Offline with Jon Favreau - Are We Amusing Ourselves to Death?

Episode Date: February 19, 2023

Megan Garber, staff writer at the Atlantic, joins Offline to explain how we’re already living in the Metaverse––not with headsets and legless avatars, but via a continuous stream of immersive entertainment. Jon and Megan discuss how our internet jargon, scandal-to-miniseries pipeline, and former reality TV president all reflect a blurring of fact and fiction. And they ask: when everything becomes entertainment, what remains of our reality? For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

I think often the internet, the messages that it gives and the incentives that it provides, you know, always posting everything is content. Other people are the extras in your great show. That really is constraining. That is not a human thing, actually, because humans are, we want connection. That is fundamental to who we are. And I think a lot of the internet, despite all the promises and pitches of connection and all of these ideas, it does really isolate us and it encloses us within ourselves. It kind of flattens us into performances of ourselves rather than simply ourselves as we are. And then I think it encourages us to see other people in that same way. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline.

Hey, everyone. My guest this week is The Atlantic's Megan Garber, who's recently been writing quite a few pieces that are right in the offline wheelhouse, from internet sleuthing to the everything is fine meme. But there's one piece Megan wrote that a few of you have tweeted at me about. It's titled, We're Already Living in the Metaverse. But it is not about Mark Zuckerberg trying to make us wear VR headsets. In fact, Megan makes the case that our understanding of the metaverse as VR headsets and legless avatars is wrong. She argues that immersive entertainment promised by the metaverse has already arrived, and it's currently blurring the line between fiction and reality in our

television, our politics, and our lives. Megan offers all kinds of examples of this blurring in the piece. The way we talk about losing the plot or being canceled, the fact that there's now a streaming series for every scandal that's hit the news, like the dropout or inventing Anna, and of course, the election of a reality TV star to the nation's highest office. When everything becomes entertainment, what remains of our reality? Megan and I had a fun conversation about this piece. We talked about the ways American politics has become entertainment, how people have come to think of themselves in terms of characters and co-stars, and how we focused on George

Orwell's warnings about Big Brother while ignoring Neil Postman's worry that we are amusing ourselves to death. As always, if you have comments, questions, or episode ideas, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And please do recommend the show the next time you see a friend. Here's Megan Garber. Megan Garber, welcome to Offline. Thanks. Thanks for having me. So you've got a big piece in the March issue of The Atlantic that multiple offline listeners excitedly tweeted at me about, for which I am very grateful because it's excellent. And the title immediately caught my attention. We're already living in the metaverse.

Let's start there. Can you talk about what you mean by that? Sure. So one of the basic ideas of the metaverse is this notion of immersive entertainment, this notion that entertainment becomes in the metaverse, something that you don't simply choose, you know, show by show, book by book, scene by scene, etc. But it becomes something that surrounds you, that you really do live within and that you almost don't have a choice over in a lot of ways that just kind of is there

that you reside in. That's one of the defining ideas of the metaverse across its many manifestations. And my editors and I started thinking that this really does describe the world that we already have. We do not need those clunky goggles from Ready Player One to access a world of immersive entertainment.

We actually live already in a world of immersive entertainment. And it manifests in the sense that everywhere, I think in politics, in culture, across the dimensions of American life, what is emphasized more than anything else is entertainment. I think Americans expect that the world be entertaining. And that is kind of one of the defining realities of this moment. And of course, that's been a defining reality for decades now. Like the concern about the effects of entertainment and mass media on culture and politics, obviously predated the internet. You write about Newt Minow, JFK's FCC commissioner, who famously accused television executives of creating a vast wasteland back in 1961. You mentioned Neil Postman, who

wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985, which, you know, is basically an argument for people who don't know that the bigger threat to America isn't George Orwell's vision of a totalitarian surveillance state, but what he calls a vast descent into triviality, where we're basically all just lulled into complacency by our TV screens. Do you agree with the Postman view of the world? You know, I do with the qualification. So I do in the sense that I very much agree with the Postman view that entertainment left unchecked, when entertainment becomes not just one feature of life, but the defining mandate of life, that that leads to problems, that that leads to our complacency, that that curtails our freedom, essentially. And I think that that is a very prescient idea of his that

is even more prescient now and more acute now. But I should also say, I love television. I love being entertained. This is definitely not an argument against fun. But I do think, though, that one of the problems I've been observing is that, you know, the lines between the entertainment and everything else, I think, have never been thinner. I think that we sometimes lose the distinction between entertainment as escapism and entertainment as a value system in our culture where everything in the end kind of will seed to the mandates of fun, to the mandates of, you know, be interesting, be amusing, be distracting. And that to me just seems again and again in politics, in culture, in so many elements of life to be that defining idea that becomes almost inescapable. It's inescapable. And sometimes I think it's not necessarily visible to us. Like I've always wondered, like, why do you think

Orwell's vision has loomed larger in popular culture than Postman's warning, which we seem to have ignored largely in favor of more screens and more entertainment. Like, it's funny, you find people who have read Amusing Ourselves to Death, and it's like a little cult of Postman people, you know? Like, everyone knows who Orwell is, right? But Postman is like, and I'm wondering if that says something about us. I mean, to your point about you don't want this to be anti-fun here. Like, we do. We love entertainment. But I wonder if we are somehow resistant to seeing that we are being sort of lulled into the state by entertainment where everything is just way too trivial. Exactly right. I think there's something refreshingly straightforward about Orwell's predictions slash warnings, whatever you might want to call them.

I think there's something very recognizable about the idea of, you know, there is an apple right in front of us. And yet we are taught to understand it to be an orange. You know, there is a very straightforward transaction that happens with that. And I think, of course, we saw that a lot with the Trump administration. You know, this notion of alternative facts is a very Orwellian notion. And we've seen examples of it again and again, where the facts of the matter that are straightforward and objectively observable become negated, you know, in the discourse, in the narrative, in whatever term we might want to use. So I think the Orwellian vision feels very visceral to a lot of people. It feels very familiar and recognizable.

And it's harder to recognize the Huxleyian vision that we would accept our entertainment and also our curtailing of freedom, because also that implicates us. We have to take a little bit more responsibility when we are, in fact, part of the problem. And I would not say that it's, you know, only on consumers to be sure, but we are part of the problem. We are making these choices every day. And I definitely include myself in that. And so I think it's harder to talk about because I think the Huxleyan paradigm is the one that we all exist in. I thought about this recently with the example of TikTok and you start the piece with this very dark example,

which I had not heard of, of like people on TikTok asking their Amazon delivery people to do dances when they deliver packages. This has become something big on TikTok, which I did not know about. I'm glad I didn't. But I know there's been this big discussion about sort of the Chinese government exerting undue influence over TikTok. And you

hear a couple of things about it. One, well, there's privacy issues because they have our data, right? Two, they control the algorithm so they can, you know, change the algorithm so that we are seeing sort of, you know, change the algorithm so that we are seeing sort of, you know, Chinese government state propaganda or not seeing anything that's critical of the Chinese government. But then there's a third thing you hear, which is basically they know that a bunch of American teenagers are going to grow up just staring at TikTok all day and being entertained and not really being sort of concerned active citizens. And it does feel like

that's a little bit of what you're talking about here. Very much so. Very much so. I think this general idea that, you know, because of the ways we're used to talking about entertainment as something that is harmless, as something that, you know, is something we choose for ourselves and something we do in our leisure time, again, as escapism, I think that can numb us to the realities that now define a lot of our entertainment. Just like you said with TikTok, it comes with these potentially very grave political costs that I think it's hard to process that because it's TikTok. It's fun. It's, you know, it's this wonderful global talent show. And, you know, it's such a great example of human ingenuity and weirdness

