Plain English with Derek Thompson - How the Logic of Cults Is Taking Over Modern Life

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Several years ago, I told some friends that I had an idea for a second book. It would be called ‘Everything Is a Cult.’ I’d noticed that in an age of declining religiosity, capitalism was filling the god-shaped hole left by the demise of organized religion with companies and services and products that were amassing a cult-like following in media, entertainment, and marketing. I never ended up writing the book. But last week, Sean Illing of ‘The Gray Area’ podcast with Vox asked me to come on his show to talk about my thinking on cults, identity, and the history of news media. Today, we're running that conversation on this feed in a rare example of me getting interviewed on my own show. Enjoy! If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Sean Illing Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nathan Hubbard, spring has sprung, the birds are chirping, and the pop girls are pop-girling. Oh, and you know what that means, Nora Prenziotti. Every single album is back. This spring is packed with new releases from some of the biggest pop stars in the world, including our girl Taylor Swift, and we'll be covering it all. We'll, of course, break down every angle on the tortured poets department, and we'll also cover new music from Beyonce, Duolipa, Maggie Rogers, Casey Musgraves, and Ariana Grande. It's Pop Girl Spring on every single album.

New episodes starting March 28th. On Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today, we have something a bit special and unique on the plain English feed. Most weeks, I interview some people about their best ideas. Today, somebody interviews me about a topic I've been fascinated by for a long time, but have never had an opportunity to turn into a big podcast or essay or book. It's a conversation about modern media and the nature of cults with Sean Elling of the Gray Area podcast where this interview originally appeared.

So some background to today's conversation, several years ago after I finished doing the rounds for my first book, Hit Makers, I told some friends that I had an idea for a second book. It would be called Everything is a Cult. So the germ of this book came from conversations with very different people in very different industries, religious studies, some in marketing, some in economics. In the religion space, I had always been interested in the fact that in an age of declining religiosity, capitalism seemed to be filling the god-shaped whole left by the demise of organized religion with companies and services and products that were amassing a religious-like, or you could say, cult-like following.

And by cult, I should probably define it here. I don't mean something that's bad, by the way. The book was going to be agnostic about the concept of cults. I was using the term in a very specific way. A cult, I said, is an organization that offers its adherence a radical rebellion against an illegitimate mainstream culture. So this definition of cults, my definition of cults, has two parts. One, it's a set of internal rules, some of which might be a little bit extreme or socially costly for the people who follow them. And second, it's a set of external critiques.

Like, if you really liked the latest Dune movie and you enjoyed reading reviews about it, that's not a cult, right? There's no rules. There's nothing exclusionary. You can watch Blade Runner the next day and be just as obsessed with that. But if you spend $10,000 on esoteric cryptocurrencies and you speak to fellow travelers in this space with crypto vocabulary that makes outsiders confused, and you do all of this because you subscribe to a with theory that the mainstream U.S. financial system is going to collapse, then yeah, I think for

better or worse, you are participating in something that follows the contours of what has historically been considered a cult, a costly, literally in this case, costly rebellion against the mainstream. In news, for example, more competition on the internet means more antagonism between ideological news sources, left versus right, far left versus center left. Gone was the 1950s era of three TV stations where tens of millions of people get their news from the same person at the same time.

The future of news, as I saw it, was rivalrous. Independent news gurus amassing a devoted audience of paying subscribers who hated the rivals of that guru they were following. The future of news was, at least a little bit like, cults. In culture, the demise of the mainstream, it seemed to me, was doing some weird things to fandom, turning fans of musicians and movies, video games, into vicious gatekeepers on the internet, where they enforced a weirdly strict set of rules on how certain art could and couldn't be

criticized even by fellow travelers. Artistic fandom, too, seemed to be culting. So as I was looking at all of this, and saying, hmm, that looks a little bit culty over here, that looks a little bit culty over there. I realize you can't write a book on vibes and anecdotes alone. You typically, for a project like this, need a piece of academic research to hang your theories on. And fortunately, I found one. Several decades ago, Larry Yonikoni,

an economist who studies religions and the economics of religions, which is a really neat idea, coined the phrase, strict churches are stronger. Strict churches are stronger. Yanukoni observed that in the last few decades, the strictest religions, Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism, Orthodox Islam,

were growing faster than less strict mainstream religions, like mainline Protestantism or Catholicism, both of which were in abject decline. Now, according to classic economic theory, that doesn't make any sense. easy religions are easier. They're, quote, cheaper to belong to, socially speaking. They have laxer rules.

