S5E12: Gashed Hull: Social Media: Jonathan Haidt

This is Larry Lessig last episode. We began to unpack how media today is different and why that difference matters to what kind of politics is possible. Today we continue that conversation with the first in a series of conversations about social media and its effect on democracy. My guest is Professor Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across culture and political divisions. Haidt is the author of the Happiness Hypothesis 2006 and the New York Times bestsellers the Righteous Minds 2012 and the Coddling of the American Mind 2018 with Greg Lukhanev. Since 2018, he's been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teenage mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. And that's what we'll be talking about today. He's currently in the middle of writing two books, Kids in Space, why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing, and Life After Babel. Adapting to a World we can no Longer Share, Haidt has become a leader in the social media reform movement. He has effectively terrified many about the harms this new media is, is spreading, especially with our kids. We talk about that harm and what might be done about it in the episode that begins now. Jonathan, I'm so grateful that you took some time to talk to us. You've done a lot of work about, I think of it as the psychology of publics. And you've been very focused recently on the impact of technology on particular publics, both political and youth. And I want to start with the story with youth because it's quite startling to parents, and I'm a parent to see the way that technology has taken over our kids. And so I'd like to start by you just helping us understand what's going on. And I would love it if we could also relate it to another wonderful body of work that you've pushed forward, which is really about the character of our kids, the character of this generation, and what we need to be aware of and worry about, maybe about them. But let's just start with social media and our kids. What are we learning? What do we know?

Okay, so I think a way to approach this is to start with the story of the boy who cried wolf. And, you know, if you say, oh, this terrible thing is happening several times and it doesn't happen, then people don't believe you when the wolf actually comes. And because there have been so many moral panics about whatever technology the kids are using. And this goes back to novels in the 18th century which were exciting the sexual passions of the youth. So because there's this long history, as far as I can tell, most media scholars have a predisposition to say this is just another moral panic, just like all the others. And if we didn't look at the mental health data, then that would be a plausible thing to say. But as soon as you look at the mental health data, you see something so extraordinary, so horrific, you know, it's hard to compare it to Covid. I think in the long run it's going to be much more, much bigger and deadlier and something that will end up changing society much more than Covid. But if you basically have kids born after 1995 having ever increasing rates of depression, anxiety, self harm and suicide, I'm just kind of amazed that we're not all up in arms saying, let's figure this out, let's do something. And instead where we are is there are other researchers who say, well, yeah, you know, it's true that all these rates suddenly shot up for girls in 2012, which happens to be basically the year that they got iPhones. They didn't get iPhones the first year or two. It came out. It's really around 2010, 2011, that kids start trading their flip phones for iPhones. And then 2012 is the year Instagram becomes popular when Facebook buys it. And so another stunning fact about the curves is that even though things are bad for boys and girls, when you look and I've got all these graphs in my book and people can find them on my sub stack, you always see kind of, you know, you see a general, like an increase for boys after 2012 or so. 2010, 2012 it begins going up, but it's more gentle for the girls. It's very often a very sharp elbow. Right at 2012. In fact, for preteen girls, the suicide rate increased 50%, 50% increase. Now it's a relatively low number, but still a 50% increase between 2012 and 2013. And it wasn't a fluke, it just kept rising after that. So that's where we are. We could talk about the evidence if you want to get geeky about this. We can talk about the difference between correlational studies, longitudinal studies and experiments. And I can go through all the data in all three kinds, but there's probably more interesting stuff for us to discuss.

Well, I mean, you've been quite helpful in gathering all of the research. There's this wonderful Google spreadsheet which has all of the research that you've put together to come to the conclusions that you've come to. But I am struck by really the attitude that people bring to talking about this subject. I mean, just today I was reading this new piece by Caitlin Tiffany in the Atlantic which lays it out in a way that makes you, in the end, believe, well, this might be a problem, but might not. So I don't really need to worry about it. I mean, you're interviewed in the piece, but I was quite.

Oh, I haven't seen that one yet. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. She talked with me. Yeah. She's written a number of things that are skeptical. Oh, yeah, here it is. Let's see. No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens. Yeah. Now this is very. This is very concerning. I mean, part of what's happening here is scientists in particular are. We have a kind of a standard of proof which is kind of like a criminal trial. You know, we're not going to believe something unless there's, you know, beyond a reasonable out p less than 0.05. But in a civil trial, it's p less than 0.5. Right. I mean, it's, you know, does the evidence suggest that you probably caused your neighbor's house to burn down or probably didn't? And when you look at all the accumulated evidence about social media and the timing and the fact that nobody can come up with an alternative, this is stunning to me. Nobody can come up with a single alternative that works internationally. People will say, oh, it was the, you know, the Newtown shooting in Connecticut. Like, that's what did it. You know, kids got scared because of the Newtown shooting and the lockdown drills. Well, maybe in the US it did. But why would that cause the exact same thing to happen at the same time in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway? I mean, so what we need to shift to is not this attitude of, well, we're not going to do anything until we're certain to. We have a gigantic epidemic here. It's killing kids, it's ruining a generation. There's only one candidate. There's evidence for the candidate. What do you say we do something about it?

