Social Media Messed Up Our Kids. Now It Is Making Us Ungovernable

I agree. The world as we knew it ended with 9/11 and the new one has been made progressively worse ever since; mostly because "the war on X" is currently a thing and requires you to give away some of your rights.

Except despite using quote marks, that’s not an actual quote, that’s your straw man.

I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that [recent technology] is to blame here, and not decades or centuries-long societal patterns. Especially when that technology is shaking up established "authorities" and calling their so-called expertise into question.

The fact that this seems particularly strong in Anglo and historically Protestant places and less in other developed countries suggests to me that this is more of a specific cultural phenomenon and less of a problem directly attributable to social media. But of course that's a much more complex topic and not something that you can wrap a trendy new nonfiction book around.

Social media is not like those earlier innovations. I think the best metaphor here is to imagine a public square in which people talk to each other. They debate ideas or put forth ideas that may not always be brilliant. They may not always be civil, but people can speak while others listen. Sometimes people are moved by persuasion or dissuasion. I think the Founding Fathers assumed that’s about the best we can hope for. Imagine one day, and I’ll call it 2009, that all changes. There’s no more public square. Everything takes place in the center of the Roman Colosseum. The stands are full of people who are there to see blood. That’s what they came for. They don’t want to see the lion and the Christian making nice; they want the one to kill the other. That’s what Twitter is often like.

The public square was emphatically not what media was like before social media. It was a locked-down space controlled by large corporations: newspapers, TV stations, and other institutions that told you what was acceptable to talk about and what wasn't. It wasn't a public square with equal access for all.

The Internet, just like the printing press in the 1500s-1600s, took that ability and spread it to millions of people that previously didn't have it. The results of the Gutenberg printing press were both good and bad, depending on your persuasion, but these types of "we need more restrictions on Internet publishing because old authorities are losing power" really sound like something that was said about the Gutenberg press when it started to spread information that called authority into question. It didn't work then, and it won't work now.

Why not both?

Create safe districts, moving the real election to the primary stage, and then give the electorate a doomscrolling-device as their primary information source.

So the primary voters become more radical and paranoid and we wind up with growing proportion of fringe candidates who would lose to a dog if only they weren't safe seats.

Mainstream people oriented social media is indeed really bad. But is it the technology or the incentives governing it? In other words, is instagram bad because of pictures, or because of engagement-optimized recommendations and endless feeds? What even is the difference between the medium and the message in a world of hyper-personalization?

When social media came we did as we always do; we talk about the potential of the emerging technology. Connecting people across the world, learning, sharing experiences. I don’t think we were wrong in the assessment, but I do think many of us were missing that potential is not the governing force - it’s the incentives.

Now, people are doing the exact same thing with gen AI: talking about the potential. But what’s the business model? Will our kids get excellent private tutors with endless knowledge, or a barrage of post-truth content designed to market, sell, influence, nudge and confuse?