Offline with Jon Favreau - Charlie Warzel on Facebook's Original Sin

Episode Date: December 5, 2021

For the last decade, Charlie Warzel has covered the internet and culture at BuzzFeed News, The New York Times, and his newsletter Galaxy Brain. He joins Jon to talk about the architecture behind our platforms, break down how the internet has embedded itself in our culture, and argue that humans shouldn’t be connected at this scale.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 see things all the time where I'm like, man, that is a load of shit. And like right now, I could tweet about that. And so many people would high five me and be like, you got them. And it's so like, we should be roasting this person, right? We should be dunking on this person. The instinct to do that is just so intense. But actually, like every time you do that, you make the place worse. Yeah, we all make the place not the place we want to be, the place that we hate. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest this week is Charlie Warzel, who writes for The Atlantic and has an excellent newsletter there called Galaxy Brain that you should absolutely check out.

Charlie's Beat is basically exactly what this podcast is about, which is how the internet affects our behavior, our culture, and politics. The big difference is we've been doing this for six episodes, and he's been covering this topic for about 10 years, long before it was cool to point out that Facebook is destroying our democracy. And that's what I wanted to talk to him about. It's been a little over a month since Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen shared tens of thousands of internal company documents with reporters and the SEC and spoke out about the harm that the platform is causing. And there's been a lot of focus since then on Facebook's role in spreading misinformation, their failure to enforce their own content rules, Instagram's effects on young people, and a bunch of other alarming revelations. But as someone who's reported on Facebook and other social media platforms for more than a decade, Charlie thinks the real problem is more fundamental. That Facebook's original sin is the architecture of the platform itself,

and that maybe human beings just aren't meant to be connected at this scale. So we talk about why that is, how these platforms have embedded themselves in our culture and our brains, and what, if anything, we can do about it. It's a conversation I've wanted to have since I started this series, and I really think you'll enjoy it. As always, if you have questions, comments, or complaints about the show, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com. Here's Charlie Warzel. Charlie Warzel, thanks for joining. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So I think the main reason I did this show is because I've had this sense through the Trump years and then especially during the pandemic that these social media platforms are changing our behavior and shaping our politics even more than I think we'd still like to admit.

And you were part of the small group of journalists who started reporting on this beat about a decade ago. Do you remember the first reporting you did where you started to believe that these platforms aren't some neutral public square where people are just acting like people? Well, so actually the thing that I first, the first ever thing that I wrote that pissed off Facebook was in 2013. And it was so by today's standards, it's like preposterous. But it like, like I got like letter, letter like emails angry emails from like the top really um and this is this is that buzzfeed and it was it was a it was a piece that looked into this idea of advertisers basically on facebook have always had access to how many people see your post but normal people don't and i was like why is that and it's because i started like looking into the

the research on that most people don't see your stuff, or at least at that point, didn't see other people's stuff. So it's basically like you were speaking to have people, you know, constantly in your comments and fighting with you and everything. They were furious about it, but they also wanted to just show me that, you know, that they had the best interest of everyone at heart and that this was, you know, connecting the world was going to be really generative. So they invited me to actually come out and I ended up flying out there on BuzzFeed's dime, not Facebook's and meeting with the newsfeed people. And again, this is like 2013. Yeah. And they, you know, I guess this was like off the record back then, but it's so, you know, anodyne that I don't mind sharing it now. Like they basically were like, Oh, you know, if we see this website kind of like coming up with this,

like spammy, you know, chummy kind of like crap content that's really outrageous. We're going to like deprioritize it in the feed. And I was like, oh, you guys just like have your hands on dials all the time in these ways. And that was the first time for me that I was like, oh, none of this is organic. This is all, you know, decisions being made by very specific people who nobody, you know, elected in any way to make a lot of these decisions, who are kind of controlling the levers and levels of attention that, you know, everything gets. That's interesting. When you talk to folks at Facebook, back then, did you get a sense, even in those early days that you were being fed a lot of bullshit? Or did you think that they were

giving you like good faith explanations about what you wanted to know about the platform? So there's always been this difficulty. Like I like to give people the benefit of the doubt in some, you know, like a little bit skeptically. And so what i would say is i believed that a lot of these folks who i would talk to at the platforms were true believers in what they were doing and they actually i don't i don't think there's actually tons of cynicism especially the top ranks of facebook the people have been there for over a decade like i don't and i think that to their detriment there's not a lot of cynicism but i also think that they and this was sort of very early on they hide behind the opacity of their platforms but also the level of technology so

what i mean by that is you know all say well i don't understand why this is doing x right like why this is and it's like well you know we can't really this is proprietary algorithms proprietary code you know we can't really get into that and we're not we're not really at liberty to speak about that and then you say okay well it's clearly fucking up a bunch of stuff out here and then you sort of give your hypothesis as to why or what you think is going on to the best of your ability based off reporting and And they go, oh, no, no, this is so much more complicated. If you could see inside these systems, I promise you, like you have no idea really what you're talking about.