Right, right. So you are firmly committed to the bullet. I mean, you're firmly convinced that we have evidence of causal effect of social media use on the mental health outcomes of kids?

Yes. We have more than 20 experiments. That's right.

And it's more pronounced for girls than for boys. But it's true for boys.

That's right. So, yes. So. And the key thing here is when you look at studies of screen time, then it's much vaguer and the evidence of harm is more mixed. When you look, if you can zoom in on social media and separate boys and girls, which most studies don't do, whenever you do, you find much larger correlations. For girls, boys, there is some evidence, but it's spotty. I can't be confident saying that social media is driving boys increase in depression. It probably is contributing for many boys, but I can't say it overall for girls. I can say it with a lot of evidence behind me.

Now, do we have any good sense of like the context of social media where we should be more worried about it than others? I mean, obviously Instagram is a place to be worried about it. TikTok would be a place to worry about it. But are there models of social media that you would be less concerned about?

Well, so there's a funny thing about all the everything about media, which is everybody focuses on content. And you know, I think Marshall McLuhan made this point, you know, like with television, everyone's focusing, well, what's on television? Can't we make better stuff on television? And his point was the medium is the message. When you move from print to television, you stop being a reader and thinker. You start being a consumer of entertainment. When everything moves on to social media, you stop being a consumer of entertainment. You start being a fount of opinions and judgments and everyone has to be judging, judging, judging. Like, don't, like, like don't. So I would start. I don't even want to talk about the content. That's not that important. I would want to talk about ages. I would want to talk about the change to social life. So the subtitle of my. So the title of the book I'm writing is called the Anxious Generation. And the subtitle is likely to be how the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. We are human beings with bodies that evolved on this planet over millions of years. Childhood has all these amazing, intricate evolutionary features. Boys need to do rough and tumble play. Girls like it too, but it seems to be more important for boys. We need to make eye contact, we need to hug and be help with all sorts of things we need to do. And if kids can go through puberty and become adults and then they move into the virtual world, it might be okay. Basically, that's what you and I and everyone else did. Like, we feel scattered, we feel it's hard to focus, we're overwhelmed. But we're not necessarily mentally ill because of the Internet, but now imagine that your 7 year old gets an iPad and so she's on it whenever she can be. And then when she becomes about 11 and starts middle school, she commonly will get her own phone. And now she has access to the Internet everywhere, all the time. This is what I'd urge us to focus on. Let's start by letting kids get partway through puberty before we give them unrestricted access to the Internet. The greatest damage appears to happen to girls around the ages of 11 to 13 is there's some evidence that that is really the age where their brains get messed up. In puberty the brain is rewiring at a very rapid pace, starting with the emotional areas that are deeper down and ending with the frontal cortex. And so to allow children to go through this neural rewiring not with like people around them and the world around them as we evolve for, but with this bizarre fire hose of weirdness and influencers stuck to their eyes and ears. So I don't even want to talk about whether there are kinds that would be better. The most important thing we can do is raise the age to 16. Frankly I think it should be 18 for social media. But realistically I understand there are reasons why you want to let people on raise the age to 16, certainly 16 without parental permission. I think 16 absolute. And then the next thing is a norm where we don't give kids smartphones until at least high school. There's no reason to give your 10, 11, 12, 13, 13 year old a smartphone. Give them a flip phone. The millennials had flip phones and their mental health actually improved compared to Gen X. And then as soon as you get to Gen Z, these are the first people who go through puberty on a smartphone with Instagram. And they are also the first people to have this explosion of mental illness.

Okay, so but you're talking about rules that would be imposed on societies or families. Why, why aren't parents enough? Why can't parents just regulate this?

Because this is a collective action problem. So when we talk about sugar, there's too much sugar around now. We're not going to say, you know what, let's stop selling candy in stores because kids buy it. We don't think that because we think, you know, people are, parents should be responsible for what their kids are eating and they should. So you know, most of the things we're used to fit into that framework where it's the parents responsibility. But social media is nothing like sugar. Social media is such that once some kids are on it, the lure for others to get on is heavy. And once, you know, a third to a half of the kids are on it. What kids are most afraid of is social death. In fact, many kids would much prefer to die physically than to die socially. And that's why when they are humiliated on social media, they very commonly consider suicide. And many of them actually kill themselves. So again, it's insane that we're letting kids have this suicide generating technology. But the reason why most of us struggle with our kids is because it is because everyone else is on it. That's what they say to us. I have to have an Instagram account because everyone else has an Instagram account. So it's a classic collective action problem. And this is the bread and butter of social scientists when you have a collective action problem where each person might be worse off if they do the right thing. Worse off in the sense that their kid is now excluded. But all of us would be better off if we could just keep them off until 16. Like, let them text each other, let them do all sorts of things. You know, video games are not nearly so bad, but the idea that even at 11 and 12, you should be posting photographs of yourself in a bikini for strangers to look at, I mean, this is just unbelievable.

And so do we see. I mean, obviously what's striking is that we begin to see some state regulation, mainly from red states that are, that are doing something about it. But at the local level, do you see school districts that begin to ban it or try to get parents to ban it for certain ages?

