connection and the sexual urges, I would have thought so strong on humans that it could overcome that. And yet it doesn't appear to be. I mean, I just spent two and a half weeks in China and I spoke to somebody who's doing research there and has a lot of access to data who quite credibly showed me not only that the number of romantic relationships has significantly declined in China, that a lot of people are not getting married, not interested in getting married, and not interested in having kids, which is of course reflected in the birth rates, but also that when you ask people about their priorities in life, when you ask young people in particular about their priorities in life, anything like love and romantic relationships is the thing that they're least likely to mention as important and the thing that they're most likely to mention affirmatively as unimportant to them. And I was slightly skeptical of this. I think there's a kind of slightly Orientalizing strain of journalism and research. There's always weird people in Korea and Japan who never date anymore. But I talked to a bunch of people there and this seems at least to be believed by smart people in China itself. So it's not an Orientalist view. It's certainly a view that is shared by smart observers in China. That may still mean it's wrong, it may still mean it's missing something. But I was again really struck by that. I mean, isn't the, the need, the desire to find a romantic partner to share that aspect of life strong enough to overcome this? Again, if you were sort of giving me all of this As a prediction 15, 20 years ago, I think I wouldn't take it seriously. I think I just say, eh, I just don't buy it. But there's enough empirical evidence to suggest that this is really happening. And yet I struggle to sort of make sense of how all of these mechanisms you point to would seem perfectly reasonable and plausible to me, can possibly be strong enough to override what seems to be pretty fundamental aspects of human nature.
- [20:40]
A
Well, it's funny you say you wouldn't have believed this prediction because one of the first assignments I gave myself at the New Atlantis when we founded this journal more than 20 years ago was early online dating. Internet dating was just starting to gain steam. And I was fascinated by whether exactly this question, was it going to change how people meet, fall in love and form families? And in those early stages, we didn't have a ton of data, we just had impressions. And we could sort of study in small scale some of these early sites. But what I instantly saw were two. They seem almost contradictory. But what you're describing, I think, is this principle coming to fruition. It's an aversion to risk. But if there's anything that's risky in life, it's romantic relationships. There's always risk and the willingness to take that risk. I think you're absolutely right. Human nature overcomes the risk aversion because you think, yeah, no, I want to meet someone, I want to fall in love. What I was finding on these sites was that people were forming habits of mind and using them. That said, put all the risk up front. I want to know everything about you. A whole dossier. I don't want to find that out. And I can't waste time with someone who might have this weird thing that I don't like. So there was that impulse combined with. And this seems a contradiction, but even if you did find someone you like, there was always in the back of your mind, well, there are thousands more other people out there who I matched with, who I might like better. So there's a seeming, you know, limitless number of options and then a more, more aversion to the risk of a real romantic relationship. And those forces Combined, I think, is what we're seeing play out with some of these younger generations in particular. To go out into the world and into the wild, as they say, and just meet someone is almost unheard of in this, in, in many generations. And I know lots of people who've happily married. They found themselves on dating. They found their spouse on a dating app. The ones that are most successful, though, were the ones I think that very quickly out of the gate, like Jewish dating sites, Catholic dating sites, vegetarian dating sites, carnivore dating sites, people who very specifically said, this is my limiting principle and I won't move beyond it. They could find each other. And that was harder in the pre Internet age. But the combination of risk aversion and the seeming limitless options that this mediated experience of meeting others provides, I think has genuinely changed everyone. And the flattening cultural effect of doing these things online means that I don't think it's just because some societies are more conformist than others. We're more independent, but we're all behaving this way. The mating practices of the human race have altered significantly across the board. When you look at some of these studies.
- [23:15]
B
Yeah, I'm a little bit skeptical about overemphasizing the evilness of social media companies and platforms. I think a lot of this is an emergent behavior of how our psychology works in these online platforms, more than sort of them doing like, brilliant, evil things to keep us addicted. One of the most shocking things I've heard, though, about online dating platforms, which I believe is true, is that, you know, they obviously have access to your IP address, and they obviously know when two people have matched. And apparently one thing that happens is that when two users are seen multiple times at the same IP address, suggesting that perhaps we're starting to form a relationship, the algorithm will deliver more attractive new options to the members of this emergent couple in order to tempt them away from their potential unit and say, hey, there's more hot people who I could be meeting instead.