And it's like, what are we supposed to do with that information? We're not allowed to see behind the scenes. There's no transparency. There's no, you know, it's all opaque. And yet any explanation, even reporter ones, like this is what Facebook did with the Facebook paper stuff is say, well, you know, you're not really seeing the full picture and there's billions of people like, well, of course, but we're getting, you know, we're getting the view that we do have is really bad. So if you can't counter that, what am I supposed to take away from that? So even by saying, well, this is proprietary information, they're tacitly admitting there that it's designed, that there's a specific design to what they're doing. Otherwise, you wouldn't say that it's proprietary. It's not just random what's happening on the platform.

Yeah. And I think that that gets to my primary critique, basically, I guess, since like, I don't know, 2017, 2018, has been to care less about the content, the specific type of content that is going on the platform, right? Like this tweet or like this, this specific, you know, Donald Trump Jr. saying this thing. Obviously, everyone wants the platforms to adhere by their their rules, right? The ones that they set out. If they say you're not allowed to do this, everyone should have that enforced equally. But for me, it's always been about the architecture of these platforms, the way that their algorithms prioritize and privilege and distribute different types of content, what they what they choose to, you know, see. And that is where like, a clearly the design flaws are extreme. And we've watched that all play out over a long period of time. But also, that's where like the transparency needs to come in, because it's impossible to really, we can diagnose the problem as to say, well, it's really bad when, you know, you're fueling a genocide in Myanmar. But we don't necessarily always know why. We can't get from A to B. And so I think it's really important to be able to diagnose that problem that some third parties, some people get a chance to look under the hood, diagnose it, and, you know, we can all then try to figure out what we want to do with that. But the architecture to me is the is the real issue here, because, you know, we're never going to

get anywhere. I mean, you've seen when we bring the tech CEOs or whoever in front of Congress, like, both the parties are furious at the platforms for completely different reasons. There's no agreement on that. So if we're going to get there, it's always going to be, you know, Ted Cruz screaming about censorship. And you know, some, you know, some of the folks on the left who are, you know, trying to think about antitrust regulation, things like that. We, we need to start like prioritizing the way that these platforms work, which is what I think was kind of helpful about the Facebook whistleblower was that, you know, you can agree or disagree on, on the, the, you know, the paths forward that she wants to take.

But the idea that like, we have to look at the architecture and the design of these platforms as the way of going forward and not just say like, well, that piece of content stays and that piece of content goes, cause we're not going to get anywhere. Yeah, no, I'm glad you raised that because I think like I think it can be very tempting for liberals like me with my media diet to just say like Facebook is bad and simplify and even potentially exaggerate like how and why Facebook is culpable for the damage they cause. So, for example, you know, you could say with ample evidence to back you up that they don't do enough to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation.

They don't do enough to enforce their own content rules for right wing publishers because they're afraid of bias. But it does seem the more I read about this, and especially in light of the Facebook papers, that these are sort of problems around the edges of something more fundamental, which is the architecture you're talking about. But what do you think it is about the architecture itself that leads to so many of these other problems? It's actually, it's just, it's very kind of simple. And this is, again, the further you go under the hood, the more complex it's obviously going to be.

But at a high level, the diagnosis is that it gives a natural advantage to the most shameless people. Hey, just like politics. Just like politics today. Yeah, because it's an attention game. It's a game that privileges attention over all else. Hey, just like politics. Just like politics today. summer of 2014 i believe and you were seeing the ice bucket challenge was happening on facebook oh yeah wow and the ferguson protests were happening same time and facebook you know twitter was the place where like you could go on there and like every night you know you were just seeing as you

did you know uh in the summer of 2020 like you were just basically plugged into protests you know all over the country but especially in fer Ferguson. And it was just this like live feed of news that sort of, you know, it felt like something new had happened and you were just plugged in and there's no way to miss that. Even if you weren't following those people, that's what you were going to see if you were on Twitter. And Facebook was just videos of people dumping ice water on each other's heads. And it was like, why are these things so different? And I ended up having a bunch of conversations with different people at the platforms, but also some people at BuzzFeed who had been talking to people at the platforms,