So those that have a lot of social capital and cohesion can do it. And so I'm told that Orthodox Jewish schools routinely ban not just bringing the phone to school, but that they will make the parents agree that they will not give their kids a smartphone. So religious communities can do it. There are some private schools that can do it. The biggest single thing we could do, I believe, to improve both mental health and education outcomes is to strongly encourage schools to actually remove funds from school. Over 70% of schools say that they ban phones. New York City schools ban phones. You know what that means? It means the rule is you can't take your phone out of your pocket during class.

Right?

See, phones are banned. Now imagine if you were running, you know, a drug addict clinic and you said to people, you know what? The use of drugs here is banned. You must keep your heroin in your pocket. Do not take it out when you go to the bathroom. That wouldn't work very well. So Very few schools use. Schools are increasingly using yonder pouches, which are good, but the kids can get them just go on YouTube, you find out how to get into them, but they definitely help. They're good. And then phone lockers is really the best solution. A little harder logistically sometimes. But a phone locker, you need a phone to get to school. I understand that. To arrange pickup, but. But I have an essay in the Atlantic recently laying out the evidence that when kids have phones in their pockets, they check them a lot, they don't pay attention and they don't talk to each other. So this is the last point I want to make about the collective action problem. Once most kids have a smartphone, then they're not. You can't talk to them between classes, you can't talk to them even at lunch. I mean, you sit with them, but everyone's checking their phone even at lunch. So it devastates social interaction. And then are we surprised that they don't grow up with normal social skills?

Yeah. So the regulation that's happening in red states in particular right now, Montana just banned TikTok fully. Utah's been experimenting with different forms of this. Have you been talking to these regulators about why this is something they should be doing?

I've spoken with the governor of Utah who is one of the leaders here. Utah really is a family friendly state. They see this as a threat to the family. You know, banning things is complicated. I don't have an opinion on all of the specific state rules. I think they're very valuable because two years ago there was a kind of a thought like, yeah, maybe it's a problem, but you know, what are you going to do? The phones are out there. What are you going to do? They're just going to lie, the kids. You can't keep them. And Congress has done nothing, absolutely, literally nothing since 1998. I mean, they created this, you know, very weak rule, coppa, regulated when kids can sign a legally binding contract to give away their data and their rights. They said 13. And so that became the law of the world. Basically that at 13. No, wait, no, actually it's not 13. You just have to be old enough to say you're 13. As long as you're old enough to say that you're 13, you can go anywhere on the Internet. So I'm glad that the states are acting because we need somebody to start moving. And eventually I think Congress and the UK I think is likely to make some progress here.

It's striking to me how people think that the problem is Privacy. I mean, there was a. When AOC got on TikTok, her first TikTok post, and defended TikTok against the push in Congress to do something about TikTok, her defense was basically, well, it's not fair to pick on TikTok because we don't have privacy regulations regulating Facebook either. And it's like, okay, yes, that's, that's a bad thing. We should have privacy regulations that are universal. But this is not a privacy. This is not just a privacy question. In fact.

No, that's right. Yeah, yeah. I don't even care about the privacy thing. There's so many other bigger things that, like, privacy is way down on my list.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's clear. I mean, you can divide the world into people who just feel it viscerally because they experience it, because they know what it's like to have a teenager on an iPhone and the rest of the world that just doesn't actually even connect to it. It's like, you know, the difference between people who have been exposed to addicts and people who have not. And they. Yeah, and the people who have not just have no way of understanding, like, why, why can't you just say no to this?

Yeah, exactly. That's good. That's a good comparison.

Okay, so, but here's an obvious point which, very obvious when I state it, but you'll see exactly why I want to make sure this is clear. Nobody thinks that Instagram and now Facebook, or maybe we don't think TikTok. Maybe we're more ambiguous about that. Are companies that are thinking, how do we destroy kids? Right. I mean, these are unintended consequences of a certain kind of business model. Right. I mean, and, and, and I asked before about different applications, not so much because I wanted to focus on the content, but for example, there's an app called Bereal, which once a day will tell you you need to take a picture and connect with your friends. So it's business. Its business model is not about making you obsessively focus on content.

How do they make money?

I don't know. I don't know that they make money. I think they're trying to build a big network. I mean, I don't know. This is the big challenge. But the flip side of that is we could be regulating to make the business model of perpetual engagements costly. Right? So imagine you said that for the first hour of engagement, you don't have to pay a tax, but when your person is engaged for two hours, then you have to pay you know, one tax and then it's a quadratic function. The more they are engaged, it's a quadratically high tax. And that, you know, you can imagine that shifting the business model so that they.

Oh, that is interesting.

But, you know, yeah, and, but the other thing about this, which I find striking is you tell people about China, you know, so TikTok has two versions, the Chinese version and the American version. And in China, there are rules about when you can be on if you're a kid and how long you can be on. And the content is skewed in favor of educational content. And it's amazing that Americans can't even imagine the idea of working hours. Like you can't be on your smartphone and social media after 9 o' clock at night. We could have a law that said that there's no reason why we couldn't do that. But we have. So our imagination around regulation, I feel, is, is so withered because of the failures of government in so many different contexts.