and creativity and humor. And there's so much good that happens on that platform that it can be hard to sort of accept that there can be bad that happens on the platform too. And I think that's also true, of course, for Instagram, Facebook. I mean, all the other platforms we might talk about has this really tense mixture, I think, of wonderful things and threats at the same time. But it's hard to discuss them in those ways, to discuss the threats because of all the good things and because we fundamentally treat them as entertainment alone. So media and technology have probably changed more over the last few decades than any other period in history. How do you think that's changed how we interact with entertainment and the threats that Minnow

and Postman warned us about all those years ago? One thing I've been noticing is that entertainment often is doing the work that journalism used to do in terms of educating people about the world, educating people also about themselves within the world, who they are in relation to other people, as citizens, as members of a community. You know, we have this rise now of this kind of sub-genre of shows, The Crown, for example,

Inventing Anna, both these big Netflix juggernauts, The Dropout about the Theranos scandal. There are lots of examples of shows like these. And what those shows are doing is using the biopic treatment, you know, where you take history and you turn it into entertainment, but they are doing it about history that is barely history at all. That is, in some cases, still happening in the case of The Crown or in the case of The Theranos Story, where the fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes was happening essentially as the dropout, the show about her, was airing on Netflix. And so you have

this real tension, I think, between fiction and fact. And I think for viewers, it can be really hard to determine what is the actual fact of the matter, what actually did happen, what is the actual fact of the matter. What actually did happen? What is the truth of these stories? And what is being embellished for storytelling purposes? And, you know, all of this is happening in a moment when journalism itself, traditional journalism, which traffics in facts and facts alone, is having existential problems. It really is flailing. You have local news outlets dying basically every week, you know, and all these ways that we used to have to understand the facts of the world are really suffering right now. And in their place often, it seems like you have entertainments, which do not have any obligation to be true in any direct or literal sense. They have only an obligation maybe to be true in a broader sense,

but really just to entertain us. That is the only thing they need to do for us. And they often do it very well. Why do you think we like these shows so much? And I mean, I'm just as guilty as anyone. I've watched all of these. And I've, you know, someone who's in politics and media have been following the stories

the whole time but like eagerly watch the dropout watch the uber show watch we work the we work show like did it all and i'm just wondering like obviously they keep making them because they're popular and i'm wondering why you know basically production companies have probably been like ripping from the headlines to do shows for a long, long time. What do you think is sort of different about this moment and why do they remain so popular? Yeah, I think that a big part of it actually is reality television, how much reality television has come to shape people's expectations of what entertainment actually is and should look like. So I think of these shows almost as an adjunct to reality TV. You know, again, a show like The Crown is essentially a very high production value,

very expensive work of reality television. It just happens to be that the characters in question are portrayed by actors and given lines and given scripts rather than being officially unscripted. But it's the same idea and the same kind of pitch to the audience, which is you can be a voyeur into the lives of famous people. You can be in the room with them when they have their fights and when they shed their tears and when they go about the daily business of being royal, which it turns out can often sometimes look a lot like the daily business of being a regular person. And there's something I think very interesting and fun about that proposition where you are getting access to lives that you wouldn't otherwise get access to much in the same way as you get when you see any reality TV show. And I think that that more and more is kind of the expectations that audiences bring to a work, that they almost deserve that kind of access

and that they want that kind of insider view of what the world is like for other people. You mentioned watching these shows and also looking at Wikipedia at the same time to see things are true, which is absolutely something I have done myself. Oh, thank you for saying that. I was so embarrassed. Oh, no, for sure. Especially with The Crown. You know, because I'm like, wait, my history is not so good on the British royal family. I'm going to have to look that up. But I can't tell. There's some times where it's a show like that and I don't look at Wikipedia and I can't tell which is worse. Because if don't look because then you're thinking like well is this true is it all not true I don't know it seems true-ish that's fine that element of truthiness yep yeah right

