Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely
Stupid
It’s not just a phase.
Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega
April 11, 2022
What
would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its
destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah
built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in
the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of
humanity and said:
Look, they are one
people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what
they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not
understand one another’s speech.
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in
many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image
in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned
to mutual incomprehension.
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for
what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now
inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented,
unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off
from one another and from the past.
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming
like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different
versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not
a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s
about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who
had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red
and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within
universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
From the December 2001 issue: David Brooks on Red and Blue
America
Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media
have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the
country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it
portend for American life?
The Rise of the Modern Tower
There is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger
scales. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms
first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. We see it in
cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero:
The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves
a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new
technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new
possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such
as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were
better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to
progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to
modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s
optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued
technological advance.
The early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms,
message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as
did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003.
Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and
strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before
imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more
than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the
first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon
to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected
citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?
The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably
2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy
movement. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all
smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the
Tower of Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and
we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. For
techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what
humanity could do.
In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public,
Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans.
“Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” he wrote in a letter to investors. Facebook hoped “to rewire
the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to
share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core
institutions and industries.”
In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he
said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he
did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has
not worked out as he expected.
Things Fall Apart
Historically,
civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and
enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it
that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United
States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?
Social scientists have identified at least three major
forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital
(extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and
shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must
understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several
years following 2009.
In their early incarnations, platforms such as Myspace and
Facebook were relatively harmless. They allowed users to create pages on which
to post photos, family updates, and links to the mostly static pages of their
friends and favorite bands. In this way, early social media can be seen as just
another step in the long progression of technological improvements—from the
Postal Service through the telephone to email and texting—that helped people
achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties.
But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable
sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I
wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with
Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and
managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do
not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.
From the December 2019 issue: The dark psychology of social
networks
Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more
time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major
transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.
Babel is not a story about tribalism. It’s a story about the
fragmentation of everything.
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a
never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with
the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often
overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others
were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way
to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter
introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed
users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their
followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button,
which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons
quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about
what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user
the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction,
eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics
unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post
that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you
blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode
to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in
turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were
guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of
reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each
new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet”
button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made
Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of
the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just
handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and
politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost
perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective
selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of
anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the
U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social
psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it
depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities
are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.”
The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in
mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give
leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them
accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
From the October 2018 issue: America is living James
Madison’s nightmare
The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012
brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare. Many authors
quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human
proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves
into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they
are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for
their common good.”
But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally
important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes
that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion
presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been
sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent
conflicts.”
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the
frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls
over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Tax the Rich dress at the annual Met Gala,
and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial
event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about
Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his
COVID vaccine?
Read: The Ukraine crisis briefly put America’s culture war
in perspective
It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that
matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy
can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a
democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules,
norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular
individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in
elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and
the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every
election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other
side. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international
measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental
organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United
Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as
the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the
bottom (albeit above Russia).
Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed
corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in
general. A working paper that offers the most
comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp
Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported
associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for
democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly
in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social
media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing
populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
From the April 2021 issue: The internet doesn’t have to be
awful
When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in
the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the
institutions entrusted with the education of children. History curricula have
often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible
for parents to become outraged every day over a
new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and
literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country.
The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching
laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and
reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the
post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a
people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended
different schools or who were educated in a different decade.
The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these
fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis
focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential
growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago,
Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent,
breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted
that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” He
described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized
mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of
existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or
an organization that could bring it about.
Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but
he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass
audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the
same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls
the first post-Babel diaspora, he said:
The digital
revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken
pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and
it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and
living in bubbles of one sort or another.
Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by
rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of
human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions,
and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the
mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a
large and diverse secular democracy together.
I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years
between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year
marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy
of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely
exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of
the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance
crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country,
and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few
adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.
The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump
could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which
said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which
Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential
campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not
in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.
Politics After Babel
“Politics
is the art of the possible,” the German
statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much
may be possible.
Of course, the American culture war and the decline of
cross-party cooperation predates social media’s arrival. The mid-20th century
was a time of unusually low polarization in Congress, which
began reverting back to historical levels in the 1970s and ’80s. The
ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the
1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a
more combative party. For example, House Speaker Newt Gingrich discouraged new
Republican members of Congress from moving their families to Washington, D.C.,
where they were likely to form social ties with Democrats and their families.
