Offline with Jon Favreau - Has the Internet Trapped Us in the Past?

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

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.

And I'm wondering if, especially in a culture where politicians have become influencers, is silence on all of our part, right, is ignoring this type of stuff, whether we're the media or whether we're just outraged people on Twitter with the ability to Ukraine and how quickly we were able to tap into live Twitter feeds from participants on the ground, right, to learn very detailed information about the movement of troops, about the conditions on the ground. It changes what news means. And so in that context, I do wonder if there isn't a case to be made for this strategic silence, even when it feels to cut against the grain of the old traditional journalistic ethics. When somebody for The Times writes about Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, is anybody being convinced of anything they don't already believe? I'm Charlie Warzel. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Offline. I'm Charlie Worzel. This week, I'm filling in for John as he is, well, offline. My guest this week is the writer Michael Sikassis. Online, he writes under the name L.M. Sikassis and is the

author of the fantastic newsletter, The Convivial Society, as well as a forthcoming book called 41 Questions, Technology and the Good Life. Michael is one of my favorite technology thinkers. Where I am a journalist, he is a scholar, and he frequently draws on the writing of past theorists from Arendt to McLuhan to Ivan Illich, and he tries to link their ideas to the technologies and media of today. The result is a conversation about technology that isn't laser-focused on the present, but that has a long memory. His work is deeply focused on the ways we can live with technology, but also, hopefully, preserve essential parts of our humanity. He grapples constantly with the ways that our new tools, from Twitter to Zoom to iPhones, change us, and the way that our usage ultimately changes those tools.

When it comes to the internet and our media ecosystems, it's easy to hurl vague blanket critiques like, social media is making everything feel worse. But Sikassos' writing goes deeper and tries to make us understand why, and then give us the language and even the agency to change our relationship to certain technologies. Recently, Sikasas has been writing about the ways that the internet, a combination of social media and traditional media, have trapped us in a doom loop of sorts. Every day we wake up and we are barraged by new horrors, eroding civil rights, existential climate fears, mass shootings, and deeply dysfunctional politics.

You can't open your phone or turn on the television without experiencing and absorbing untenable levels of grief. And yet it feels like we're constantly fighting over the same things and hardly anything changes. Sikasas describes this as a stuckness, and he argues that there's a reason for it. The internet, he says, is trapping us in the past and making it harder than ever to live in the present and fight for a better future. This conversation, like so much of Sakazis' work, opened my mind, and the end features a beautiful meditation on unplugging that left me unexpectedly inspired. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

As always, if you have questions, comments, or complaints about the show, feel free to email us at offline at cricket.com. Here's Michael Sakasas. Michael Sakasas, welcome to Offline. I wanted to base the majority of this discussion on a piece that you wrote back in May in your excellent newsletter, The Convivial Society. The piece is titled, We Are Not Living in a Simulation, We Are Living in the Past. For listeners, I want to note that what I love about this piece is that unlike a lot of writing and thinking about the internet, including my own, you don't just come out and say that many of us have recently in the sort of post-Trump, mid-Perma pandemic, and that's a feeling of being stuck. I think a lot of people hearing that are going to just immediately relate to this idea, this vague notion of stuckness, but could you tell me what you personally mean

by feeling stuck? I think, uh, yeah, a lot of what you said is, is part of, uh, what I had in mind. Um, but the sense that we, we seem to be stuck in loops that we can never quite escape that, um, especially online debates and conversations tend to never move productively forward, but spiral downward, as it were, and that we're constantly having the same kinds of conversations, never resolving the issues that they're about, that there is no forward momentum. It just seems as if we're doomed to kind of just repeat the same patterns that we've been trapped in for some time now. And then I think even personally, we might feel this, where we have maybe a lack of a sense of purpose, or we find ourselves acting in ways or behaving online or maybe engaging online in ways that we sort of know are counterproductive, but can't seem to shake

ourselves loose from. And so that it generates a sense of, again, just falling back into patterns we never can't quite escape or transcend. Do you see the stuckness as something that's generally separate from the kind of anxiety and dread that you can feel plugging into, let's just say something like Twitter, or even, you know, just scrolling the news on Instagram or TikTok or some social media app? Do you feel like the anxiety and dread we feel is a part of that stuckness or do you feel that that's something kind of separate? This is really its own phenomenon. Yeah, I think maybe they're intertwined. The anxiety and dread is a kind of a emotive response maybe to this sense of being unable to not just be stuck, but to be confronted

with situations that we feel we have very little agency over. I mean, we've been confronted with a tremendous amount of uncertainty over the last few years as we've tried to navigate any number of crises. The pandemic, I think, is a great example of this, especially early on. And so we, in some respects, I think, turn to social media often to somehow alleviate that uncertainty, to go in search of the right bit of information and often don't find what we're looking for and end up feeling more anxious because of this decision to search for these answers through social media.