- [24:03]
A
There's a hotter, better person two blocks away. Right? No, of course, it's a business.
- [24:09]
B
That really is one of the most evil things I've heard. I have to say something. And of course, one of the sort of strange dynamics on social media is that, you know, there's slightly different ways in which men and women tend to behave and rate each other on those platforms. It's quite well documented. So men, you know, know swipe right so, you know, evince interest and a much greater share of women than women. Do in men. And what tends to happen is that there's a big tale of men who can't get any matches online, and there's already small number of men who get a lot of matches. And then, of course, those men are often tempted to just go on, you know, many, many dates with different women, perhaps sleep with many different women, and then move on to the next one. And the women get burned, because women often are ones who, you know, are looking for a serious relationship, and they feel that each again, they go on four or five dates of somebody, start to develop a real romantic interest in them, and then suddenly that doesn't work out. And so eventually they become very, very bitter and angry at that, at that experience. And so there's a kind of, you know, there's sort of women who feel like they're being treated in a very unfair way by the people they meet on those platforms, and men who can't get dates who feel that those platforms are kind of locking them out. And so you have, by two very different routes, people perhaps tuning out of a dating market.
- [25:24]
A
Well, and one of the things about becoming a fully formed adult is learning how to handle rejection. But I think what's changed is that I don't think we were designed to handle rejection at this scale, Whether it's the woman who, you know, has a couple of dates with a guy and then he ghosts her, or the man who can't get a date with any of the women because they all swipe the wrong. They swipe left rather than right. That kind of industrialized rejection which the platforms enable. Perhaps we're not wired yet to deal with that. Now, will we learn to adjust these behaviors? I think we have. I think there continue to be interesting markets in the online dating world. When women, for example, got sick of some of the larger platforms like Match.com, you had plenty of fish. You had sites developed that were designed by women so that the women could make the first offer of interest. And so there are all these ways that you can game the system. But. But from my perspective, the question we should ask is, has this shown to be a better system than some of the other ways? We used to do this when we were out in public space, where we did allow for time and a slow reveal of each other's personalities to someone with whom we had interest. I think there's a lot of impatience baked into this system, too. And I think, again, particularly for romantic relationships, but for friendships and family as well, you do have to be patient with other people. And these Devices which we spend again seven or eight hours a day on. They do not encourage patience by any stretch of the imagination. And I do think we see that bleeding over into people's interactions with each other.
- [27:00]
D
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- [27:28]
B
So one other strange thing about online dating is that I remember very vividly when those sites sort of came up. It was weird to be online dating. Yes.
- [27:37]
A
No one wanted to admit it. Right, Right.
- [27:39]
B
It was something for losers. Right? Like what? You can't a girlfriend or boyfriend in the real world. You have to go to these online sites. There's something really odd about you. And now, of course, it's been completely normalized. You know, at this point, a plurality of relationships are formed through online dating. You know, in younger age groups, I believe it's a majority. It continues to rise very, very quickly. Again, you might have predicted in the 1990s that it would be easier to get people to make friends online than to date online because the stakes are lower. Because in a way it's easier to say, hey, we share this, this, you know, obsessive interest in some random band or some random thing. Let's be friends. Right? You know, and yet if you're looking for friends online, that is still a little bit weird. Now you might make friends online and kind of randomly. I have Twitter friends, I suppose, you know, from like commenting on each other's things and mentioned like, oh, you know, let's talk about this. And you know, because you're part of also a professional circle or something, but like attempt. I think Bumble, for example, had an attempt to like do a friend dating thing where you sort of use the platform, but rather than opting into a romantic form of matchmaking, you opt into I want to make friends. And especially a relatively mobile society like the United States, you'd think that there's a real understandable need for that. Hey, I just took a job in Cleveland, Ohio. I don't know anybody here. I'm not going to college here, where college takes care of presenting you with lots of people who might end up your friends. I want to go and grab coffee with a few people who might become my friends. You'd think that this algorithm somehow can facilitate that form of sociability. And yet, for whatever reason, even as romantic online matchmaking has become completely mainstream in society, dominant in society, that form of friend making is still quite marginal. And even for various forms of it exist, meetup and so on, that's still regarded as a little bit strange where you need to go online to make a friend. What's wrong with you? I mean, is the solution here not to sort of turn to the offline world, but to expand the online world? I mean, would it be helpful to have a change in norms where when you move to a new city, you really can make friends online in this kind of way? Or why is it that there is this, again, somewhat surprising discrepancy between these two different things you might think of doing online?