So cross-party relationships were already strained before
2009. But the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more
hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the
enemy with sufficient vigor. On the right, the term RINO (Republican
in Name Only) was superseded in 2015 by the more contemptuous term cuckservative, popularized on Twitter by
Trump supporters. On the left, social media launched callout culture in the
years after 2012, with transformative effects on university life and
later on politics and culture throughout the English-speaking world.
From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American
mind
What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter
engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet
doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while
broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a
dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012,
Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve
been shooting one another ever since.
Social media has given voice to some people who had little
previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for
their misdeeds, not just in politics but in business, the arts, academia, and
elsewhere. Sexual harassers could have been called out in anonymous blog posts
before Twitter, but it’s hard to imagine that the #MeToo movement would have
been nearly so successful without the viral enhancement that the major
platforms offered. However, the warped “accountability” of social media has
also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.
First, the dart guns of social media give more power to
trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens. Research by the
political scientists Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Petersen found that
a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with
gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so. They admit that in
their online discussions they often curse, make fun of their opponents, and get
blocked by other users or reported for inappropriate comments. Across eight
studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more
aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people
to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able
to dominate discussion forums, Bor and Petersen found, because nonjerks are
easily turned off from online discussions of politics. Additional research
finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the
digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.
Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and
voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the
moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy
group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified
seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right,
known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population.
The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8
percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most
prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over
the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.
These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways.
They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that
America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who
are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two
groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political
attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely
a result of thought-policing on social media: “Those who express sympathy for
the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In
other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they
spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on
their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on
compromise grind to a halt.
From the October 2021 issue: Anne Applebaum on how mob
justice is trampling democratic discourse
Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media
deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process.
Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for
vigilantes. A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on
strikes. Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective
punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences,
including innocent people losing their jobs and
being shamed into suicide. When our public square is
governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and
inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and
truth.
Structural Stupidity
Since the tower
fell, debates of all kinds have grown more
and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human
tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs. Even
before the advent of social media, search engines were supercharging confirmation
bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and
conspiracy theories, such as that the Earth is flat and that the U.S.
government staged the 9/11 attacks. But social media made things much worse.
From the September 2018 issue: The cognitive biases
tricking your brain
The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction
with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with
counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only
his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out
conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think
differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you
smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence
or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are
shooting darts into their own brain.
In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing
institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse.
In his book The
Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the
historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic
operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from
the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals. English law
developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both
sides of a case to an impartial jury. Newspapers full of lies evolved into
professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out
multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by
fact-checking. Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into
research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth
evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world
would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.
Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from
having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of
knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history, linking together the
world’s best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances
into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported
scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon.
But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not
self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings
and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.”
So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal
disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically
uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent?
This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key
institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because
social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The
shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative
industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and
local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed
by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality
social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent,
could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a
drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key
institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back
critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their
students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.
But when an institution punishes internal dissent, it
shoots darts into its own brain.
The stupefying process plays out differently on the right
and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives
with different sacred values. The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the
“devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism.
They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies
outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and
traitors. According to the political scientist Karen Stenner, whose work the
“Hidden Tribes” study drew upon, they are psychologically different from the
larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who
emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.
Only within the devoted conservatives’ narratives do Donald
Trump’s speeches make sense, from his campaign’s ominous opening diatribe about
Mexican “rapists” to his warning on January 6, 2021: “If you don’t fight like
hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the
battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.” Right-wing death threats, many
delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional
conservatives, for example in driving out local election officials who
failed to “stop the steal.” The wave of threats delivered to dissenting
Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining
moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the
conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality. We now have
a Republican Party that describes a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol as “legitimate political discourse,” supported—or at
least not contradicted—by an array of right-wing think tanks and media
organizations.
The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many
conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress.
“Pizzagate,” QAnon, the belief that vaccines contain microchips, the
conviction that Donald Trump won reelection—it’s hard to imagine any of these
ideas or belief systems reaching the levels that they have without Facebook and
Twitter.
The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural
stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle
between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and
ongoing, and often the moderates win. The problem is that the left controls the
commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood,
art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and
teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions,
dissent has been stifled: When everyone was issued a dart gun
in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in
the brain. And unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and
entertain most of the country.
Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the
sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which
America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the
struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress
toward realizing the noble promise of its founding. This story easily supports
liberal patriotism, and it was the animating narrative of Barack Obama’s
presidency. It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden
Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian
values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s
cultural and intellectual institutions.
But when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave
everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most
shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these
older liberal leaders. Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the
activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is
an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on
top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is
rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or
opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.
The universal charge against people who disagree with this
narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking
the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. The punishment
that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and
social death.