And so there's a stuckness in the sense that we can't ever again find the answer, find the solution that we turn to social media for, that we might be turning to social media for digital media more broadly. And then that probably contributes to the sense of anxiety, having to deal with an uncertainty that we can't resolve. I want to hold on some of the specifics of those dynamics and the idea of agency and come back to that. But let's talk first about the premise of the piece.

When I first heard, or I guess read, this piece, it kind of cracked open my brain. You wrote that, quote, the internet as a mediator of human interactions is not a place, it is a time. It is the past. I mean this in a literal sense. The layers of artifice that mediate our online interactions mean that everything that comes to us online comes to us from the past, sometimes the very recent past, but the past nonetheless. When I wrote about this theory in my newsletter, I had a lot of people tell me that no, no, no, social media is too focused on the present. And so I'd love if you can explain a little bit more of what you mean about the

distinction between the feeling that everything is happening right now, and then your notion and theory that so much of what we're actually encountering online is coming from the recent past. Right. I think the idea as it crystallized for me and it, um, it, it, it was a sort of idea that all of a sudden kind of enters into one's mind. And, uh, and, and I thought, well, yeah, I think there's something here and it's, it's, um, like I said, I mean, it's very literally, right? So if I'm scrolling Twitter, for example, everything that I see is already coming to me from the past. In other words, it's been generated not in my immediate presence, which is the lived present, right? But it's being generated in the past. And this is, you know, the reason this is so is because what we encounter online are

inscriptions, right? And so much of social media is also textual, right? Or that there is some sort of inscription, whether it's the meme or the text that we might type out, that we, in that act of writing, we are creating a document, right? We're documenting something, expressing ourselves, but in that expression, creating a document. And then what others encounter is that document, right? It's that mediated documentation of the thought that I may have had in the present. And I realize, because I understand the pushback that, no, this is actually very presentist.

And in fact, I've actually made that case in the past. I've thought about it in that way as well. And I won't necessarily say that, no, that's an absolutely wrong way to look at it. But that even when we're thinking about being entwined in the present, it's still kind of dominated by the archives that we're building. We're always turned back towards what has just been said. We're never quite turned forward looking into the future or simply inhabiting the present. Whenever we are contributing to engaging in social media, we are literally building archives that are documents of what has already been said and what has already happened.

And so some of those may come to us rather instantaneously, right? So that it does feel as if this is, in fact, presently happening. But they very quickly recede. They're always receding and there's a kind of piling up on top of layer over layer of mediated inscriptions, right?

That builds up this archive of the past, which is what we're always turned toward, I think, when we're engaging online. And so I think that's what I had in mind. And that's why it struck me that we're anchored to the past in a way that may be really counterproductive towards finding a kind of agency in the present or even to be able to think more productively about the future. And I think about this a lot just on a very practical level, right? I am someone who is using Twitter way more than they should as sort of the primary social media experience. And I notice a lot of time that, you know, especially if a tweet of mine gets a little bit of pickup and is, you know, not viral, but goes, you know, out beyond the network that I intended

it for. And I'll notice people coming to this observation six hours later, maybe a day and a half later, and the whole context surrounding what I was talking about has completely changed. And I think that's a great way to sort of illustrate in a very practical level, what's happening in the way to that that can cause this disconnect. I often see people get very mad about things that were those, you know, documents of a very specific sliver or moment in time. You know, I actually see it happening to across different types of media. Interestingly enough, I am a contributing writer at the Atlantic and the Atlantic just opened up its archives for its 160 plus year archives of everything. And there were a lot of people