- [29:53]
A
Well, I would say yeah, meetup groups are great and people do use them, but they don't have the ubiquity that I think you're pointing to that online dating does. The difference is this. I think if you, the Internet can be, and social media platforms in particular can be very useful. If you have an existing interest and you move to a new place and you want to join a group that's already doing that, you can find those people more efficiently and join that real world group. And that's a great thing.
- [30:19]
B
How do I find somebody who's playing pickup soccer?
- [30:22]
A
Exactly, exactly. That's wonderful. But I think we have to remember, and the great Neil Poster, cultural Critic of the 20th Century, made this point about television and politics, which I still think resonates. He said, when you introduce television into the realm of politics, you no longer have politics with television, you have a new politics. And I think that's true of friendships and romantic relationships, even neighborly relationships. When you introduce a social media platform to that relationship, you no longer have that thing anymore. You have a new thing. So think of next door, which was created with great fanfare to bring neighbors together. You would be able to communicate garage sales, emergencies. It would all be great. I did a little study of nextdoor and in some cases it works really well. It gets news out to the local neighbors. You have to identify yourself. You have to live in the neighborhood to contribute. And so there was some gatekeeping for that platform that hadn't existed before. But it very quickly devolved into like the worst sort of vicious gossip, finger pointing, you know, tattling on each other. I mean, I have a pretty active next door neighborhood group that I just watch in awe and amazement. Again, because at scale, because of the online disinhibition effect, we, we are not acting neighborly. We're not going out into the street because it's easier to sit at our keyboards and have our say than it is to actually confront someone and say, hey, you know, your dog's a little crazy, can you put him on a leash? Or something like that. Because again, the risk, the sort of, you have to actually deal with another human being who might be volatile, who might be unfriendly, who might say something scary. And that's where I do think we need to remember, even with friendships, even with romantic relationships, what we're talking about here isn't the old way, it's a new thing. And we're still developing norms to adapt to that. And I have a lot of confidence that we'll find those. We already have found some, but we have to at least acknowledge that it isn't the same thing, because those old rules don't apply in many of these cases.
- [32:09]
B
I wonder if another development here is that you can get a lot of shallow community that then replaces deep community. The ease of finding shallow communities somehow pushes away deep community. Now, the extreme form of this that I see sometimes is, you know, of all the different social media platforms, I kind of quite like Reddit because a, I think its algorithm is better and it can just be sort of entertaining in weird ways. But you know, you so often get somebody say, I've been friends with this person for, you know, 20 years and they said this one thing to me yesterday that I find kind of hurtful or whatever, and I've decided to cut them out of my life completely. Am I the ass?
- [32:49]
A
One of the best credit threads.
- [32:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. One of the best community 7 and the answer is always no, no, no, no. You know, if somebody has said something that doesn't value you perfectly in the perfect way at every moment, they are toxic and you must cut them out of your life. I think that's gotten a little bit better over the last few years. But there's certainly, you know, a tendency where these members of this very shallow community of people who you've never met personally, you've never might have had a second two way conversation with, who perhaps just commenting on some random post of yours, are enc you to cut those real life community ties. Now that's a particular example. I'm sure you can find examples that go in the other direction and so on, but perhaps that's part of what's going on here.
- [33:34]
A
I think that's A really important point, because what it shows is that again, humans are hardwired to seek the approval and connection to others in our communities. Our community can potentially online be limitless. So if you are spending less time in person with the people who know you best, who might provide for, for example, a leavening influence on your impulse to cut someone out of your life because they looked at you sideways, that person would be like, ah, you might be overreacting. Think about it. Sleep on. You know, they would give you all that good advice that our friends and loved ones give us when we're acting crazy. But that's one person, one voice. If you happen to see them or text them this question. But then you can go online and you can get thousands and thousands of strangers telling you, you are brave. You have to do this. I did this too. And you suddenly again are urged to belong. And connect, is triggered and rewarded. You're rewarded for doing the more extreme thing, even if it's not actually what's best for you. And there. And combine that with a very presentist way of going about our daily lives. We want instant answers, just like we want our seamless order delivered instantly when we want feel like a cheeseburger. But there's this tendency to not really think, not take the time. Again, this speaks to this patient's point, but we're becoming habituated to those forms of making decisions. Look, my favorite Reddit thread, instant karma, when people who drive like maniacs immediately get pulled over by the cops. I love watching those videos. I was like, ha. Finally, justice. But we have these impulses that when taken to an online platform, become extreme. But then we get extreme rewards for them, and so we keep doing them. And it's difficult to step back. It's one of the reasons why I don't check my phone during interstitial moments of my day. Because it's too easy, as you said earlier, to end up an hour and a half later wondering what you have just done with your time. There's a version of that with relationships. Go seek out someone whose judgment you actually trust and listen to them. Ask them that question. Don't go to Reddit first. You can still go to Reddit, but get the wisdom and judgment of someone who knows you first. That's what we're not doing. We're skipping that step now.