Well, first, so let me just point out, I think, you know, the idea of, the idea of the government putting on restrictions is just obvious in China. It's an authoritarian country with an authoritarian tradition and is anathema in the United States. So I'm not surprised. I don't think that like something like that, like a rule that you have to be, you know, kids can't be on at a certain time. But I, but age, age gating, age limits is an absolutely legitimate function. All over the physical world, we've learned how to live with kids. When I was a kid, when you and I were kids, you could buy cigarettes because you could go to vending machine. And then we finally realized, you know what, let's not have vending machines. Right? You know, we put, you know, we put, we have seat belts, car seats. I mean, we've learned how to live with children and reduce the damage to them. And it took a while over many decades in the 20th century. And then everyone goes online on Instagram and other places around 2012, and we say, how about zero? How about nothing? How about no protections of any kind, no age gating, everyone can go anywhere. And so I've recently begun thinking we have. There's really three paths we can follow. The path we're on is there's an unrestricted Internet and there are no gates. Let's call it, There's a libertarian Internet and anyone can go on it. So that's what we have now. And this is, I believe, really destroying Gen Z, especially the girls. So I don't think we should stay on that path. The other two paths are. One is we have age gating. We say if you want to go on pornhub, you actually have to do something to authenticate your age. And if we could do that with Cornhub and with Instagram and TikTok. So you can't open an account. This is the crucial thing. You can't open an account so that the algorithm knows you and feeds you. If we could have age gating, then we could have. Kids could be on the Internet. That's my favorite path. But since it. I think people will yell and scream if they have to do anything to get on CornHub. So if we're going to continue to have a libertarian Internet where anyone can do anything, then I think we need to keep kids off of it. That sounds terrible, but. And by off, I don't mean that they never use the Internet. Of course not. I mean, we need the Internet for a lot of things. What I mean is unrestricted access. Here's your smartphone, kid. You can be on at 11:30 at night after your parents have gone to bed. Just keep it under your cover so that your parents won't see it. This is insane what we're doing.

Yeah, and the idea, I mean, one reason people don't push for the regulation is that there's actually a pretty significant question about what regulation is permitted. I mean, there was all this regulation of video games, which for reasons you've described, or videos and video games. It's not clear that they had anything like the same negative effect that we're seeing with social media. But in the context of that litigation, the courts began to articulate a very strong First Amendment principle that said that kids had a right to this content and you could only be restricting this content in very narrow contexts. And the same thing with the idea of age gating. Legal content like pornography as opposed to obscenity, there too. The civil rights groups have pushed the idea that there's a First Amendment right to access that and any burden you place on children.

Wait, wait.

Well, no, no, not for children. But the point is, if you have a scheme that requires you to verify your age, that burdens older people as much as younger people. Now it burdens it differently. The 13 year old won't be able to get on, but the 25 year old or the 70 year old has to bear the burden of like showing an id. Now, I don't think that's. That should matter. I don't think that should be a burden I don't think that's a constitution issue. I'm just saying that the reality is we live in a constitutionally empowered libertarian Internet. It's not just that you have a bunch of lack of regulation, you have an affirmative value that the law has increasingly imposed that you have to just let it alone.

Oh, that's it. That's interesting. You know, in psychology we have the concept of concept creep. So you know, there really is such a thing as abuse and addiction and bullying. You know, these are real things. And whatever they meant in the 80s, gradually they came to mean almost everything. You know, kids today if they there's so much anti bullying stuff, if someone's mean to you, then they bullied you. So concept creep. And it sounds like we have kind of constitutional concept creep. Like obviously the first Amendment is a very crucial amendment, but to apply that, that somehow the first Amendment protects your right to have totally unfettered access to pornography without even without even clicking a button, just, you should just be able to get on. So that does sound very strange. Now actually I'd love your opinion on this. People seem to think whenever I say we need to raise the age of 16, many people seem to think that this will violate kids right to speak. They should be able to speak on social media and give their political opinions at any age. But I think people are thinking too narrowly about like banning people from being online. And instead I think what we should be thinking about is going back to coppa, the Child Online Privacy Protection act, which said when can a child sign a legally binding contract? And as I've been talking about this, a lot of people say like on Twitter, like, oh, but minors can't sign legally binding contracts. And I looked it up, you tell me. But from my brief survey online, like no, the terms of service, when you check that box, the terms of service are a legally binding contract. And COPPA meant that children can sign that at the age of 13. So I think the simplest way to do it isn't to say no social media till you're 16, because then I understand, at least I understand the First Amendment arguments. It's rather to say boy did we mess up in deciding to treat 13 year olds as legal adults. Boy did we, we got that wrong. In fact, Ed Markey originally set the age to 16 and written various lobbyists pulled it down to 13 for no good reason. Or rather I should just say for reasons not related to mental health. So what do you think about that the question should be raised in the age of Internet adulthood?

Well, I'm not convinced this is a solution because the whole idea of contract age is not so much to forbid a certain interaction, but to shift the the burdens of the consequence of that interaction. So If I'm a 15 year old and I enter into a contract to buy a car from you, I can actually enforce that contract against you. You can't enforce it against me. So it's just about like protecting the child against the consequences of the contract in certain contexts. Not so much to forbid the contract because you're free to enter into a contract with a 13 year old to sell your car or to sell, you know, your tv. That's not regulated. It's just if you enter into that contract, then you might not be able to enforce it against the kid because the.