going through it recently and saying like, but did you see this article from, you know, 1880 that is, you know, very racist? And there's this kind of this way that we're sort of litigating those things coming to it from the present and talking about, you know, the past, talking about these inscriptions as if, you know, they have to sort of mean the same thing throughout all of time. It's a very confusing space. But one of the lines that really kind of set off alarm bells for me was you wrote, because we live in the past when we are online I think, in this experience of the stuckness. Around the time that I read your piece, I saw this chart that was published by Axios about social media engagement around mass shootings. And it showed that after the tragic shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that online

engagement around the tragedy plummeted after a couple of days. There was a shooting, a white supremacist shot up a supermarket in Buffalo the week before that, or two weeks before that. And the same sort of thing happened where it was dominated social media for a short time and fell off the map. And this idea that even with absolute tragedy, it's so hard to rally the country's attention. And I guess, do you see this as all of a piece with your theory? Because it seems to me that two things are happening here. That one, we're just constantly barraged by new events that make it very hard to live in the present.

And then because we're trapped in that flow, we kind of tend to argue about the same things and it's all that backwards facing. Yeah. I mean, certainly the preponderance of information that we encounter makes it very difficult, I think, for any particular event to gain traction. We've talked about information overload for a very long time now. I think that's a phrase that probably has 15, 20 years old at this point. But I still don't know that we fully grappled with the consequences of what we're talking about when we talk about information overload. And I think it's both information and what I've called affect overload, all right, because it's

not just that we're being confronted with data, but we're also being confronted with, often, as the examples that you just gave, with very emotionally trying information, information that elicits, you know, a sense of tragedy, sadness, anger, frustration, and we're never cut off from it, right? So there's no, for the extremely online, of course, but I think for most people now, it may be the case that we have very little distance from that constant flow. You mentioned other kinds of media that might also kind of partake of the same dynamic. And I think that's true, right? So any documentation, whether it's writing a photograph, a video film, a magazine article from 1880, they are all from the past, right? They all arrive to us

from the past in some way or another. What I think the difference is, is that the ubiquity of our connection to the internet, right? The fact that it is always with us, that we're constantly plugged into it so that it's not as if we sit down, we encounter the newspaper and in it we read about things that happened yesterday. Right. So when somebody opened up the newspaper, they were also being confronted with the past. But it's that we were constantly plugged into that stream, right? And so we're bombarded with the information and it's always receding into the past. And we are overwhelmed. I think our emotional capacity for emotional response is overwhelmed. And in many cases, I think also our ability to process the degree of information that we encounter, you know, can be epistemically challenging. And so all of these things, I think, do combine to create a situation where, yeah, it's difficult to sustain attention.

Just in terms of how our Internet experience is structured through social media, it can be very difficult for any event to gain traction for very long at all. So it's not surprising that even that amount of time is shrinking over time. We have these events too that they all seem to sort of build and layer on top of each other right like a part of that stuckness that you talk about is this notion that it's not just that you know we two sort of almost opposite things kind of seem to be happening right which is that nothing can stick in and have that traction, but at the same time, we just keep building on top of it. So it's just like crisis atop of crisis atop of crisis. And I think people are really overwhelmed by that.

Um, one thing that you've described with this is that the sort of digitization of all this media, it's this disordered relationship to time, right? Because the focus is so disproportionately in one direction. I'm sort of curious if you could expand on what you think that is doing to us. You know, like you mentioned, 20, 2030 years ago, we had newspapers, we obviously had media that was focused in the past. But now, because that focus is so constant, like, what is that doing to just average people to be spending so much time dwelling backwards, as opposed to, you know, looking into the future or really enjoying and absorbing the present? A lot. I think it's doing a lot. I think it's a common complaint to feel as if

we're unable to inhabit the present and unable to kind of be, you know, the cliches to be in the moment. Right. And so I think there's a moral dimension to that in the sense that, you know, what often is calling our attention in the moment is, you know, the people we may be with, right? But we have a difficult time attending to them as fully as we ought because we have a kind of compulsive relationship to the information flows that are always present with us, that we carry around in our pockets, that are always before us. And so I think that inability, perhaps what we might feel sometimes to simply step away from those flows of information, those social media feeds, in order to simply be with the people we ought to be with,

