WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID
By Jonathan HaidtIllustrations by Nicolás Ortega
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.
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.
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.
[illustration with an 1820 painting of outdoor feast with people in
historical dress fleeing a giant flaming Facebook logo in a colonnaded
courtyard]Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: _Belshazzar’s
Feast_, John Martin, 1820.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
[illustration with detail from 19th-century painting of hand holding
dart with an email "send" logo in place of its flights]Illustration by
Nicolás Ortega. Source: _Venus and Cupid_, Pierre-Maximilien
Delafontaine, by 1860.
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.
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.
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.
[illustration with 17th-century painting of woman looking in mirror
that is shattered around the thumbs-up "like" symbol]Illustration by
Nicolás Ortega. Source: _Vanity_, Nicolas Régnier, c. 1626.
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.
[illustration with 1861 engraving of the arch-heretics from Dante's
"Inferno" with two people looking at glowing smartphone screen
surrounded by people climbing out of tombs with fires smoking and city
wall in background]Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: _The Arch
Heretics_, Gustave Doré, c. 1861.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
-------------------------
_This article appears in the __May 2022__ print edition with the
headline “After Babel.” _