sort of on the business side and stuff. And again, these weren't like reporting conversations, I was just talking to them. And one of the things about Facebook at this time was they were surfacing less news about Ferguson because it was kind of contentious in the sense that like if you posted in, you know, saying like, you know, this Black Lives Matter movements, trouble, etc. You were going to get a lot of people maybe disagreeing with you and maybe unfriending you as a result. Right. Like, I don't want to associate with this person. And the same thing with, you know, people saying like, oh, this is great. This is, you know, like democracy in action, whatever,

like same thing. And that Facebook at the time was so focused on making sure that connections weren't severed, that it was just like not going to show you this thing. Whereas Ice Bucket Challenge, it's funny, it's viral. You know, it's just like, let's just go, go, go. And no one's going to, you know, end a, you know, engagement with another person because someone posted a video about, you know, raising money for ALS. And that was another one of those like examples of, you know, the ultimate game here is more time on site, you know, more

people connecting to the platform, more people connecting with each other to spend more time on site, etc. And so, I mean, this has been said by tons of people for a long time now, but, you know, nothing does better for engagement than content that is outraging, that makes you feel very, it is one of the strongest and most like motivating emotions. You know, people want to defend themselves, they want to, you know, provoke others, when others are provoked, they want to respond. And so it gives a natural advantage to the most shameless people. And I think we've seen that, especially, I mean, we see that in politics, obviously, but that's why the marriage of platforms like Facebook and politicians is just, it's been so catastrophic, I think. Well, it also seems like just from that story, there's been quite a shift between 2014 and now in what the algorithm prizes, because um they want more angry engagement around political and cultural issues right and and not just a bunch of videos of ice bucket challenge kind of stuff

yeah i mean i think in a perfect world they would want it like because again i don't think they're like sadistic psychos right like i think like that's what they want to have, you know, Facebook be a place for all kinds of uplifting fundraising type of events like that. But there just aren't nearly as many. And, you know, yeah. So, I mean, there's been,

the Facebook paper showed there's been numerous sort of changes to what Facebook has has you know chosen to emphasize over over the years and you know one one of the things was with the way the algorithm was in you know in 2014 2015 it privileged uh outside content and like video content so people were watching a lot of stuff you know i was at buzzfeed at the time buzzfeed was making a lot of this content right and then they i think you know the researchers at facebook found out that like this stuff is you know if you're just sitting watching short kind of you know clicky videos all

day it starts to like degrade you you start to you know feel like shit yeah um and so they said well you know what we what would makes people not feel like shit is having authentic conversations with other people. So let's just prioritize these types of conversations and posts where lots of people are talking in the comments because that means it's engaging. Well, turns out that the posts where most people are talking in the comments are ones where someone is like, you know who we shouldn't let into the country? Like Mexicans or, you know, whatever. And then it's like off to the races. And what I think that those revelations from the Facebook papers showed was that when you're connecting humans at this scale, there's no good way to do it.

Like if you feed them, if you say, hey, we want to interact with this third party content, people go way overboard because they're just watching it all the time because of the scale of the platform. And the same thing with this other end. It's like the dial in every direction, you know, leads to garbage and feeling terrible. I mean, that's interesting because, you know, it's clear that Frances Haugen's like, you know, main contribution, aside from all of the documents that she delivered, was really identifying that the algorithm is the core issue. But it seems like tweaking the algorithm or just changing the algorithm in any way, it doesn't necessarily fix the problem, or it sort of presents its own set of challenges. Is that right? Yeah, but I think it's because what the ultimate goal is. And the ultimate goal is engagement.

It is time on site. It is adding new users. It is growth. And so your view is that as long as that is the ultimate goal, growth, engagement, optimization, that there is no way to solve some of these very big problems that Facebook is causing. I think so. And I think it happened around from for me around like 2018. But it was just like, this realization that I just don't think people should be connected at this scale, like at the at the Facebook level scale. And I'm not saying that,

like, I'm not saying that people shouldn't, that we shouldn't democratize speech to some degree. But like, I've, I've talked recently to some people inside Facebook and who've left Facebook, and a couple of them have described this really interesting phenomenon to me, which is basically that Facebook is stuck right now. They've connected so many people. It is such a massive, like, attentional, like, you know, tractor beam that they've created such a such a powerful thing that they are horrified about training it on any one thing right like i think there was an example someone was saying to me about like they were looking at celebrities and celebrity pages and like some celebrities are saying i do actually want to see if I can try to get more interaction out of it. Right. And, and, and like

hear a little more feedback. And they like tweaked something on a really big celebrities Facebook page. And it like, it sent more traffic to that page in a short amount of time, like than ever had been accumulated on the platform in that amount of time. And they were like, no, no, no, that's bad. We like, let's stop. We shouldn shouldn't do that because that's going to be a total nightmare for this person but then you know those people don't want to just have their pages languish so there's this idea that like a lot of you know like them wanting to play around now facebook is in this difficult position where you you know, if you tweak the dial too much, and like you cause unrest in a country, like that the stakes are really high

there, right? And so and so that's what I mean by like, so much connection. Maybe this is too much. I'm not saying like, you know, the media needs to be the gatekeepers. And we need to, you know, let all these people like, stop commenting in my feeds feeds i'm not saying that what i'm saying is like this platform facebook but you know you same can be applied to youtube um like talking about world historic amounts of attention engagement and, and ability to just throw eyeballs at something, anything. And I think that we really don't have a good way for normal people of conceptualizing that and what that is and what that means.