to give our attention to the tasks that we know are required of us, our obligations. And I think then that kind of sort of self-loathing that comes from knowing that you ought to be doing something other than doom scrolling at this particular time, even if it maybe is just getting a decent night of sleep. There are, again, emotional, I think even kind of physical consequences to that. We are not perhaps becoming the kind of people that we want to be or dealing with others in the way that we know that they deserve. And I think that has ramifications across past, present and future, right? So what might it mean to kind of a rightly ordered relationship to the past? I think we ought not to ignore the

past, right? And saying that we're always focused on the past is not to suggest that we should not relate to it properly, learn from it where appropriate, value the histories that inform our understanding of the world in which we live. And likewise, as we think about the future, we can imagine anxiety as a kind of disordered relationship to the future. But in the way that our digital technologies encourage us, maybe train us to experience time, I think it could throw off our ability to relate rightly to the past, rightly to the present, and rightly to the future. And I think we find ourselves sort of skewed on all of those axes. We're sometimes too preoccupied with the past, but in a way that's not actually generative of understanding and

wisdom. We're unable to be in the present in the way that we know we ought to be. And then when we think about the future, it's generally with a sense of anxiety and a sense of a lack of agency or an inability to imagine better alternatives. Yeah. Something that makes me think about immediately too is sort of the moral dimension that you're talking about too and the way that we relate, you know, to other people is, is, is how it just kind of warps our perspective of who we're talking to and when, right. Again, just on a very practical level, like I'll go back to the way that a lot of people, the way that I talk to certain people on social media, the way they talk to me, the way I watch, you know, others talking to each other, especially the lack of

kindness that you see, but also just in general, there's something that's very strange, right? We always say, I think, oh, you know, you would never say that to my face, because we're not really perceiving, you know, when we are physically together, like our sense of time is so much more aligned, right? Like we very understand that we are in the moment with this person. The words that come out of my mouth, like it's going to affect them. It's going to affect, you know, how they look, how they respond to me. It's going to affect the air in the room that we're with together. And all that I think is a relationship to time and a relationship to the present and relationship to the future. And some of that warping I think has to do

with why it's so much easier. It's not just that I'm not in the same room with you. It's that I don't, I'm not almost in the same time as you. So I can say almost whatever I want, or I don't behave in the way that I would if I was there. That's what it makes me think about to some degree. I think that that's such an interesting point about anxiety too, as a sort of a disordered relationship to the future, that kind of ruminating. It makes a lot of sense. And there's something really kind of upsetting, right, to this idea that, you know, not only do these tools tend to trap us in that sort of cycle of the past, but also that when we do kind of look forward, that

it's in this really anxious way. I mean, you're right, I think, to point to the importance of the body, I think, you know, we are fundamentally embodied beings, right? So part of what happens online is that we abstract the body from our interactions. And so when our sort of embodied presence isn't the, I'm not sure that I love this metaphor, but when our embodied presence isn't our interface with our experience, I think we do lose, we lose something or we invite ways of relating to one another that might not necessarily be so easy to fall into. Because, of course, people can be cruel to each other, you know, face to face. You know, the fact that somebody says, well, you wouldn't say that to me. If we were faced, maybe they would. People can be remarkably cruel to one another under all

sorts of conditions. But I do think it's easier because if I'm present with somebody and I say something that is insulting or offensive, that registers in their body in that moment, right? I can see the wince, I can see the anger, I can see the shame. And I immediately perceive that in a way that I don't when I'm interacting merely through inscriptions online, right? And again, when those inscriptions are removed in time, but also the body is absent from the exchange. And so, yeah, I think that certainly at least removes some of the roadblocks to cruelty, you know, and other forms of harm that we might be too willing to fall into in online interactions. One place where this whole conversation is kind of hung around so far is this idea of agency.

And to me, reading your newsletter on this and thinking quite a bit about it, I just get this sense that it all builds towards, whether it's the stuckness in the past or the looking toward the future and feeling that kind of anxiety, that it all is almost a perfect recipe for feeling powerless, right? And you write that on the internet, fighting about what has happened is far easier than imagining what could happen. So, you know, not only do we have this sort of anxious look towards the future, this stuckness in the past, but also this kind of almost a curbing of our imagination. I mean, would you agree that it is that recipe for feeling powerless? It also feels like a recipe for loneliness. It just feels like it's almost like a worst case conditions, you know, that lead to an action. Yeah. And I think that's because when we're interacting online, the only form that action can take is through posting, right? Through adding comments to the discourse or, you know, dropping a meme or what, you know, some form of discourse, right?