I mean look we have covered on Pod Save America the ongoing saga of George Santos, but it's so much to keep track of that I found myself a few times being like, God, this is going to make such a good series. I can't wait to see the series about Santos. I wonder who's going to play him. I wonder what's going to happen. I'm going to find out all the backstory because honestly, it's a lot to keep track of all the lies. No, exactly that. And that's the thing. The news itself is so overwhelming. And that is, I think, a direct result of news as mediated by the internet. The internet is huge. It does not have specific sort of buckets and channels in the way that, you know, print news did. So we are just having this kind of onslaught of stuff at all moments. And it can feel exactly very overwhelming. I know exactly that feeling that you have. And it's really nice, actually, when a good producer

will come along and render all of that chaos into a very good TV show. I really do actually appreciate when that happens. But then I think the question becomes, you know, what is then the truth in that? You know, if there is the pretty much inevitable, I would say, series about Santos at this point, you know, what will it leave out? What will it say? What claims will it make? You know, what will it present as the final truth of this story? And will it be one that actually does reflect the reality of the situation? Yeah, I mean, look, the implications of this are for figuring out what the actual truth is. There's also a lot of other implications that you write about.

You talk about how each invitation to be entertained reinforces an impulse to seek diversion whenever possible, to avoid tedium at all costs, and to privilege the dramatized version of events over the actual one. What do you think are the implications of more people giving into that impulse more frequently, which seems to be what's happening right now? Yeah. I mean, I think that there is a real threat of kind of this pervasive nihilism coming over American culture. I think a lot about the fact that both impeachment trials of Donald Trump in both of those cases, Donald Trump's defenders used as an argument in his favor. This is boring. Literally, they just said, you know, and these are lawyers for the most part, professional lawyers who you would think would know better. And that was the argument. And just that alone is so, if you just sort of extrapolate that out at scale, that is just a horrible thing to sort of argue, to let pass, you know, and yet a lot

of people I think did let it pass because it's so standard for this is boring to be treated as an argument. Because I think we do expect that something because it's so standard for this is boring to be treated as an argument, because I think we do expect that something like this trial, which was televised and therefore in its way a work of a television show, essentially, you know, that it owes us entertainment, that it owes us to be riveting, you know, and we're talking about matters of impeachment. We are talking about, in one case, a coup and a violent coup at that. You know, none of this is actually boring. And yet the way that it was treated as boring, I think, really does harbinger bad things for our future if we don't kind of curtail this kind of sentiment.

Because, you know, this is boring is not an argument. And I think, you know, the fact that will come along with the notion of climate change. But there is basically no way to make that existential phenomenon entertaining in any classical sense. And yet we have to pay attention to it. We have to find ways to talk about it. And if entertainment is the only paradigm and the only ethic, we might well not find ways to talk about it. So things like that, I feel like are, if you just sort of extrapolate them out just a little bit, it becomes really troubling about where we're heading as a country and as a planet. Well, you've now hit on sort of my central conundrum as a former political staffer, strategist turned someone who runs a media company which is

I feel like we're always in a war for people's attention right now yeah and so like you mentioned the January 6th hearing and they hired a producer right for the January 6th hearing a television producer and I remember thinking that's a good idea. And the reason I thought that's a good idea is because it is so hard to get people to care about anything. Like you made the point about climate change. And, you know, most people who listen to the show or online all the time wouldn't understand that because they're all news and political junkies like us, right? Like, we follow this all the time. But most voters are not right. And I have done focus groups of voters and I go sit with them. And I remember sitting with one group, right? The night before the January 6th hearing started group of people in Pennsylvania who are all

registered voters. They voted for Biden. They're going to vote again. And I said, how many of you are going to watch the January 6th hearings? And they go, what, what hearings? I didn't know they were January 6th hearings. And so when you think from a, the standpoint of a, of a elected official or a political strategist, you're like, all right, how am I going to get those people's attention? Well, I have to put on a good show. And so then you have to go. And so then I wonder how much of this is what the entertainment media political complex are giving us and how much of it is they're giving it to us because this is the only way we pay attention. It's both. Yes, that's such a good point.