And that's what I mean when I'm saying, I don't know if we're supposed to be connected like this. Have you thought about what it is about human nature that screws us up so badly when we're connected to that many people all at once? I was talking to this guy uh michael sakasis he runs a great sub stack uh newsletter called the convivial society he writes like very sort of academically focused tech criticism and the thing he was telling me the other day was that for us to have these experiences and i'm probably butchering this a little bit like what these platforms demand of us is just like the ultimate amount of grace basically like like like so say

you go on twitter right yeah you should be reading every tweet and saying man this person like they might be stuck in traffic their mom might be sick they could be this and i try to do that now too and i fail all the time or like or like you know you know they were probably raised in the you know in in this specific type of culture you know but like like like maybe these are their priors they have good reason for believing this and look they're really trying but you know it requires a massive amount of grace and yet what the platforms actually incentivize is the quickest possible reaction and the sort of the most like like animal level reaction to whatever you've seen so these platforms ask of us is the exact opposite of what they incentivize us to do which is rash judgments and

also like i see things all the time where i'm like man like on twitter like that is just like that is a load of shit and like right now i could tweet about that and it would like so many people would come to like you know basically like high five me and be like yes and like oh you know like you got them and it's so like letting go of that instinct because a lot lot of times, too, it's like, we should be roasting this person, right? We should be dunking on this person. The instinct to do that is just so intense. But actually, every time you do that, you make the place worse. You, me, we all make the place not the place we want to be.

The place that we hate. And that's what I mean by this. We're always actively rooting against our self-interest by what we post and how we behave on these platforms. I've even gotten to a place where I try really hard now not to fight with people on Twitter. If I disagree with people on Twitter, I try to do it respectfully. But even when you don't do that and you're not like actively trying to to make it a worse place by dunking on someone or getting in a fight with them i find that when i tweet something i'm still reading all the replies to the tweets or at least sometimes reading the replies to the tweets partly because i'm curious as to how people are

going to react again a very human instinct but as i read more and more of the replies to the tweets, partly because I'm curious as to how people are going to react. Again, a very human instinct. But as I read more and more of the replies, like you start focusing on the ones that make you angry and then you're distracted, you're angry, you're anxious. It sends you down another rabbit hole where you're thinking more about that and you're thinking how to respond or whether you should respond. And maybe you don't respond on the platform, but you send it to someone else, you should respond and maybe you don't respond on the platform but you send it to someone else you know and then you comment on that and pretty soon it's just at the very least a huge fucking waste of your time yes totally and and also just like so over indexed like i mean i being a a like a a journalist like a writer someone who has like publishes at a very frequent cadence like the

amount of work that i've had to do both just like professionally and like psychologically to not write with like the internet's voice constantly in my mind like i'm i won't lie to you like it's there sometimes but like to not make that my primary editor is like, it's a Herculean amount of effort. Like, and, and I don't know, I mean, your previous role, like you, you know, when you were writing speeches, like Twitter wasn't really at that kind of pace, but I can't imagine what it's like now to just like, to write with just the idea of like the whole internet clearly screaming at you. It's got to be just madness.

You know, I hadn't really thought about that because towards the end of my time in the White House, it was, let's see, 2012, 2013. And I think then I was on Twitter as a lurker. I didn't tweet. I just sort of read tweets. So I didn't have the engagement to deal with. But I sort of knew what the internet was talking about. And I do remember that even then, it would fuck up a little bit of how I wrote speeches

because I would, sometimes the president would say, oh, why'd you include this? Why'd you include that? Well, this is part of the discussion out there yeah right and he would be like what what discussion because he wasn't on twitter right and it was partly i mean back then it was partly twitter and partly cable right so i'd have like cable on in the office so i'd be watching what fucking morning joe was saying um and then I'd scroll through Twitter once in a while. But I would try to, you know, write what he wanted to write and say what we needed to say to the American people.