That's the only possible. Now, this is not to say that those online interactions or actions may not generate sort of offline actions that can look very different and can have very serious consequences. But when we're online, the only shape our action can take is to just pile on, to pile on to the discourse and that way add those layers of commentary on top of commentary where it doesn't take very long before everybody has lost sight of whatever the original point of conflict might have been. And we've stepped into what I elsewhere call the kind of meta positioning where we're just trying to figure out what are the people on my side saying so that I can understand how I can relate to this particular debate or controversy. Or we're otherwise trying to just figure out what the

appropriate quote tweet is going to be that I can contribute to this viral moment. I hesitate to use the phrase real world. I think the online world is very much intertwined with the real world and it's very real, but it's not going to generate any kind of satisfying, I don't know, resolution. It's not productive action. And I think most of us know that. And I think if that's all we're left with, and that's all that the present social, political, and economic structures of our world have given to us, right? It's as if we have been in some respects stripped of the capacity for genuine public action through political structures, say, and instead been given this never-ending spectacle into which we can partake and participate and have the simulation of action, but it's not in fact action in a more

substantive sense. And so that's, I think, what does give us a sense of being stuck, of being powerless, unable to affect anything in particular, because that's the only mode of action that's left to us online is to just contribute to the archives of the past that just build inexhaustibly. Well, it's also this, and again, I really take the point and think that it's really important to say, obviously, as you did, there is digital activism and there is quite a bit you can do to mobilize, to use these tools for positive social change or political change or whatever, and not to discount that. But I do think there's something really important about this idea of the layering on the commentary, feeling like an activism, or feeling like, you know, the best way to get that agency when, when in reality, it's, it's not. We actually spoke about this one time offline and talked about how there's almost like a cynical influencer culture that this creates, right, where it is so much easier but also more kind of socially lucrative, more sort of instantaneously rewarding and appealing to sort of instantaneously rewarding and appealing to,

you know, to sort of behave like an influencer and sort of have that, you know, masquerade as activism. But really, it's not. I think that it's really, again, this, this worst case scenario, because it is, I think about it so much in my, in my personal life, where I do feel like I see something that I that I have no control over, right, something about, you know, the the war in Ukraine. And, and I do feel like the only way that I, you know, can can have a little bit of control is to say something publicly about it. But, you know, in reality, that part of my voice isn't really necessary, right? And there's also nothing that I, there's no change that I'm, you know, going to affect by, like you said, layering on a quote tweet. Do you find yourself doing that in your own sort of experience with social media? Because you are, you think about this stuff

so deeply? Do you see yourself falling into that? I think I try to be really disciplined online. So I have Twitter, which is the one social media platform that I use too much, I'm sure, as many people would say of their own use of social media or um, of social media or of Twitter specifically. Um, and so I, yeah, I, I try to be pretty, pretty disciplined and to, uh, as much as possible practice what I preach as, as it were. Um, so I, I think that the, um, you know, as, as, as you were describing just a moment ago, the, the urge to speak, right. I, right? The urge to do something about things that I'm made aware of through social media, right? So we are tempted to think that we must know about and care about every possible thing happening in the world, right? So, you know, electronic media, television, and radio already began to do

this. In fact, you know, there's some evidence that some people were related to the telegraph in this way in the 19th century, right? That all of a sudden, the world that they could be sort of immediately attentive to was much wider and broader than their immediate community, right? So there was a point at which, right, as fast as information could travel was as fast as a horse could run. And in that world, time and space itself sort of regulated information flows and foregrounded the things that were of immediate concern to you, right? Your community, your town, your village, whatever the case may be. Suddenly with electronic media and then exponentially more so with digital media,

we have, as it were, our senses is a kind of a Marshall McLuhan way of putting it, right? But our senses have been extended into the whole world, right? Digital media is an extension of our nervous system so that we now can perceive things happening across the globe almost instantaneously, as it were. And my sense of this is that we can't care about it all and we can't know about it all. And I don't mean that in the sense that we shouldn't, you know, and this is, I think, part of maybe the tension that many of us feel. We encounter things that are very serious, that are worthy of attention, but there's a limit, I think, to how much we are able to focus our attention productively on an issue, on a crisis, and then to think about what is it that I am capable of doing