- [35:38]
B
You know, I just had a thought which is very random and may not make sense once I say it out loud. I have a gripe against primary elections in the United States and the reason why I have a gripe against primary elections is that I think that there's two kinds of mechanisms which I trust. One is stakeholders. In Europe, most political parties have party members who pay party dues and they elect officers and those officers make the most important decisions like who to nominate for chancellor of Germany or whatever. These people have a long term stake in the well being of the organization. They've put a lot of work and effort into it and they have a sense of its history of past successes and failures. You have skin in the game then. I believe in democratic elections in which everybody participates in votes because I actually think that most people are reasonable. I don't always agree with the opinion of a majority of my fellow citizens, but by and large I think people are reasonable and decent. That's why democracy works. That's why I believe in democracy. The problem with primary elections is that it's selected for high engaged, low stakes people. People who are very engaged, who are willing to turn out which most people are not for a primary election. But we don't have skin in the game like insiders. In a way, what these kind of online communities recreate is the primary system. It's not your mom and dad, it's not your best friend. It's not the stakeholders who know your history and know you've already cast free people out of your life over random reasons. Perhaps you're just a little oversensitive. It's not the people who actually care about your long term well being being. It's not the average person who may be much more psychologically well calibrated, who doesn't have that kind of stake in your personal well being, but who probably has common sense. It is, you know, the small subsection of people who spend all of their life commenting on people's MIV threats on Reddit. Right. And they're likely to be psychologically with all honor to the great community with MIV asshole psychology, pretty different from the average person. Right.
- [37:41]
A
So very self selective. Yes.
- [37:42]
B
Yeah, it's a weird selection effect of who you're allowing to make those decisions for you.
- [37:47]
A
Well, there's also, I think what you're pointing to as well is something that certainly American politics has been suffering from for a little while now, which is the decline in the power and respect for institutions. So you did used to have active political parties in this country that had some power and exercised judgment over who should run at the state level, federal level and whatnot. And that disappeared. And it actually, you know, in our current populist moment, and it's whoever has the most followers on X or Blue sky or wherever. And we do see that. My wonderful colleague Yuval Avin has written about this, about how the institutions that should shape people's behavior and judgment and to which we should appeal for authority, like Congress and elsewhere, have flipped. And now you have people using the institutional platform to promote their individual goals and the individual control that is offered. Each of us when we go online is encouraged. In part. You know, we're radically individualistic society in the U.S. i think a lot of our politics has become this game of one upmanship, not just among, as you say, the highly engaged, but perhaps not completely mainstream people who participate at the primary level and in these online discussions, but our politicians themselves are now reflecting that impulse because they are also rewarded. I can't say often enough how on the right and the left, you have a whole bunch of politicians who are more concerned about followers than constituents, their constituents. Constituents are the people who they are supposed to answer to, but they answer to their followers, many of whom don't live in their district, have no concern beyond, you know, signaling their tribal loyalty online. And this has been bad. This has been very bad for democracy. And it continues to pose a challenge in our election process, in our personal relationships, though, you're absolutely right. The mediating institutions, the human institutions, the. You know, I think I sometimes got called a scold because I love to take the quiet car on the Acela train, and I'm the first person who politely jumps up and says, this is the quiet car, could you please stop? And I do. I try to be nice, but, you know, I'm pretty firm and I'm that scold. But that's a social role I'm fulfilling. And you see that deteriorating first because everybody's just, you know, staring at their screen, doesn't care about the people around them in public space. But that's a kind of institutional structure that we shouldn't let go of easily. Yes, we can film bad behavior on our phones and make people infamous in real time in a split second, but are we actually doing the hard work of being good human beings who call out bad behavior and actually hold someone accountable in real time, not just filming them, but going up saying, hey, you know, knock it off or break up the fight. Don't film it and post it on an Internet site. So that's a kind of cultural, institutional function that I fear is disappearing. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola in original and cherry vanilla that Pepsi taste you love with no artificial sweeteners and 3 grams of prebiotic fiber. Pepsi Prebiotic cola, unbelievably Pepsi.