But every once in a while, the conversation would seep in. So I actually don't know. I don't know how speechwriters do it now. Yeah, I feel like but I feel like then to like 2012 Twitter is like, oh, you know, you have like so and so like the people who are you know again sort of like programming the you know cultural political thing but now you could just be like mr president like anime pepe 46 is actually really concerned about this you know it's like it's in all in my mentions this shit poster is trending and uh we got to deal with it right well i mean it's happening in Wall Street. Like there, you know, you've got guys on Reddit boards who are making stocks do things and, you know, messing with traders heads like it's real everywhere.

What we're sort of getting at here is the only way to really fix Facebook is to have no Facebook. I mean, you know, even the discussion about breaking up Facebook because it's too big. And I've heard you make this point before. You spin off Instagram. You spin off WhatsApp. That's not solving any of the problems that we just spoke about. Yeah. No, I mean, I've gone just ever so slightly back on that to say, like, obviously, it's a good thing if you, like, check their corporate power.

Of course. So that, like, they, you know, they're not so powerful that that they can do this that won't solve yes the design and architecture problems and i mean a thing i've said before is and other people smart people have said this as well like a facebook with a lot of the necessary fixes doesn't look like facebook right it's you could call it Facebook or meta or whatever the hell. It probably wouldn't look or feel a lot like it. But the last point about that that I'll make is like, I think we need to approach it with giving ourselves a little bit of that that grace as well um to say this is like a multi-generational

problem that we have here right like it's sort of foolish to think like hey we're gonna amend the laws of section 230 you know change a couple of the words here and there and like boom boom boom like we should be good internet fixed like no you could very easily fuck this up in a bigger way, right? Like, you could, you know, make it so that, like, we just turn the internet into this, like, litigious machine that just, like, you know, draws everyone into court because everyone's liable for everything in these horrible different ways. So I think we have to look at this and say,

like, it's going to take a while to figure this out. Like, we don't even have a lot of, like, shared language yet for, like, what we think is the problem, right? Because you start talking about, like, you know, the problem is all these attention seekers and saying these things, and then, like, it immediately abuts, you know, the free speech language. And I think a lot of people who feel very strongly about the fact that these platforms need to be reined in also believe very strongly in freedom of speech. So I think we have yet to develop that vocabulary. We've yet to sort of, you know, work through this.

And I think it's going to take like decades. And there's also a lot of problems that neither political side is really focused on. I mean, I loved your piece about Facebook's vast wasteland where you point out that a lot of the most popular content isn't offensive or polarizing. It's just junk. It's spammy memes and random clickbait. But it doesn't mean it's not harmless. You cite this internal Facebook survey reported by the journal that says one in eight Facebook users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting, or relationships. Is there a more subtle danger that we're not paying enough attention to with these platforms? In that piece, I was really

worried about like, there's junk on fit. Your kids are, watching crap like right if anything i'm more worried about boomers watching crap to be honest um but i do think that it means something and it's consuming just like abject clickbait shit all the time is just it's not it's not good for any like anyone for anything it's just not generative it's not a great way to spend your time and and like i i don't mean this in an elitist way. I have been there. I have consumed a lot of shit and wasted two and a half hours and felt bad about it. And it's not like it's ruined my life. But over time, more and more of that, that being sort of like a lens with which you process and, you know, live in the world. Like that's just, it's, it's, it's not good. Right. And we've done this with other mediums where we've said like, Hey, this medium is just incentivizing, just like straight up garbage. Like what if we worked from a

regulation standpoint, not to censor or say what it should be, but to say like, we have a set of just like general values about how people should be spending their time like that it should give them something it should you know could maybe hopefully contribute to like the fabric of our society in some way and that doesn't have to mean like you know everything is pbs it just has to mean like people enjoy it and get something out of it like cultural conversation or something yeah um and so i think that's actually like a really great way to start thinking about the problem of Facebook is from that vast wasteland perspective, because there are so many interesting places where you can go with that, right? Like if you incentivize, if Facebook and, you know, a regulating agency incentivize creators and give them the ability to make things that they're proud of, that they're

interested in, that they care about, instead of like, click farms in the Philippines, just creating, you know, like, garbage animations, because they know that, you know, they can do like a click arbitrage thing and end up making, you know, $100,000 a month. Like, those are the types of things that are interesting and creative potential solutions. Like, is it the solution? I don't know. But it actually worked in the, you know, in the TV model by incentivizing the creation of independent studios. And those studios creating really like, you know, not elite or highbrow but just like good shit yeah i mean you you cited of course the vast wasteland speech is by new minnow and it's about sort of the effects of junk television on society it made me think about neil postman's amusing ourselves to death and he