in relation to this particular development. And mass media did this, already began to do this in a sense that it kind of made the national, the primary form of information that we encountered, say, in nightly news, network news. And it tended to make local developments and local politics and local events somewhat less of the focus in the world of the media, right? And so in the case of digital media, this happens, I think, by default in the sense that we have connections. We can easily connect and receive information from across the globe. So I think the idea is probably to figure out, knowing that there are many things that deserve our attention, where can my attention and my presence and my action most productively align? And that answer is going to be very different for different people, right? I may have a different answer given where I am and what my own

skills and capacities are than what yours might be and somebody else's might be. But I think that trying to figure out where I can make attention and capacity and action meet productively in my own experience and realize that there are limits to me as a human being in terms of what I can know and what I can, the kind of care that I can give and the kind of action that I can contribute. And to resist the temptation, perhaps to feel as if I myself need to be immediately involved with every particular crisis that comes across my feed. Well, and the difficulty too is, I mean, I find in my tortured relationship with social media that I am constantly entertaining this fantasy of, you know, unplugging completely, right? Getting off of there. And, you know, there's a bunch of different elements

that complicate this, including that my job is to pay attention to this stuff. But there's another, and that's the sort of the moral value of it, right? Which is to say, here is this machine that plugs me into everything that's going wrong with the world. To disconnect from it means to some way, you know, makes me feel like I'm giving up on that. And that there's some virtue for me just staring constantly into this string of bad news, right? If I can absorb it all, then maybe I can either do something about it or help, or certainly, at the very least, I'm not looking away. And yet, at the same time, it's just not actually

a productive way. I've talked to numerous people about this from colleagues to friends, and they all end up saying, in a lot of ways, frequently being bombarded, being overwhelmed, being stuck in the past, so to speak, or being made anxious about the future makes you a worse, you know, activist or makes it harder for you to, you know, to really focus or to care. It paralyzes certain people, right, instead of spurring them into some kind of action. And, you know, in a lot of this conversation, especially as it pertains to feedback loops, and the cynical kind of influencer culture, it all makes me think of politicians, right? You know, there's there's the sort of meme now, that politicians are professional shit posters, right?

They're professional influencers. And a lot of politicians are, instead of governing, they're kind of influencing. They're aggregating, getting attention, and that attention is power. But it's not really governing as we think of it. Do you think that some of that feeling of the stuckness, I mean, our politics feels very stuck right now, nationally, you know, in some ways globally. Do you think that that has a lot to do with that sort of influencer sort of, you know, media dynamic kind of taking hold and influencing every part of our lives?

I mean, one way I've thought about it with respect to, you know, a certain segment of political culture and certain politicians that maybe are more online or have too readily adapted to the dynamics of the attention economy. One way I've thought about that is that, you know, it used to be politicians would kind of show their constituents their value by kind of, you know, tying pork barrel spending to their district, right? So, you know, I've passed this bill that gives this federal spending that comes right to my district to provide jobs or to create a factory. So it was a very material sort of return. I think that's been, for some people in some circles, replaced with culture war victories, right, or culture war provocations. And so what is most rewarding in some cases for some politicians and their

constituents is not that they're governing, not that they're effectively directing resources to their constituencies and their districts, but that they are adept at culture war attention games. And they learn very quickly how to create the right provocations, which issues can be kind of safely stirred up. And by safely, I mean, it's not going to require them actually to follow through on anything. They simply, you know, kind of pick a fight, carry on that fight, and then get, you know, the appropriate kind of rewards in popularity from their base. And so those dynamics certainly, I think, have to do with the way that social media

has kind of colonized the political sphere. You know, you've, I'm thinking about the, you know, the politicians and the influencers, and let me, I'll use myself as an example, right? I have written quite a bit about the ways that certain politicians, especially on the right, you know, use social media tools to sort of help, you know, program news cycles, right? And kind of hijack our attention in the ways that both myself, but other people in the media amplify them and whether or not, you know, what we're doing is, is a positive, right? Whether, whether we're just sort of playing into their hands. And I think that, you know, you can make a good case that a lot of times we are right. A lot of times to, you know, be very confessional about it. I frequently feel that when I'm writing about, you know, someone like, let's just say Marjorie Taylor Greene or something