- [40:48]
B
This question of social norms is really important because some social norms are very healthy, right? It's very good to have one car on the Amtrak. There's lots of other cars where you can go and have conversations.
- [40:57]
A
They better never get rid of that
- [40:59]
B
car in which people can do some work and enjoy some quiet, right? And it takes people to get the balance right, right? I mean, if every time that somebody spoke, and I've seen that sometimes happening on the quiet car, people shout at them and create a huge ruckus, A, that's counterproductive because then you're disturbing people more with your reprimand than people who originally were their disturbance. B, it just becomes a very unpleasant social environment. At the same time, if nobody ever enforced the norm at all, the norm would very quickly go away. And again, I think some of the elements of the in person world encourage the right calibration of this. It can go wrong, but we have long evolved instincts for how to do that. You know, online. What we end up with is very vague norms which are not as bound to a specific locus as the Amtrak quiet car, right? So different norms can clash or you never know which norm is going to be applied to which situation that then can be enforced out of all proportion with the underlying offense. And you know, we're recording this a few days after a relatively small incident, which is probably like literally a million others happening every day, which is two spouses cheating on each other. But that has consumed the Internet and led to a huge degree of opprobrium for the people involved in a way that indicates this. I'm speaking of course of a Coldplay couple kissing on the kiss cam. That's a lot of C's and K's. Now, of course, there's that kind of fear. If I go out into the real world, I might be shamed in this way that feels out of proportion to the underlying offense. But as of many sort of behaviors of cancellation, there are some of these cases that become very famous, but lots and lots which are not. And people experience now as teenagers all kinds of forms of all consuming drama, often with forms of cancellation in the local community that never makes any headlines, it's certainly never written up on the New York Times and doesn't go viral on Twitter with tens of millions of people watching that entertaining six second clip. But that nevertheless may just leave people so traumatized that they say, I'm just worried about any form of social interaction that might potentially expose me to that form of collective response.
- [43:16]
A
Well, and this is an irony of our current age, because one of the early promises of these technologies is that they would be liberatory, right? We would have more freedom, we'd have more accountability, we'd have more control as individuals. The state can't crush us because we can film all these bad actors that are sent out by the state. But in fact, because we can all survey each other. Now, we behave differently because we know this from many, many studies, that if you know you're being watched, you're going to act in ways that are different from when you're not being watched. But there's also this aspect of it that I think isn't given enough attention and that's how it shapes our expectations for justice. Because these platforms don't just reward embarrassing figures, they reward moral grandstanding. And they turn almost every single discussion into a moral discussion. And everything isn't a moral debate, just like everything shouldn't be politics. But if it's rewarded on these platforms, where most people are having their conversations, where unfortunately now most people are getting their news reading, seeing a link, but never reading the story, then that exacerbates this human tendency to actually mete out justice and judge others behaviors and shame people sometimes too. I mean, I feel for the families of those two spouses who are they themselves have been brought into this global shaming campaign and the mockery that's ensued. Now the punishment of this kind of shaming is way orders of magnitude out of kilter in terms of how humans usually judge and deal with bad behavior within communities. And that's something that I think the outsourcing of that to the Internet has been a very bad thing, not just for politics, but for personal relationships. How many times have you seen out in the wild, people starting to argue and everyone pulls out their phones? It's like, well, now I'm going to film you. I'm going to show your worst self. And it's a threat. It has become a weapon in the hands of people who don't want to deal with a conflict in the way that we should. It just becomes a deflection and a tool to shame people. And that I think is very bad. That's been going on for a long, long time. And we have not developed norms, as I think that recent episode that you just described demonstrates. We haven't figured that part of it out yet.
- [45:35]
B
My producer rightly chides me that the Coldplay couple was cuddling, not kissing, which is mostly upsetting, since there would have been an even better alliteration kissing was implied. I'm sure they kissed at some point.