But the kid can enforce it against me. Very interesting.

Yeah.

So what that means. Wait, so wait, so if you have a nine year old opens an Instagram account, they lie and they say they're 13, everything's fine, right?

Well, I mean it's not fine from the standpoint of Instagram because Instagram doesn't want them on. They will say I'm going to kick them off.

No, they do want them on. No, they want them on.

Well, I mean from the official perspective of Instagram, they don't want them on. They want to be able to say yes, if we discover there's a nine year old on, we're going to kick them off and they kick them off and there's no contract consequence for them kicking them off. That's certainly true. But the whole idea of using contract to regulate here, or the idea that could evade the putative First Amendment issue, I just think is a mistake. I think we should just address the First Amendment issue head on. So yes, my 13 year old.

How would you do that?

My 13 year old daughter I think has a First Amendment issue to post her views about whatever. The question is in what kind of context?

Yes.

So the point about Instagram or The point about TikTok is not just that it's a place where people speak, it's that they speak inside of a machine that is tuned to addict them in all sorts of poisonous ways. So if I shut them out of TikTok or I shut them out of Instagram to post their views, let them open a blog. I don't care if they open a blog and they type their thoughts. So the point is to recognize these as a certain kind of machine as opposed to this simple. They're always analogizing this to the New York Times. You're shutting down the New York Times. TikTok is not the New York Times. Right. And these platforms are not blogs. And that's the way we've got to begin to talk about it if we're ever going to be able to escape. But it's going to certainly be a very difficult First Amendment.

No, that's great. I like that. Addressing the idea that yes, there is a positive value to having 11 year olds say what they think about gun control and the environment. I agree. And yes, of course they should be able to write up their views and put them out. And then so that's one argument. But then on the other side there are certain places like a boxing ring, a strip club, a coal mine where we don't want children to be. It's not safe for them. Right.

I mean a bar. Think of a bar. I mean people get together at bars. You and I might get together and talk about politics at a bar. And so we engage in speech and if you ban people from bars, you might say geez, you're stopping people from speaking. But there's no problem in telling a

kid or free from association. Right.

So free association, there's no problem telling a kid. You can't go and associate in a bar. You can't go speak in a bar because we understand there's a separate type of issue and that doesn't restrict their freedom of speech in some fundamental sense. It just is a time, place and manner type of restriction.

Okay, well good. So actually Larry, maybe there's some hope here because this year and just really in the last 10 or 12 months, it started when Francis Haugen testified. So if we go back to what was that like September of 2021, I think. Yeah, yeah. So Francis Haugen comes out with Facebook files and all the leaks. Whistleblower from in 2021. That's when things begin to turn and public sentiment becomes much more convinced that actually you know what, this machine is really chewing up kids. And in this year, 2023 is when we're seeing finally all this legislation which means again that state politicians, state level, you know, they're seeing in their constituents a view for this. I would say that now almost everybody sees the problem. You know, every parent of a teen sees it. The teachers, the school administrators, the psychotherapists, everybody sees it except for a small number of researchers who have their heads buried in dose response data, in this one kind of data about hours of use correlating with, with mental illness. But if you see the whole problem and you see the Emergent aspects, the collective action problem. I think people are really seeing it. So I think the line of argument that you're pursuing wouldn't have caught on two or three years ago, but I suspect that actually it will catch on now.

Right. I'm hopeful. But we're going to see. I think Montana is a very interesting case about this because they're shutting down a particular platform in the. And very smartly TikTok has gotten a bunch of the creators who distribute their stuff on TikTok to say this is violating my First Amendment right in Montana. So we'll see that work out. But the other part about this, which I think is really interesting in your work is the way you relate it to a certain character of Gen Z that's different for different reasons, but that is rendering them particularly vulnerable to deal with a complicated world around them. And so what is the origin of this and how does it connect to the kind of environments that are inside?