argues in that book that you know unlike the scenario laid out by George Orwell in 1984, we're more likely to be oppressed by our passive addiction to entertainment than by the state. It does seem like the internet has supercharged that risk and that it's not just an effect on us individually, but it sort of has a larger effect on society if we're just sort of clicking through bullshit all day long when you actually need very engaged, attentive citizens to sort of maintain a healthy democracy? I think so. I mean, I think that there's this, you know, and this is why I think all this world of like, you know, solutions-based, but where we're at now is so tricky. It's like we've had social media and we've had the internet, you know,

as a part of our lives for long enough that we are like, it is imprinted on us and we've imprinted ourselves on it as well. So like, I've been thinking a lot about this, like, sort of like the supply and demand of like real garbage on the internet right because stuff you know goes viral because of a demand and and i'm not trying to say that like the platforms it's a tricky place because like i don't want to put all the blame on just like individual random people who kind of have no chance in certain media environments to not you know be, be deluged with stuff. But I also think it like

speaks to bigger things about what's going on in not just our country, but the world, but like, I'll use the United States, like, I think that there's some, you know, there's components here of like, when you look at life expectancy, going down in the country, when you look at the economic inequality, when you look at people in all walks of life who just feel either political despair, economic despair, whatever, who are just miserable. I think that these platforms also give us a way to either absorb a lot of misery and then inflict it back on other people. And I think that some of these problems are a little, like, they're bigger than Facebook, too, at the same time. And I think we don't think a lot about that. And I don't really, it's kind of a, you know,

as far as like a frame, it's pretty half-baked, you know, from my end. But I really think that there's something there. And thinking about it in that supply and demand framework, you know, from my end, but I really think that there's something there and thinking about it in that supply and demand framework, you know, might be helpful, because I just like, when I tap into these social networks, like the level of rage, you know, and I spend times in ones that aren't mine, like I, I've gotten a lot of people to give me their Facebook accounts, like random normal people for a day, so I can spend some time in their feeds. And like people are furious. People are miserable. People are delighting in absorbing that and then reflecting it back out on other people.

And I think that it speaks to something really broken about where we are and the ways that the platforms have also tapped into that inside of us. I think about this all the time, and especially as I've been doing this series, like, look, we've had problems like this for hundreds of years, right? There's been growing inequality and we've had civil and political conflict and we've had pandemics before and we've had recessions and depressions and all this kind of stuff. And what's changed is this technology that, as we were just talking about, has connected people on a scale that we've never seen in all of human history. That's the variable.

And look, there is something about the Internet that every day we are presented with like a flood of information about all of the world's problems and there is not a um there's not enough information about how we might solve those problems that the internet presents us as well so we are left every day just scrolling through all of this misery and taking it all in and yet we still have the same capacity we had before to actually affect all of this. Yeah, I was, man, I think it's such a, it's like, it's such a fundamental component of this. I wrote a newsletter recently about like, it was like, calibrate your anxiety, colon, the debt ceiling. And it was like, you know, how much should I care about this? Right? Like me, just normal person, like, compared to all these other problems and it was so completely split in the reaction that i ended up coming down on like you know like it's probably good to like you know have it in your radar but like don't lose sleep over it right now right you know right um normal person and i had all these people furious right because they're like if people

don't freak out about it they won't call their congress people they won't like you know like there won't be enough pressure and we won't see change and like this is how those low probability shitty events come to pass right is not enough people whatever and like that's a valid that valid point and then there's this sort of you know the other side of people who are like mad that i'm even dating to like bring it up because it's like how am I supposed to absorb another worry right another worry that's like based off of like what a bunch of people in Washington DC are going to do based off a whole bunch of bullshit that I'm not in control of like and like what does that do for me as a person to spend more of my time upset worried about that you know know, it's like,

I've got to deal with climate change and a pandemic and, you know, the other political stuff and feeding my family and the price of gas and like, you know, and it's like so valid. And I know that a lot of people self-included at times, like you can only absorb so much. There is a wall. I stared into into the black heart of the internet for a very long time and didn't approach the wall. And then the pandemic came and I was like, ah, there it is. There's the very personal,

might die going to the grocery store thing. I've hit it and I have to recede for a while. And I wasn't kind of able to do my job in the way that I normally could. Everyone shuts down.'s like what is what is that point and we're all sort of approaching it and trying to calibrate it as a journalist like I feel like I am in this constant state of telling myself that I am not adequately alarmed or not adequately alarming people to things and at the same time I am being alarmist and I need to just like chill the hell out.

And it is like every day I ping pong. Well, I think because social media like causes us to both be too alarmist about everything all the time and thus not alarmist enough about the things that really matter. Because if everything is at an 11 all the time, we lose sort of a sense of proportion about what we should care about, what we shouldn't.