You can see the stupefaction process most clearly when a
person on the left merely points to research that questions or contradicts a
favored belief among progressive activists. Someone on Twitter will find a way
to associate the dissenter with racism, and others will pile on. For example,
in the first week of protests after the killing of George Floyd, some of which
included violence, the progressive policy analyst David Shor, then employed by
Civis Analytics, tweeted a link to a study showing that
violent protests back in the 1960s led to electoral setbacks for the Democrats
in nearby counties. Shor was clearly trying to be helpful, but in the ensuing
outrage he was accused of “anti-Blackness” and was soon dismissed from his job. (Civis Analytics has
denied that the tweet led to Shor’s firing.)
The Shor case became famous, but anyone on Twitter had
already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don’t question your
own side’s beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go
silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists’ more
radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization.
This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to “go woke” in rapid
succession that year and the next, beginning with a wave of controversies and resignations at The
New York Times and other newspapers, and continuing on to social-justice pronouncements by groups of
doctors and medical associations (one publication by the American Medical
Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, for
instance, advised medical professionals to refer to
neighborhoods and communities as “oppressed” or “systematically divested”
instead of “vulnerable” or “poor”), and the hurried transformation of curricula at New
York City’s most expensive private schools.
Tragically, we see stupefaction playing out on both sides
in the COVID wars. The right has been so committed to minimizing the risks of
COVID that it has turned the disease into one that preferentially kills
Republicans. The progressive left is so committed to maximizing the dangers of COVID that it
often embraces an equally maximalist, one-size-fits-all strategy for vaccines,
masks, and social distancing—even as they pertain to children. Such policies
are not as deadly as spreading fears and lies about vaccines, but many of them
have been devastating for the mental health and education of children, who desperately need
to play with one another and go to school; we have little clear evidence that school closures and masks for young children reduce deaths from
COVID. Most notably for the story I’m telling here, progressive parents who
argued against school closures were frequently savaged on social media and met with the
ubiquitous leftist accusations of racism and white supremacy. Others in blue
cities learned to keep quiet.
American politics is getting ever more ridiculous and
dysfunctional not because Americans are getting less intelligent. The problem
is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished
within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into
official policy.
It’s Going to Get Much Worse
In a 2018
interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to
Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing
the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by
Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and
angry. But back then, in 2018, there was an upper limit to the amount of shit
available, because all of it had to be created by a person (other than some low-quality
stuff produced by bots).
Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling
the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3
is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out
as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising
level of coherence. In a year or two, when the program is upgraded to GPT-4, it
will become far more capable. In a 2020 essay titled “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,”
Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory,
explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake
videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with
GPT-3.)
American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and
social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too. In a
haunting 2018 essay titled “The Digital Maginot Line,” DiResta described the
state of affairs bluntly. “We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an
Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological
extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow
discord and erode shared reality,” she wrote. The Soviets used to have to send
over agents or cultivate Americans willing to do their bidding. But social
media made it cheap and easy for Russia’s Internet Research Agency to invent
fake events or distort real ones to stoke rage on both the left and the right,
often over race. Later research showed that an
intensive campaign began on Twitter in 2013 but soon spread to
Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among other platforms. One of the major goals
was to polarize the American public and spread distrust—to split us apart at
the exact weak point that Madison had identified.
If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our
political system, and our society may collapse.
We now know that it’s not just the Russians attacking
American democracy. Before the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, China had mostly
focused on domestic platforms such as WeChat. But now China is discovering how much it can do with Twitter
and Facebook, for so little money, in its escalating conflict with
the U.S. Given China’s own advances in AI, we can expect it to become more
skillful over the next few years at further dividing America and further
uniting China.
In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the
country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong
force that helped keep the culture and the polity together. In the 21st
century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products
that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared
understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.
Democracy After Babel
We can
never return to the way things were in the
pre-digital age. The norms, institutions, and forms of political participation
that developed during the long era of mass communication are not going to work
well now that technology has made everything so much faster and more
multidirectional, and when bypassing professional gatekeepers is so easy. And
yet American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability.
If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political
system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic,
financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.
What changes are needed? Redesigning democracy for the
digital age is far beyond my abilities, but I can suggest three categories of
reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in
the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can
withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes
less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic
citizenship in this new age.
Harden Democratic Institutions
Political polarization is likely to increase for the
foreseeable future. Thus, whatever else we do, we must reform key institutions
so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation,
and violence increase far above those we have today.
For instance, the legislative branch was designed to
require compromise, yet Congress, social media, and partisan cable news
channels have co-evolved such that any legislator who reaches across the aisle
may face outrage within hours from the extreme wing of her party, damaging her
fundraising prospects and raising her risk of being primaried in the next
election cycle.
Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry
extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their
district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries,
replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top
several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice
voting. A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska,
and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former
President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a
closed Republican primary but is not in an open one.
A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce
the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for
example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials
who will supervise elections. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan
way. Research on procedural justice shows that when people perceive that a
process is fair, they are more likely to accept the legitimacy of a decision
that goes against their interests. Just think of the damage already done to the
Supreme Court’s legitimacy by the Senate’s Republican leadership when it
blocked consideration of Merrick Garland for a seat that opened up nine months
before the 2016 election, and then rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney
Barrett in 2020. A widely discussed reform would end this political
gamesmanship by having justices serve staggered 18-year terms so that each
president makes one appointment every two years.
Reform Social Media
A democracy cannot survive if its public squares are places
where people fear speaking up and where no stable consensus can be reached.
Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and
foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more
like rule by the most aggressive.
But it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability
to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the
platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to
what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”
Those who oppose regulation of social media generally focus
on the legitimate concern that government-mandated content restrictions will,
in practice, devolve into censorship. But the main problem with social media is
not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake
and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and
influence that was not possible before 2009. The Facebook
whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture
of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to
police all content. For example, she has suggested modifying the “Share” function on
Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the
third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into
a new post. Reforms like this are not censorship; they are viewpoint-neutral
and content-neutral, and they work equally well in all languages. They don’t
stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely
to be true.
Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the
toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for
gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.
Read: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem
Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules
so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from
criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the
same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they
could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your
words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a
third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular
country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would
wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that
currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the
frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more
generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online
when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.
In any case, the growing evidence that social media is
damaging democracy is sufficient to warrant greater oversight by a regulatory
body, such as the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade
Commission. One of the first orders of business should be compelling the
platforms to share their data and their algorithms with
academic researchers.
Prepare the Next Generation
The members of Gen Z––those born in and after 1997––bear
none of the blame for the mess we are in, but they are going to inherit it, and
the preliminary signs are that older generations have prevented them from
learning how to handle it.
Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent
generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less
unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these
shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for
effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play
is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll
need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate,
make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept
defeat. A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist
Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the “art of
association” that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of
American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed “a serious threat to
liberal societies.” A generation prevented from learning these social skills,
Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and
would suffer from a “coarsening of social interaction” that would “create a
world of more conflict and violence.”
From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a
generation?
And while social media has eroded the art of association
throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on
adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among
American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to
Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known,
but the timing points to social media as a substantial
contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American
teens became daily users of the major platforms. Correlational and experimental
studies back up the connection to depression and anxiety,
as do reports from young people themselves, and from Facebook’s own research, as reported by The
Wall Street Journal.
Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with
new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more
threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced
social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for
diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among
many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a
range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent
years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose.
Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said
that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of
violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should
expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to
become more severe.
Read: Why I cover campus controversies
The most important change we can make to reduce the
damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have
passed through puberty. Congress should update the Children’s Online Privacy
Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the
age at which companies can collect personal information from children without
parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for
effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies
should be held responsible for enforcing it.
More generally, to prepare the members of the next
generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do
is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most
need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with
minimal adult supervision. Every state should follow the lead of Utah,
Oklahoma, and Texas and pass a version of the Free-Range Parenting Law that
helps assure parents that they will not be investigated for neglect if their 8-
or 9-year-old children are spotted playing in a park. With such laws in place,
schools, educators, and public-health authorities should then encourage parents
to let their kids walk to school and play in groups outside, just as more kids
used to do.
Hope After Babel
The story I have
told is bleak, and there is little
evidence to suggest that America will return to some semblance of normalcy and
stability in the next five or 10 years. Which side is going to become
conciliatory? What is the likelihood that Congress will enact major reforms
that strengthen democratic institutions or detoxify social media?
Yet when we look away from our dysfunctional federal
government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly,
things seem more hopeful. Most Americans in the More in Common report are
members of the “exhausted majority,” which is tired of the fighting and is
willing to listen to the other side and compromise. Most Americans now see that
social media is having a negative impact on the country, and are becoming more
aware of its damaging effects on children.
Will we do anything about it?
When Tocqueville toured the United States in the 1830s,
he was impressed by the American habit of forming voluntary associations to fix
local problems, rather than waiting for kings or nobles to act, as Europeans
would do. That habit is still with us today. In recent years, Americans have
started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and
friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on
whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us.
We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change
ourselves and our communities.
What would it be like to live in Babel in the days after
its destruction? We know. It is a time of confusion and loss. But it is also a
time to reflect, listen, and build.