So most of my writing has been on social media, but half of the story is the decline of childhood freedom and autonomy. So as I said before, we're biological creatures. We need a lot of free play, rough and tumble play, all kinds of play play and risk taking. It turns out that when kids climb a tree and get afraid because they've gone too high, that's really important. And they have to have that fear. And fear is a part of childhood kids, you know, if a kid learns to skateboard, they don't just do the same thing over and over again. They add risk. Kids add risk because they have to dose themselves. This is the way a kid unfolds to become a competent, confident adult able to judge risk, face some risk and make intelligent choices about risk. We banned that in the 90s. In the 90s we said for a lot of reasons, all kinds of sociological reasons, legal reasons that it. But in all the English speaking countries, or I'm sorry, at least in the US, UK and Canada, what happened in the 90s was we had all these sex scandals, abuse scandals, Some of them were real, that there were, you know, there were men in authority who had been abusing children. Some were completely fabricated. Like the idea that young women in a daycare are molesting the children. That none of that was ever true. Whatever the story, we freaked out in the 90s about child molestation, child abduction and we started locking our kids up. So you don't hear stories about parents being arrested in the 90s because their kid was found outside play. Those start in the late 2000s because by around 2007, 2008, nobody had seen a child in the wild for more than a decade. So it began to be where, you know, if a neighbor sees, you know, a nine year old boy walking alone, they might call the police. And once that happens, now parents are really afraid to let their kids out because once child Protective services gets ahold of you, they'll never let go. So we lock our kids up. Now what happens when you don't let kids have unsupervised playtime? They don't get to take risks, they don't get to get in fights and arguments and work them out. They don't learn the basic skills of democracy. The playground is the best school for democracy, much better than a civics class for elementary school kids in particular. So a lot of my story is we overprotected kids. Kids are anti fragile. That means they need setbacks, risk, risk, fear, they need that in order to grow strong and we deprive them of that. So they're weak. So the same generation. This applies to the late millennials too. So Gen Z begins, I say 1996, people say 95 or 97. The late millennials, that is those born after 1990 are raised with this and Gen Z is entirely raised with it. So that's the first part. So they're just weaker psychologically. We didn't let them unfurl, unfold, develop risk tolerance. Then the same kids, you know, 1995, 96 birth year, if you're born in 96, you turn 12 in 2008. That's just right after the iPhone comes out. You might get your first iPhone when you're 13 or 14. So my story is Gen Z was created by the vast overprotection in the real world and vast under protection online, kids who went through puberty without having had a lot of free play. And under the guidance of social media, their brain development was altered, possibly permanently. And they're much more subject to anxiety, depression and fragility.

And then it manifests itself in a constant demand that the environment be rendered safe. Right. So we're both in academic environments, we've both heard stories about students claiming they don't feel safe in certain environments when you know, it's not that they're in a closet with somebody who might have used them, but they don't feel safe because they don't agree with the person who's talking to them. And so this radically changes the very idea of liberal education when you can't have conversations with people you disagree with.

That's right. And so this is a very particular set of ideas that I believe is essentially tied to identitarianism. So what I've been thinking a lot about is right wing identitarianism and left wing identitarianism. So right wing identity is very clear. You know, it's white supremacists, white people are the natural or rightful owners of America, et cetera, et cetera. And that has sucked in a number of boys on these sites like 4chan and other places. So there is a really ugly right wing identitarianism. We saw it in Charlottesville, but at the exact same time emerging, especially on Tumblr. Turns out Tumblr is a really key part of the story. Tumblr brought together fans, not social networks, but people who are fans of something. And there was a culture that developed around 2011, 1213. Angela Nagle's book killed All Normies in which these ideas about identity took shape. Everybody, you have to have your own identity. It's very fragile. And if someone, you know, if someone questions, you know, anything about, you know, you know, trans athletes, if someone has a different view, they're denying your existence, they're attacking you. You are not safe, you. Your identity is threatened. So there's this very fragile identitarianism, sort of a left wing identitarianism. It's embraced by a lot of girls, not boys. And this, I think, is a big part of the reason why the numbers explode for girls in 2013, 2014. For boys, they go up, but it's not nearly so sharp.

The anxiety numbers.

The anxiety, depression, self harm and suicide. Yeah, yeah, all four.

Right. And then. But it continues through to become an ideology as well. Right, because now it's like the right way to think that we have to create these environments of speech that protect against diversity of speech.

Exactly. That's right. It's funny, I just gave a talk earlier today in which I quoted Isaiah Berlin. Let me see if I can find that quote. Oh, he's so wonderful. Here's his writings on plural pluralism. Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth, especially about how to live, what to be and do. Those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad and need restraining or suppressing. So this is what broke out. It's this incredibly intolerant left wing identitarianism. Both forms are very ugly. But on campus we don't see any right wing identitarianism, but the left wing Identitarianism is incredibly bad for the people who embrace it. Their mental health plummets. It's incredibly destructive of organizations. And anybody listening to this who's on the left and who cares about the left's political potency should read was it. Maurice Mitchell had an article, there was also one called the Elephant in the Zoo. There were a couple of big articles came, came out last year, profiling what's happening in progressive organizations. Once you embrace identitarianism, you just have constant fighting because everybody feels that you've harmed them. So it renders organizations impotent. It renders the people, embrace it, depressed. And according to Barbara Walter in her book How Civil Wars Start, a Country that Was a Democracy and falls down into anocracy, as the United States is doing, we're sort of on the border between democracy and anocracy now, or we were briefly. And then also the conflict, the locus of conflict shifts from interests to identity, especially ethnic and racial, religious. When it shifts to identity, that's a big step on the road to actual civil war.

Yeah. And there's a really hard question about where and how you resist it in. You know, I feel fortunate that I have not yet, in my role as a teacher, been in the middle of one of these fights. You know, not because I feel like I'm being particularly sensitive, but it's just the stuff I teach. I don't get into the middle of it. But you could imagine being in the middle of one of these fights where you have said something that, you know, people have taken in a way that they claim they don't feel safe now. And then you've got to make a choice about what idea are you going to defend. And, you know, at a place like where you teach or where I teach, you're probably protected regardless of what you do. But there are all sorts of places where that protection is not there, and it's easier for the administration just to move them out and so very quickly becomes a kind of, you know, cultural Revolution. Chinese Cultural Revolution inside of the academy, that makes it very hard to do our job.