And I think even more importantly, what we can affect and what we can't. And like, you know, I have a slightly different job because I'm in media, but I'm also a political activist. And so I have a, you know, when I'm thinking about when i'm sifting through all the fucking garbage news stories every day to figure out what to talk about on the pod i'm like okay i want to try to talk to the audience about stories that really matter but also stories that they can potentially do something about and And I want to make sure that if I'm asking people to give their time and effort and money or whatever else, that it's to causes that they can bring about change. Because if it's just, here's something that you should be outraged about,

and we can't tell you how to do anything about that, but just be mad and be upset, then I don't know that we're doing anything better than what a lot of the right wing media is doing all the time, or some of these social media platforms. But it's hard. It's hard because sometimes shit really scares me. And I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty alarmed about the state of democracy right now. And I feel like I should tell people about that. I try to maintain a lot of my friendships with people who aren't like me, like as in like not chronically online. And I don't know what the sort of effect is of people sort of tuning in and seeing the, you know, everyone has their hair on fire about something, a legitimate thing too. But then 48 hours later, it's like it never happened i mean

the sort of the biggest one i think that of like the last i don't know few years was um the withdrawal from afghanistan which was a legitimate like real thing with just like absolutely crushing images coming out like all this stuff and it was like you know me i don't cover foreign policy stuff really so i know me i don't cover foreign policy stuff really so i was like i don't really know what to what to say like it's very clear that i'm just gonna sort of you know view this from afar let people do their thing and and then it was like two days later like it's just like just, like, not a thing. Like, we had, like, strangely moved on in some way. Yeah.

But I was like, what does that do to people, just normal news consumers, when they're like, you were just, like, screaming about war crimes. And now, like, it's like we haven't talked about it in 35 days. Like what does that do to just normal people who are trying to calibrate their stuff? And then like the way they respect people in my profession. I don't know, man. I thought about it when it happened. And, you know, I don't cover foreign policy much either. I'm not an expert. But, you know, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes were talking about it.

And, you know, this is a huge fucking deal. And it was a huge fucking deal in the moment. Yeah. were talking about it and you know like this is a huge fucking deal and it was a huge fucking deal in the moment and in the back of my head i kept thinking this ain't gonna last more than a couple weeks after this actually happens we're not gonna be talking about this a month from now and i don't think that's necessarily even just because it's hard to get americans to care a lot about foreign policy though it is it's because uh we're already starting to memory hole a fucking insurrection yeah or like how about the biggest irony of all the facebook papers yeah like what happened to the the facebook papers is what happens to every other social media thing this was a big social

media story that ended up being treated like every other story on social media which is it was forgotten about in a couple of news cycles and we've all just moved on and like what's gonna happen with facebook i don't know it's so hard um because again the point of all of it is like it doesn't all of this matters to some you know degree and obviously to the people involved and and to a lot of us outside of that and i i mean it's it's such a problem with with journalism i think that's like i don't i don't even know that like the media even is causing it necessarily like i i feel it myself the pressure to be like like i am so bored of the Facebook conversation because I've been having it for 10 years. I was going to say, yeah, you've got a decade under your belt. And like, I just,

like, I don't, but it's, I don't think it's any less important, but I'm also like, okay, so what's the new way, you know, to keep people interested in this thing that I think matters? You know, what's the new way to like spin this? And so like, I'm as guilty as anyone of getting caught up in this stuff. Um, and then, and then sort of being like, well, we got to pivot over to here, you know, because I need you to read this because I need to, you know, have a job or whatever. I'm curious as to how a decade of reporting on this has changed your own online habits or has it? I think I'm really, really hyper aware after a decade of covering this stuff of the way that I, my experience is not natural, right? I do this thing sometimes where I just,

like, if I'm seeing a lot of one person on Twitter, this happens all the time. And I'm not trying to like, you know, drag him into this. But like it happens a lot with Matt Iglesias on Twitter. I will see a bunch of people angry about something. And then I realize like, oh, they're angry at him. So then I'll like search his name and I'll try to like understand the weird internet drama. And then Twitter will be like, we know what you want now.

We only want you to see Matt Iglesias tweets. You want more. Like, this is all. We know what you want and the answer is more Matt Iglesias. This is all you want. Because, hey, you searched it, man. It's on you. Oh, wow.