Something I think a lot about is the fact that common sense, the Thomas Paine tracks that gets so much credit often for really fomenting the American Revolution, right? Like, I think what people sometimes forget is not only did it make a very compelling argument, not only was it passionately written, all of that stuff, it was also very funny. It was read aloud, people would read it together, and that was in large part because it was a source of amusement, it was a source of entertainment for people. And that's been true, I think, of a lot of elements of American history, where you have to find ways to combine the fun and the entertaining and the amusement with everything else. So I very much empathize with that problem. And I share that problem actually as a journalist, because, you

know, a lot of our work too is finding ways to make stories compelling to people and interesting to people. But I would say too, from the consumer side, one of my wishes is that people would, and again, I include myself, that people would sort of stop to consider, you know, does X news event, does X political policy, does it need to be entertaining or does it need to be merely relevant to my life? And I think something about just shifting the way we talk about a lot of these things, I do think that that can actually be a big service because right now so much adheres

to kind of the ethic of entertainment, to this notion that the world owes us fun. And in fact, we owe the world, you know, we owe to future generations. And so I think if we could just change our mindset a little bit and frankly, be okay with a little bit of boredom, you know, just as we are in our normal jobs, as we are in child rearing, as we are in our lives, we have some boredom. And that's okay. That's inevitable. And I think if we could translate that idea to political life and cultural life and our discourse, that would be at least a step in the right direction.

Yeah, well, that goes back to the technology issue and sort of social media and some of these platforms now, which I blame us less for this because I think that it's very difficult. We talk about this all the time on this show. It is very difficult to be bored these days. Yes, that's true. And I always remember, I tell this story a lot, that one of my best friends,

when the iPhone first came out, he got the iPhone first and he was describing it to me. And he goes, here's the thing with the iPhone. We'll never be bored again. He's like, you stand in line somewhere and you used to have to just stand and stare or talk to people. And now you can look at your phone the whole time. And at the time I thought, oh, that's great. What a wonderful invention. And now it's like, you can't put your phone down. You can't not look at a screen. And even if you don't have screens in front of you, that you still have that desire to constantly be stimulated in some way, whether it's by entertainment or something else, which

is tough. Yeah. Oh, I think that's exactly right. And I have that too. I will get a little bit itchy if I'm walking out in the world and hearing only the sounds of the world around me. I think I should be listening to a podcast. I should be learning something. I should be, if not learning, then at least having some fun. It's a real problem. But I do think, yeah, that

I start to notice myself feeling kind of addled, you know, when I don't let myself just slow down for a little bit, you know, to just sort of experience the world, see other people without just looking at my phone. I've actually made a point of trying to do more of that. And I've noticed myself being a lot calmer, a lot happier, I think, in a way, because there is a way that we can retreat into the phones and thereby ignore the world around us. And yeah, sometimes the world can be hard and unpleasant, but often it can also be great and wonderful and kind of miraculous. And I do want to pay attention to it. So I'm sure it helps with your writing too. It does. That's the thing. It's exactly like, I think I would be a much more boring writer if I didn't try to be curious about the world. And if I only looked at my phone.

I do think the political implications are what worries me the most. I mean, you point out in the piece that in the metaverse, it's not shocking, but entirely fitting that a game show host and Twitter personality would become president of the United States. I have thought for a long time now that our entertainment addiction explains Trump and basically our entire current moment of politics better than just about anything else. I very much agree with that. Yep. I mean, yeah, you write about the intersection of culture and politics all the time. Like, what does it look like from sort of your vantage point seeing both sort of the rise of Trump and just where politics is right now? Yeah. I mean, so much of politics right now is about fandom more than anything else.