like that, doing something outrageous, outlandish, the goal is to expose that to an audience and maybe call them to action or, you know, to help understand some awful things that are happening in the world and the potential downstream consequences. But again, I might just be, you know, feeding that. I might just be giving that enough attention to let it keep breathing. And so I've felt over the past few years, you know, the desire to want to ignore this, you know, these things that are awful, because I think maybe starving it might actually, you know, in a world where attention is currency, that might be better. Now, I mean, you've written before about the power of silence. And I'm wondering if, especially in a culture where politicians have become influencers,

is silence on all of our part, right? Is ignoring this type of stuff, whether we're the media or whether we're just outraged people on Twitter with the ability to quote tweet, is that a way to break the cycle? Yeah, I mean, I think so. I would say the moral calculus of the journalist is maybe slightly different than the individual. So for me, I would say, yeah, this is my practice. I think I wrote about this around 2013 or so, right? The best I can do is to, if I'm a node in a network, right, if that's how I understand my role in the attention economy, I'm a node in a network with the kind of provocateurs that you're describing, the best I could do is not to critique, but simply to let that little message die, right? So that if

it hits me, it won't spread further through me to those other nodes that I'm connected to, right? So that, yes, silence, I think, is power. And I think this is very counterintuitive because silence is complicity is the line that I think more readily comes to mind for a lot of people. And so I think I want to clarify strategic silence and that different people positioned differently in hierarchies of power need to think about this differently, right? But I'd say for, you know, the average, you know, citizen who's on social media and sees this kind of, you know, whether it's, you know, Green or some other person that is just said something absurd or offensive or ridiculous. I think the issue is that the way that we have

connected to those who are like us online, right, so that our networks often are, by and large, like-minded people, right? Our critique is not necessarily going to change anybody's point of view because they're already going to probably think what we think about it. What it will do is sort of amplify the message and maybe give it more air, more oxygen than it would have otherwise. And so I think for the individual citizen on social media, that certainly is a viable strategy to recognize that even in critiquing, they are often rewarding and amplifying the very thing that they want to challenge. Like I said, I think that a journalist is maybe in a slightly different position because of the

kind of responsibility to inform the public that they might feel ethically as part of their work. But even here, I mean, I think if we're going to take stock of the media landscape as it now exists, information is widely available, right? You know, I was thinking about this in relationship to, you know, something that was on Twitter yesterday. I can't remember who tweeted it, but it was a question about whether people get their news more on, actually, I think you were on this thread, right? People get their news more on social media than they do on, sorry, I didn't mean to implicate you. No, go ahead. we might think of news as having a kind of coherent meaning or referent. And it implies, you know, my view, it comes out of a, you know, situation of information scarcity,

where I depend upon the news media, whether that's, you know, the four networks or local newspaper, to tell me what I need to know to supply information to me that I wouldn't have otherwise. I don't think there's any press organ that has that kind of lock on information necessarily, right? Outfits like the New York Times are able to provide information about contexts that I would not otherwise have the ability to gain information from. But I think even there, if I even think, the war in Ukraine and how quickly we were able to tap into live Twitter feeds from participants on the ground, right, to learn very detailed information about the movement of troops, about the conditions on the ground, it changes what news means. And so in that context, I do wonder if there isn't a case to be made for this strategic silence, even when it feels to cut against the grain of the old, you know,

traditional journalistic ethics. You know, I'm not a journalist, so I don't feel like I'm competent to adjudicate the case, right? But, you know, I guess the question is how much are we informing, right? And since people have lined up behind their various information sources, because trust is also an important dynamic here, you know, when somebody for The Times writes about Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, is anybody being convinced of anything they don't already believe? You know, what is the outcome here that is worth the attention that you know, to her, to her campaign. So I don't know, it's a complicated question that I, you know, I know has vexed me, but, um, Yeah. And I, and I think, and I think it even,

even further complicating element of that too, is that occasionally the, like, uh, you know, a troll or provocateur or professional politician as troll, uh, a lot of times too, they're, they're not just hoping for the coverage. They're hoping for the criticism from a very specific group of people because it signifies to the other side that like, look, these people you dislike, dislike me, therefore, hey, that's an endorsement. And it is, it's very, very interesting. And I think, you know, you kind of worked through that, and especially as it relates to journalists in a way that I think every journalist, or many journalists, and myself very much included, that's how we're wrestling with this, because you don't want to just punt and give up and say, I mean, I think there's something very dangerous about adopting that, you know, complete ignoring of these subjects.