And I'm like very well aware that like if I delete sometimes four people, like from my follow list, the entire experience of my Twitter feed will change for like three days, just like completely, it's like, like, oh, wow, like, I'm seeing stuff about golf now. I think that's the biggest thing is that I'm constantly aware of the way in which none of this is really organic. And that like that sort of like, we're all miserable on here is like a factor that like that sort of like we're all miserable on here is like a factor of like all of us are following the same miserable people and i'm not saying that's bad necessarily like we're doing this for reasons but it's always the thing that i'm trying to keep top of mind but also the one that's like so destabilizing when you're like wow

this experience that feels like fundamental to my existence because I'm plugged into it over all these platforms, like, doesn't really mean shit outside of the world of me to some degree. Yeah. And it's kind of, I mean how it's not organic, what information you're getting and, and trying to control that is maybe even an easier step than just saying, oh, I'm going to log off, which of course is just takes a tremendous amount of self-discipline and also isn't very feasible for most people, um, who, you know, need to know all this information for a living. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no, definitely. And. And like, that's, I struggle all the time. I really dislike the phrase Twitter is not real life. Not because, not because of, you know, like, I can't see that it's obviously its own bubble,

but because I think a lot of people use it to dismiss things that they are uncomfortable with. So I see it a lot from like very sort of like centrist pundit types, just like very frequently, just saying like Twitter's not real life, right? Like, I mean, I think the Biden administration made that sort of like a kind of tongue in cheek thing, right? And I think a little of that is because A, it's correct to a degree but b it's because there's a lot of people screaming at them about stuff and i think like i think you can easily i guess what i'm trying to say is i think you can easily take that too far and start to say like the like the inputs i'm getting from here don't mean anything and everything that i've

seen from horrible internet movements to wonderful social justice internet movements is that like, they start in that sort of like, okay, like, you know, try to like push this down. Because it's just like a lot of like people, you know, yelling, and then it and then it builds, it builds consensus, or it becomes part of like the, you know, the fabric of our cultural conversation. The flip side of that is people taking one argument on Twitter and being like, aha, like that's the left or aha, that's the right. And just like slowly driving themselves insane. Oh, see that, that's why I, when I have said Twitter is not real life, that's more what I mean is that ladder, you're right twitter has been great at you know getting rid of the gatekeepers and sort of allowing people who aren't usually heard to have a voice right and and particularly in politics and and and in social

movements and that's i think a good thing i spoke to duray mckesson about that on last week's episode um but i do think what happens is is sometimes Twitter obviously is not representative of the population or the electorate at large in any way. It's like more educated. It's whiter. It's richer. It's just not. It's a very small percentage population. But I think because so many journalists are on Twitter that the opinions on both from the left and the right on Twitter are then taken as, oh, this represents the, from the left and the right on Twitter are then taken as, oh, this is represents the democratic party. This represents the Republican party when it really doesn't, it's, it's not real life in that way, but it is real life. And that like, it does

give people in real life, a voice to affect change and to like, tell people what they think, which is important. Yeah. it's been really fascinating. Like, I think that, I mean, that's 100% right. That's how I feel. I just think like, I still think there's, interestingly enough, groups of people who just don't realize that like, internet culture is culture now. It's also politics now.

It's also finance now. Like, it's everything. And there's this way in which we're still kind of in this mode because it's all happened so fast. And because a lot of it is ridiculous that like, you know, we'll talk about like the GameStop, you know, thing or whatever. Like the way that, you know, Reddit's changing, you know, like shorting stocks or getting people back who short stocks and driving stock prices up and elon musk tweeting about dogecoin or like whatever and we're and there's this like i'm part of it too right where i'm like this is exhausting or like the future is ridiculous or the future is crap or whatever but it's also like this is what it is like this this culture has

permeated like politicians are professional shit posters now that's like a solid part of the job and truly i think has a lot to do with certain people getting just elected in general and like we have to deal with that instead of sort of say like uh you know like you know this isn't real or this is so ridiculous. Like this is part of what the culture is. And it's, you know, we have to figure out how to live with it and live around it and all that jazz. Last question. I'm asking all our guests, what's your favorite way to unplug? And how often do you get to do it? Um, I, this is like the most like elitist out of touch uh thing but like i i like to play golf and the

reason i like to do it is because it like engages my brain and like makes it so that i actually can't like have contact with the screen that's good uh and it's and it's like it's like like hiking's too like i don't know it's too like enjoyable golf is like a mental anguish that i get from the internet that i can just like port into something else that isn't a screen. Like I'm just like- Transfer it somewhere else. I'm just like furious all the time at like grass,

which is like, you know, a better thing to be furious at than everyone else on the internet. That's a good answer. I'll take it. Charlie Worzel, thank you so much for joining Offline. Thank you for having me. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced

by Andy Gardner-Bernstein and Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez Ari Schwartz, Madison Hallman and Sandy Gerard for production support

and to our digital team, Elijah Cohn Milo Kim and Narmel Konian who film and share our episodes as videos every week Thank you.