It's about emotional connection to a person rather than about what policies they might espouse, what real world implications they might have for individual voters and for the broader mass of voters. It's about this almost visceral sense of whether do I like a candidate or do I not? I think sometimes about the historian Warren Sussman, who talked about the way that the mass media, the rise of the mass media, changed the way Americans thought about their most kind of

essential personal values. So Sussman argues that before the mass media came along, Americans really put a primacy on character, honesty, integrity, community, you know, things that really served the collective. And then he argues that once mass media came along, the mandate shifted to what he called personality. So charm and charisma and essentially the ability to put on a good show, whether you are in a theatrical setting or not. And I think a lot of his insights are alive in the way Americans do relate to politics right now, because they expect politicians to whatever else they might offer to be able to put on a good show. I mean, even the fact that we allow so much decision-making power to presidential debates, for example, you know, which often really, you know, sometimes they're about substance, sometimes they're about policy, and they can be very revealing,

but often they are mostly a test of, is someone good on stage? Are they good, you know, at reacting in the moment? Can they get in a good line? And all of those ideas. And the fact, I think, that we take it for granted that that should be so much a part of the political process is revealing. And I just think there are so many examples like that where, you know, if a politician is not charismatic in this very particular way, they are often written off. And often the, you know, notion of charisma is constrained by what came before, you know, so often the notion of a charismatic person will, you know, be someone who is a man, is a white man, is, you know, who looks like all of our previous presidents, except for one. So, you know, so I think those ideas

really do kind of inform the way that politicians treat us and then also the way that we treat our politicians. I wonder if our entertainment addiction also explains why Trump lost. Like, do you think enough people just got tired of the show? Because, and Biden, aside from the fact that he is a straight white man who had very, very high name ID as Barack Obama's vice president, sort of cuts against this notion because I don't think anyone discourse about Biden being this almost plea for boredom. You know, please make lot of ways, embodied the maelstrom of what it feels like to live online. People did, I think, just get tired of that. They want, I think, very fundamentally steady leadership, you know, from the people who are given the chance to govern them. And I think that, yes, the fact that voters did reject Trump on that second try, I think is very much, you know, evidence of that. But I also think there was a little bit of, in those, you know, make America boring again,

ideas that came with Biden, I think I could detect just a little bit of regret, you know, that, oh, politics isn't going to be as interesting now. Oh, what do we talk about now? What do we write about? You know, and so I think there is as interesting now. Oh, what do we talk about now? What do we write about? You know, and so I think there is very much a tension there where, you know, that Trump embodied so much because I think people sort of instinctively knew that his brand of politics was going to be destructive for every other reason,

but also for his emphasis on entertainment above all. I think people did have that sense. But at the same time, there was something exciting about him. I think a lot of people felt. I remember a voter who talked about why he was going to switch from an Obama voter to a Trump voter in 2016. And he said, at least Trump is fun. And that's always stuck with me because, you know, what are you trading for fun? And yet this voter was willing to. So I think about this all the time because I do think one thing that has happened in American politics is as government, for a host of reasons we could talk about in an entire other episode, because it has stopped functioning so well, delivering for people so well, and people

can't count on the fact that their government is going to tangibly improve their lives, then politics becomes my team and their team and the fight between them. And it's why sort of a lot of these so-called culture war issues are more exciting and entertaining in what we're fighting about, even though those issues for a lot of people in this country aren't like fun entertainment, they're life or death. But when you're not voting for someone who is going to deliver tangible results that improve your life that you can notice, then it's all about the game and it's all about the show. And we talked about it from the prism of, you know, personality and performance. But I also think there's something going on with voters and how they view politics.