- [45:50]
A
That was not an HR approved cuddle, let's just put it that way.
- [45:54]
B
It wasn't a cuddle between friends. You know, one obvious way of thinking about this is the village in the city. And you know, perhaps, perhaps there was a golden period of urban anonymity which is never coming back. So in the village you didn't have anonymity because your friends and your neighbors and your relatives always know what you're up to. And of course that is very restrictive to people. It also, by the way, led to a certain set of very socially conservative norms which were in part necessitated by the state of reproductive technology at the time, but in part facilitated by the inbuilt forms of social surveillance in the sort of geographic modalities in which most human beings lived for much of human history. Right. You were just very easily observed. So then you had this brief period where you had 50 or so percent of the world population living in cities in relatively anonymous places where your neighbors might have been able to observe you, but they were not part of the same friend and kinship network. And they probably didn't care that much about what you were doing doing. And that actually gave people a lot of freedom. One way of thinking about what happens with these forms of online surveillance and social shaming and people taking out the video is that you have kind of sporadic reviligization. Normally you can go around New York doing whatever you want, but if for whatever reason what you do is sufficiently outrageous or terrible, or it's just a common behavior like cheating on your spouse, which sadly is relatively common, but it somehow gets caught in a way that captures the imagination because it's a perfect six second clip of people diving in shame out of a frame of a picture and so on. And suddenly you are subject to the norms of the village of the past. Now this conversation, this is a very obvious point. People have made it that the Internet turns us into a global village in some very bad ways. What's interesting though, and which this conversation makes me think, is that the village comes with inbuilt stretch. My friend who's of Greek origin always said, says my country has solved the problem of loneliness. It is impossible to be lonely in a Greek village because the moment you step out, your neighbors talk to you and chat with you and ask you about your day. And I know when I spend time in Italy, there's a one minute walk from the house, which my mother is part of the year, to the local bar in the village and Often it takes you half an hour because you run into so many neighbors and acquaintances and so on, and you guys want to get my damn coffee. That takes you half an hour to get there because you have a really interesting, nice, friendly chat with people. It's one of the beautiful things about living there. Now, what you're describing is sort of the social opprobrium and the judgmentalness, and therefore, perhaps, as you see sometimes in supposedly progressive spaces, the emergent conservative social norms. It is the left that is saying. I mean, it's everybody kind of mentioned in the last days, but it is in part supposedly progressed people saying these evil adulterers, right. In a way that sounds a little bit like kind of 19th century skulma, but without the benefits of the village, without the deep social ties, without the social network, without the person who says, hey, you look a little sad today. Everything all right? You know, can I come over and make you some food or something? Right. So it's kind of like the worst version of a village, actually.
- [49:11]
A
Well, it is, because there's no trust in that village. So if you think about the old forms of that, particularly in the urban. So one of the concerns about all the people who fled the small village to go to this big city was that then they would be kind of anonymous and lost and without protection. And I think the work that Jane Jacobs did in New York, for example, was so fascinating because she said, actually there is this whole informal network of eyes on the street where people do just as you described in that Italian village. We're watching each other, but not with hostility. It's out of. And not necessarily with benevolence either, but just it's. We're all in the same. This is our shared space. Let's all just keep an eye on each other. Now, that meant we're. That, yeah, you probably did have one or two busybody, nosy people who are going to bother you with stuff you would rather they not know about you. But it also was a protective mechanism. If you needed help, you could ask several people, because the eyes on the street were all in it together. And that's where I worry, particularly about the younger generations, because we don't have eyes on the street now. We have surveillance of each self, you know, constant surveillance of each other. And that, I think encourages, because of the way the platforms are designed, a kind of instant rush to judgment. So what that means for. For these younger generations of kids, if that's the expectation in the world they grow up in, is they don't have the in bioethics we have this term called an open future. It's why we, a lot of bioethicists argue you should not do genetic manipulation of your children because you're robbing them of all the opportunities that an open future that wouldn't have had that genetic manipulation would give them. And it's permanent. You can't take it back. So we don't genetically engineer our kids for that reason because it robs them them of becoming who they, robs them of freedom.
- [50:49]
B
Wait, wait. I mean, I know this is a side note, but aren't the kids going to be determined by one genetic makeup or the other?