Exactly. No, it really is. There's a lot in common with the Chinese Cultural Revolution Revolution. And it's true that you and I are protected by tenure. We're not literally going to be fired if a student lodges a complaint against us. But I've had it happen that students make accusations. At nyu, we have a bias response team in every bathroom. It shows them. In fact, on the back of your ID it says, you know, Emergency 911 bias response line. Here's the number. So if a professor says something, if a professor says anything that offends you, here's how you call it in. So, yeah, it's chilling. It makes it hard to do our jobs and we're all in a collective action problem, sort of a bit the way parents are, that is, each one of us has to decide, okay, someone just said that they're not, that they don't feel safe, or they said that I shouldn't show this slide, or I shouldn't use this word, or I shouldn't assign this article. What am I going to do? Am I going to stand up and explain the principled reasons and risk her escalating it to the judicial system of the university, or am I just going to say, you know what? I'm really, really busy. I don't have time for this. Fine, I'll just cut it.

Right. And 99% would take the latter route.

That's right.

Because, you know, the truth is we academics are not, in our nature, strong people. I mean, there are some nowadays.

Nowadays, yeah, there used to be some, but there's very few now. I agree.

But I want to. What's interesting about this, this identitarianism, is it actually links directly to the business model of media in general. Because what we see in cable television, and we see on the Internet, too, especially in the political space, is that to the extent you can take an issue and render it in identity terms, you can make it into something that's going to drive people's attention and their engagement with it. And so you might think of harmless examples of that. But just think about what happened with COVID when here we're in the middle of a genuine national crisis, invaded by this foreign invader, and yet they succeeded in taking certain aspects of the defense and rendering them political. So it was your. It denied your conservative identity to wear a mask because Tucker Carlson told you that you were pathetic if you wore a mask or if you got a vaccine or something like that. And that. And. But that makes sense from their perspective, from the business model of media's perspective, because it simplifies this business of rallying a base and turning them into loyal followers. So what's scary about this is the way that it begins to cross all domains. It's not just in the academy, it's in fact, fueled much more aggressively even outside the academy. And we have this nation now where people would rather you marry, rather have Putin as your president than a Democrat as your president.

Yes, that's right. I know it's insane. It's completely insane. Look, my own view is that we're a kind of a ship of state floating down a river. We've already gone over Niagara Falls. We are in free fall now. I don't think there's any way to go back. And I don't know where this ends. But yes, it's crazy. And my prediction is that this is the sanest year we're ever going to have. Every year is going to be crazier.

Wow, that's terrifying. I mean, is there. I mean, so, okay, but you must have an intuition of three strategies. I mean, I've seen you at political events where you've been talking to political people about how they can make the world a better place. So like what are those? What is that strategy?

Well, you know, I, you know, you and I are both involved in various democracy reform movements and we're both systems thinkers and you know, we can all point to the closed party primaries and how elections are funded. There's all sorts of things we can do to make our system work better. But what I'm thinking about these days, and this is going to be my second book, so I'm writing the first one is Anxious Generation. But originally it was going to be one big book called Life After Babel. Adapting to a world we may never again share. And what I'm coming to see as I read more of the history of technology is that I think, you know, there are cycles of history first of all. And Peter Turchin has this, I really like his work. He has a new book out called End Times about these cycles of history, like 80 to 100 year old sun cycles. But they're also technological, if not cycles, technological mega events. And so the printing press was one. And even though it didn't change Europe immediately, it set up conditions for a print based culture which gave us the scientific revolution. It gave us liberal democracy based with constitutions. And you know, it just had a huge effect of a print based culture. And I believe that the Gutenberg era, which is where we were able to have these amazing liberal democracies where people got rights, where we made amazing material progress. I think that era ended in 2014. We're now in a new era in which it's not, it's not, it's not about print and information flow that we, you know, we adapted our institutions over 60 centuries to print. And now I think we're entering an age of networks which are ever shifting, always fragmented. There is no way to get agreement across the network, especially in political polarized countries like ours. So we will never have widespread agreement on major things, I think, and somehow we're gonna have to find a way to live in this new post Babel world where we can't really talk to our neighbors and we can't find truth. So, yeah, it's really disorienting. I don't know what's going to happen.

Yeah. The metaphor that sets up the book that these conversations will help inform is a metaphor around the Titanic. So, you know, you imagine as the captain, you hit the iceberg and you're standing on the deck and you see the overturned chairs and you say, okay, we can fix that. We can clean all that up. And then you're. Your crew informs you that there's a tear in the hull across six of the 16 chambers. And you realize it doesn't matter if we fix that because the ship is going down. And now we have to convince people to climb into lifeboats, which in the middle of the Atlantic, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the winter is not an easy thing to do when you're on the Titanic, the supposedly unsinkable Titanic.

Oh, wow.