That's like, I mean, I gave you my vote and now I want this episode to end well. And I want to see I want a happy ending. And if I don't get a happy ending, I'm going to try. I'm going to change the channel and I'm going to get another show. And there's like less patience for government, which is slow and frustrating. And there's more of a desire for like, I want to consume, but I don't want to actually do something myself. I want to be a political hobbyist. I want to follow my favorites online and tweet and do all this stuff. But like going out and doing the phone bank, that's a lot of work. Right, right. Well, I think, I mean, so much of American culture, I think for much longer than the internet was around, you know, has kind of

valued instant gratification, right? Like we are, I think just, you know, as a people, very impatient. So I think that is one element of that. And I think that the internet, you know, has only exacerbated it for sure. But I do think that part of the culture war elements of things too, is that, you know, one of the things I talk about in the piece is the way that the internet sort of encourages us because it is mediated through screens, because it is so distant, encourages us to see each other, not as full people, but essentially as characters in this ongoing drama. And I think that part of the kind of psychic appeal of the culture war is that the terms seem very straightforward. You know, when you watch Fox News and hear about, you know, the regime that wants to control you and all

of this stuff, that is a very kind of straightforward and in its way reassuring view of the world because things are so simple. They are so straightforward. You know who your enemies are. You know who your team is. And you can fight for the team. And the other thing about war is that it really does not demand nuance in its morality. When one is at war, anything is rationalized, anything is possible so that you might win. And there's a certain horrible and paradoxical freedom that comes with that, I think, in the political context, because, you know, you can treat another person horribly and justify it by saying, well, they're the enemy. They're on the other team. So that's fine. I can

do that. I can be, as my colleague Adam Serwer said, I can be very cruel to them, you know, and not think of it as cruelty at all. Think of it as winning one for the team. Yeah. Well, when there are heroes and villains, entertainment is a lot more clear cut and easy to follow than sort of the, you know, Academy Award nominated shows that are a little more nuanced. Yeah, like nuanced is for the is for the highbrow set, right? But mass, mass culture wants like your heroes, your villains, your good guys, your bad guys, and just let me know which side I should be on. And I'm good. That's right. Yeah, exactly. It's like, yeah, art is a sporting event, essentially. Yep. Yeah. Well, you talked about how the internet does that for politics. It also does that like on an individual level. I interviewed Gia Tolentino for the first episode of the show, who has very memorably called the internet an

endless performance with no backstage. And you write about how life in the metaverse is similar, that we now value the ability to entertain and perform for a mass audience of strangers above almost anything else. What do you think that's doing to us as individuals, this constant need to perform for people who we've never met all the time? Yeah. I mean, I think for the most part, it does not do a lot of good, I will say. I mean, you know, the tension that I do want to bring in there is,

you know, one element of the performance idea is that so many people now can be performers in ways they never could before, you know? So, so many people get to explain the world from their perspective and get to say, you know, this is what it feels like to be me. And that is such a profound ability. But on the other side of that, when everything becomes a performance, when your whole life becomes a performance, when, you know, your home is your set and your friends are your co-stars or perhaps your extras and your clothes or costumes, et cetera, et cetera.

I think that can really flatten us, you know, both to ourselves. And then also, I think it can encourage us to see other people as characters, as not fully human, as tropes. And I mean, again, speaking of heroes and villains, I think it's very common, not just in political discourse, but in culture at large to see other people as, you know, they're on my team and therefore the heroes, or they're not on my team and they are therefore the villains. And a lot of really horrific behavior has been justified according to those terms. And I think that is the problem that we face is, you know, kind of how do we see each other as humans again? And I hope we still can, but it's hard to imagine how, actually. It is very hard because it's not happening online.

No. For sure. It's not, no. And it has to happen in offline spaces, I think. Yeah. You wrote about the contradiction at the heart of life in the metaverse, which I think about a lot. You said, we have never been able to share so much of ourselves, even as we have never felt more alone. We talk about this all the time here. We just did an episode on this last week. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that this technology that where the promise was to bring us together and connect us like never before has left us feeling so lonely?