- [50:55]
A
Well, so, yes, I mean, they're going to be half of their parents on either side. But what you don't do is take an embryo and say, I'm going to select for height and I'm going to select. I mean, some people would even argue, barring a genetic condition that's sex related, I'm going to select for sex. I'm going to do these things because that's the parents imposing on the future of this child without the child's concern. So pathways, from the moment that that embryo is engineered by the parents, pathways of freedom for that future child are cut off.
- [51:24]
B
I get the argument. I guess it seems to me like there's a distinction between. There's a range of different possibilities and the parents are selecting between those possibilities, which seems to be an accurate description of that case, and a rather different idea, which is that the child. We don't want parents to over determine the choices of their children in one obvious way. This is one of the key arguments against female genital mutilation, that you are depriving the child of the possibility of exploring various forms of sexual pleasure by doing this kind of operation. And even though we accept that parents have a lot of authority over young children because children can't make choices for themselves, what we don't accept is that parents can foreclose those kind of choices later in life. At a certain point when the kid turns 18 or whatever the age is, they should be able to make those choices for themselves. But here there's a case where whether your genetic makeup is A or your genetic makeup is B, you have no agency over that, right? You're born one way or the other, and once you're born, you have no choice. So it's not clear to me that the parents are reducing the choice of the embryo. They are determining one pathway or the other. But since either of the hypothetical children wouldn't have Any choice in what the genetic makeup was anyway, you're not reducing the choice that the children have.
- [52:41]
A
I suppose it's more the over determination point. So, for example, take sex selection, which is where a lot of these debates happen. Parents who've had two boys, but they desperately want a girl, well, what expectations are built into their understanding of what a girl child will do? What if that girl grows up to be a tomboy who doesn't want to wear, who doesn't want to take ballet, and they wanted a ballerina. So it's the imposition of expectations that if they're seen all the way through, that child will have a miserable childhood, but also not be able to fully develop. And it's probably a bad analogy, but when you think about, about young people growing up online and the embarrassing mistakes everyone makes, I mean, I for one was in the marching band in high school and thank God the Internet was not around yet, because I would never. That wouldn't have prevented me from having a future career, but it would have been an embarrassing moment in my past. Those embarrassing moments track people now throughout their lives. So you can. And that's the inability to have reinvention, which is actually a core value in the history of America. This idea that you can, you can, you know, when we had a frontier, you can just leave where you're from, go somewhere else and start over. You can't do that. In the same way, in the same way that, as you said earlier, you know, everybody was embarrassed when early online dating, you know, was going on and they wouldn't admit to it. Now, however, I had a friend who was set up with someone not online, but through another friend, and she googled this man. And he was, he didn't have an Internet presence, basically because of the work he does. But she found that highly suspicious. She's convinced he's a serial killer. So. And that's a very short span of time that our expectations, like, you must be out there on the Internet. You must have this digital identity that people can examine and check. And so that for children, for adults like us, I mean, that's fine. We just live with that reality. But if you grow up in a world where everything you've done is tracked, surveyed, photographed, put online, and your digital footprint by the time you're 12 years old is massive. Forget that. Like you say, forget what the big companies do in buying and selling that information. How does that form a sense, a healthy sense of self for someone who might hit 15 and go, actually, I'm not the God who had all those piercings. I actually, I like philosophy and want to do this other thing. It's more and more challenging for kids to make, to develop their a healthy sense of self and make all those mistakes. And I think that's where John Haidt's work is a good starting point for saying maybe some of the crises of these kids is that they don't have that freedom anymore. And they know it. They know it all the time. Every time they look at their phones, they know it.
- [55:12]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Wicked Fight. In the rest of this conversation, we touch on one particular way in which social norms have shifted the very rapid spread of sex work, which at this point is likely to be done by somebody in a part time way, taking pictures of themselves engaged in various sexual activities on OnlyFans and marketing themselves on that platform. As it is in the more traditional kind of categories of sex work. What does the spread of that platform tell us about the set of subjects we've been discussing in this conversation? And how should we feel about that? Should, as my instinct certainly is, we be concerned about the way in which that might shape the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of young women in the United States and beyond. We also talk about what to do about all of this. How do we encourage people to have real experiences of the world again, to set their cell phones aside to enrich their social lives, to listen to that part of the conversation, to gain access to all full episodes of this podcast, and of course, to support the work we're doing here, please go to yashamonk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber, that is yashamonk.substack dot com. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [57:15]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.
- [57:20]
B
Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.