It's a really complicated environment. And I think what makes it so difficult is that, and this is what it speaks to, is we all play a part in some degree, even if it's a very small part. I love that, what you said about being the information node, thinking of yourself as a node in that system. I really hope that anyone who's listening to this adopts that framework, even in that little personal way, because these are structural problems that we're dealing with and they're bigger than us. But that to me feels like the most hopeful, empowering part is to imagine yourself as a piece of that, that system. Um, but before we go, I want to, I want to just quickly turn to a couple of personal things. Aside of writing about these, you know, broader media ecosystem dynamics, you are one of my favorite writers on, you know, other sort of,

I guess you would call them like more mundane parts of the way that technology intersects with our lives. And I would love to know a little bit about your own experience with digital tools. In a different interview you did last year, you said that you think of the body and the world in our minds as creating a circuit. And when we take a technology tool, you know, we insert that into the circuit and it changes how we perceive the world and interpret the world. And that really stuck with me. And you mentioned it specifically in a comment of being aware of the way that camera phones have changed how you document and relate to raising your young children. And the idea that, you know, you have this ability to document their

lives at every stage all the time, capture these moments, but that it also makes you really acutely feel the passage of time in a sort of bittersweet way. In my head, you're this very responsible user of all these tools because you're thinking so intensely about it. And I'm curious how you use these sort of, not just social media, but these other mundane tools in your life, like let's just say the camera phone. And has it created a really fraught sense of how you use these tools or more of an appreciation for them? So I hesitate to say anything, so I don't, you know, challenge the wonderful image you have of the way I use these tools in your head right now. I, yeah, I mean, I'd like to think that

I try to be aware and sensitive to that, you know, a lot of what I write actually just emanates from my own struggles, if you like, or the challenges I perceive or trying to make sense of, you know, how having, you know, a certain tool or device in hand is making me relate to myself, to others, to the world, et cetera. So, yeah, I try to be aware of those things, which is not to say that I always, you know, do exactly what I know I ought to do. You know, like I said, I would readily confess I've spent too much time on Twitter when I ought to have been doing other things. You know, I've tried to help myself a little bit. I'm still holding out. I don't have a smartphone. That makes some things easier. And it's still, right, whatever phone you have has a camera.

And, and, yeah, with, I think I've learned to kind of allow that, you know, that urge to document, to reside, you know, to subside. I don't feel that quite as keenly. And again, that's another interesting way in which we, you know, we become archivists of the past rather than actors in the present. Because in that kind of classic moment where your kid is doing something and you want to document it, you've actually kind of interrupted the capacity of your mind to generate a memory know, a memory of that moment that you can internally carry with you. And instead you've outsourced it, you know, to one of the 10,000 photos on your, on your smartphone. So, um, trying to think about these things, being conscious of them, being conscious of the habits that they generate in me. I think there's, there's something,

um, really fundamentally important about recapturing a sense of our, you know, of what it means to be a human being, its limits and its, you know, its capacities and the joys that it can bring. That's lovely. I think the limitations part is, it really resonates in a way where I'm not doing that very much. So that kind of brings us to the last question that is always asked here. And I think you're probably going to have maybe a more rich answer to this than most smartphone addicted humans. But what is your favorite way to unplug? Great question. addicted humans. But what is your favorite way to unplug?

Great question. I enjoy walking. And I've, you know, tried to do that more. my mind, um, and isn't kind of empowering and, and renewing. Um, so that I think is definitely, um, you know, one of the things that comes readily to mind. Um, and, and especially if I'm able to do it in places where the human built world recedes a little bit to some degree. Yeah, I find that to be pretty life giving. So I think that's the first thing that comes to mind right now. I'm not sure if that's very profound or much more sophisticated than what others might say. But I want to experience life as a gift, not as a project that I need to manage. And so in being able to be attentive to the world and receive it with gratitude as much as I'm able to experience it as something that is given and not just there for me to manage and control and try to assert my mastery over anything, any practice that encourages me in that direction, I think is one that, you know, I try to embrace.

That's great. Well, we're going to leave you to all of that and get you off the internet. But Michael Sikasas, thank you for joining Offline. My pleasure. Thank you so much, Charlie. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Andy Gardner Bernstein, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital

team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.