Yeah, I love that question. I think that a big part of it is that we are now, I think, seeing each other and ourselves as characters closed off. I think that to be a fully functioning person in the world requires a certain vulnerability. It requires a certain openness to other people and an acknowledgement of their worthiness that is precisely equal to ours. And I think often the internet, the messages that it gives and the incentives that it provides, you know, always posting everything is content. Other people are the extras in your great show. That really is constraining. That is not a human thing,

actually, because humans are, we want connection. That is fundamental to who we are. And I think a lot of the internet, despite all the promises and pitches of connection and all of these ideas, it does really isolate us and it encloses us within ourselves. And it makes us, it kind of flattens us into performances of ourselves rather than simply ourselves as we are. And then I think it encourages us to see other people in that same way. And, you know, you can sometimes feel, I mean, we were talking about phones earlier, you know, just in a city environment, there are everyone walking around staring in their phone. Sometimes they bump into each other and it's very awkward, you know, and this feels like a metaphor for how we actually relate to each other. We do it through the screens, even though we're all right there. We're still together. We could be together if we chose to, but often we choose not to. Yeah. Well, also I think about the process of connection and connecting with someone else on a real fundamental level is messy and clumsy and can be awkward and

it can take time and it can require nuance and it required like really sort of detecting people's facial cues and social cues and all this, all this stuff. And you can't do any of that. Yeah. You can't do any of that online. And you especially can't do any of that when everyone else is watching you. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly right. I remember a couple of years ago, there were efforts to implement a sarcasm note for Twitter. Do you remember this? Yeah. Just to signify, hi, I am being sarcastic because so often sarcasm note for Twitter. Do you remember this? Yeah, just to signify, hi, I am being sarcastic, because so often sarcasm does not translate when you're in a text alone medium. And of course, those efforts did not work, but they kind of were illustrative of the problems and the attempted solutions. But yes, I think that it really is hard to be kind of fully human together, you know, in these digital environments.

And I think it also can serve to sort of, for them to be seamless, you know. And we, I think, have very little patience for precisely the kind of awkwardness and vulnerability that you're talking about. And I think in part, I wouldn't say in whole, but in part, I think that does come from this expectation that life should adhere to the movie, you know, that life should look like a TV show, because that's what so many of the cultural messages out there tell us. And so, you know, rom-coms will have their meet cute, they'll have their whole cute setup, and then everything will end well. And I think there is an element of life right now that tells us that our own interactions should be similarly simple and similarly tidy,

when of course they never could be. Yeah. Last question. What do you think? Is there any hope for us to escape life in the metaverse or is America doomed to amuse ourselves to death? I'm an optimist, so I'm going to say there is hope.

There is hope. I think that a big part of this really is, you know, I'm an optimist, so I'm going to say there is hope. There is hope. I think that a big part of this really is, you know, I'm a critic. And so I believe very strongly in the power of, you know, language, the power of ideas to change a lot. So I think if we can sort of, A, recognize the problem, and then B, come up with languages and grammars to talk about this problem. You know, we can talk about it in terms of the metaverse. We can talk about it in terms of amusing ourselves to death. There could be a lot of other ways we discuss it. But I think just recognizing the situation is come down to the fate of journalism. You know, and obviously I'm a journalist. I'm biased as I say that. But I think so many reasons that entertainment really has taken over the way that we view the world is that a lot of people don't have other options. Local news is dying.

You know, even non-local news at the national level is very compromised right now and facing existential problems. And I think if journalism can make it through this moment kind of as an institution, you know, fact-based, fact-checked, that cares primarily about being the first rough draft of history and getting its facts right, that can solve a lot. I think that that alone could save us, actually. Because if we have that kind of foundation of facts, then we can build off of that. But if we lose that foundation, then we lose everything else. And I think that's the real threat at the core of this. Yeah, no, that's a very good point and a good place to end.

Megan Garber, thank you so much for, uh, for joining offline. This was a great conversation. Oh, thank you so much. I had fun. Thanks. Offline is a crooked media production. It's written and hosted by me,

John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.