And the parallel is like the things you and I talk about when we go to democracy organizations, you know, the ranked choice, voting and money in politics, that's the equivalent of the overturned chairs. We know what we could do. We know how to fix that problem, and that problem is fixable. But in a certain sense, when you stand back and you realize we live in a media ecosystem that profits by turning us into ignorant people who hate each other, it doesn't matter whether you fix that. I mean, you said free fall over the Niagara. I think that's exactly right. And then the question is, what are the lifeboats and how do we motivate people to climb into them? Because you're right. I mean, I think this is something that maybe only Democrats can recognize. But the idea that Joe Biden, who has accomplished as much as a president since, I don't know, since Lyndon Baines Johnson or Nixon, even though we hate Nixon for lots of reasons, he accomplished a bunch of stuff. The idea that his popularity is the same as Donald Trump's popularity was, it's not a measure of the truth. It's a measure of the media bubbles that we live inside of. And of course, I understand why their bubbles believe what they believe, but I don't understand how we do democracy where we can't even have a common view.

Well, that's right. So this is, I think, the scary or one of the scary thoughts is that it may be that the era of democracy is over. Liberal democracy is over, I should say. You know, democracy has been around a long time. It'll still be around, but there are pretty savage forms of it. The kind of liberal democracy that we've had. And here I'm drawing a lot on Jonathan Rauch's incredible book, the Constitution of Knowledge, about how it is that we generate knowledge in liberal democracy. It's possible that the kind of democracy we took for granted is no longer tenable in the age of networks. Democracy, I think, thrives when you have a community that has norms and that where people trust and respect each other to some minimal degree as fellow citizens. And we may not have that anymore. So how do we live? Maybe. So what's the working title of your book?

Oh, I don't know. That maybe it's the Titanic. I don't know.

Okay.

No way. Far from that.

Okay. But, you know, but one possible metaphor is we can't have. We can't have big ships anymore. From now on, it's just lifeboats. Everything's in lifeboats. And we. We have to figure out how to live in lifeboats.

Right? I think that's right.

And. Hey, hey, wait. I have one other thing for you. This goes back to something you asked earlier that I didn't get to. You talked about. You raised the business model, which is so crucial here. I don't remember where I got this idea, but somebody pointed out, maybe it was a ted, maybe some conference I was at, somebody pointed out that the incredible amount of innovation that went into the advertising technology. So the idea of having these micro auctions, like a user goes to a page and before the page scrolls down, there's been an auction and somebody bought the. Right. You know, it's incredible technological innovation. And so whoever this was, I heard they pointed out that had that effort gone into micropayments, in other words. Okay, you know, you want to read this article? Is it worth a penny to you? A penny? Sure, I pay a penny, you know, but the overhead of paying a penny is so great. But no, you know, and crypto was already. No, crypto was not around at the time. But whatever. Whether it's crypto or not, the point is, if we were to go to subscription models and post Post News, there's an alternative to Twitter that's doing this. You post stuff. If people like what you say, they can transfer, you know, a penny, 3 cents, 10 cents, whatever they want to you, that would really change the incentives away from keep engagement at any cost and over to create quality stuff that people appreciate consuming it might.

You're right. And it is astonishing to think about the level of innovation that went into this ultimately incredibly poisonous technology. I remember once I went to Yahoo. When there was still a thing called Yahoo. And I spoke to the tech development team and these were gentlemen geniuses. These were like PhDs in math. And I remember talking to one of them and saying, gosh, if you just took your genius and you went to the DHS and you helped them figure out how to distribute healthcare more effectively. And to his credit, he said, I tried and I couldn't get a job. This is the only place I could get a job. So we made this choice as a society to, to fuel this. And of course, it seemed to be solving a pretty important problem. There was no business model for the Internet back then. Right. When those of us beginning thinking about the Internet, we didn't have advertising in our mind. It was completely.

No, that's right. That's right. Web 1.0. I remember telling I had a friend because we were an academic, so we got email first, we got the Internet first. And I remember a friend who was in business saying to me, well, there must be some way to make money. This, this was 1994 or so. And I said, no, that's the beautiful thing. There's no way to make money. It's just information that people put up for nothing. Isn't it amazing? Oh, my God.

If only. Okay, Jonathan, I'm so grateful that you would take time to talk to me. I learned so much from you and what you write, and every time I hear you speak and now in a chance to speak to you directly, I'm grateful and I look forward to, you know, the other conspiracies we can get involved with to make this, these lifeboats livable here.

Yeah, sad metaphor, but yeah. And a lot of this is going to have to do with smart regulation at national and in other countries. And so I've appreciated my conversations with you about that because getting this right is going to be crucial for us having a decent world to live in. So thank you for your work, Larry.

Thank you. This has been the 12th episode of season five of the podcast Another Way. These podcasts are produced by equal citizens and they are physically produced by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. You can find out more about equal citizens at equalcitizens.us and you can give us your favorite feedback and thoughts at that website. We love the feedback. I love the thoughts and of course, we're also grateful for your support. Everything I do for Equal Citizens is done pro bono. I have another job, but we have a team that needs to earn a living and you can donate to help keep us going. Not only does podcast, but everything Equal Citizens does, which is of course, to save democracy in 10 easy steps. Actually, there's one, but that's beyond this conversation. Anyway, you can find the donate at EqualCitizens US. Look for the ubiquitous donate button. Thanks again. Stay tuned for the next episode.

Sam.