You don't have to show up to the church every week. You don't have to embrace a certain kind of dress or a certain set of practices that immediately identify you in public as a member of a minority faith. Strict churches are expensive. But Yonikoni said that strictness makes organization stronger and more attractive. It reduces free riders.

strict churches screen out members who lack commitment and stimulate participation among those who remain. This is really counterintuitive, I thought. You'd think that if you want to persuade somebody of anything, you should be cautious, conciliatory, compromising. You should aim to mirror the inner weather of the potential comfort.

But the theory of strict churches suggests the opposite. Deep down, many people want to belong to extreme groups, not because they want their personality to disappear into that maw of a group, but rather, and this I thought was Yanukoni's most brilliant observation, because groups make us feel more individual. Groups provide clarity, purpose, a force of will that comes from the outside, something for us to bind to. We feel most like ourselves, he said, when we find a place where we belong.

In our conversation, Yanukoni had one throwaway comment about how his page was applied to modern marketing and have never forgotten it. He said, quote, we've gotten so damn good at making products with good physical attributes that the commercial war of the future will be about identity rather than value. Identity rather than value. Don't drink the soda because it's refreshing. Drink it because it represents childlike wonder. Don't drive this car because it's fast.

Drive it because it signifies exploration. At base, Yanukoni told me, cults are about identity. And an economy where, quote, everything is a cult, is an economy where everything is fundamentally about identity. Who you are rather than what you need. Anyway, I never wrote the book. But I was incredibly grateful when Sean Elling asked me to come on a show and cook up some theories about cults, the future of cults,

And in particular, my reading of media history through the idea that everything is becoming a little bit more culty, ironically, in a period where religiosity is going away. Here is our conversation from the gray area podcast. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Derek Thompson. Welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thank you.

So we are going to do a deep dive, obviously, into all of this. But I want to start by just having you lay out as generally as you can your cultification thesis, which I love. I'm not sure that I've ever been able to go deep on it. I'm very interested in, and I've always been very interested in culture, which I suppose is worth defining. Culture is the way that we think about the world and the way that we influence each other's thoughts about the world. And that can be through entertainment, it can be through religion, it can be through fashion and clothes,

but it's the memes and ideas and ideologies that not only influence our own sense of reality, but other people's sense of reality. And I've always been interested in how people's sense of reality comes to be. So you can start with the late 19th century when the concept of a national reality was first possible, at least in America. You had technologies like the telephone and the telegraph that allowed newspapers to share information and report on information that truly was national. It allowed information to travel much faster than it had ever traveled before. And so suddenly in the late 19th century, we had the possibility of a national and even international, somewhat real,

time shared reality. And that shared reality might have come to its fullest expression, maybe in the middle of the 20th century, with the rise of television technology, you had just a handful of channels that were reaching tens of millions of people. And at the same time, you also had the rise of national newspapers and maybe the apogee of national newspapers in terms of their ability to monopolize local advertising revenue and become just enormous machines for getting tens of of Americans to read about a shared reality. And so you move from the 19th century with sort of the birth of this possibility of a shared reality, in the 20th century, where you really have the rise of a kind of monoculture, which was never really possible for the vast majority of human history.

And what I'm interested in is the possibility that the internet has forever shattered that reality, that we are in a way going back to the pre-20th century where culture is actually just a bunch of cults stacked on top of each other, a bunch of mini local realities stacked on top of each other, and that we maybe we'll never have anything like monoculture ever again because the internet in a weird way thrusts us back into the 19th century. And there's all sorts of fascinating things that can unspool from the fact that monoculture and shared reality,

as we briefly came to understand it, is dead. Yeah, I think basically all of that is right. Right, and I'm going to try to resist a temptation to start chewing on too much of it because I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here. I think it would be helpful first to also define another term that we're going to throw on a lot here, and it deserves to be defined clearly so that people know what we're talking about. And that term is cult. How do you define a cult? I think of a cult as a nascent movement outside the mainstream that often cruelt. that often criticizes the mainstream

and organizes itself around the idea that the mainstream is bad or broken in some way. So I suppose when I think about a cult, I'm not just thinking about a small movement with a lot of people who believe something fiercely. I'm also interested, especially in the modern idea, of cults being oriented against the mainstream. That is when they form, they form as a criticism

of what the people in that cult understand to be the mainstream. And cults, you know, especially when we talk about them in religion, tend to be extreme, tend to be radical, tend to have really high social cost to belonging to them. You today, especially in the media and entertainment space, have this really interesting popularity of new influencers or new media makers adapting as their core personality, the idea that the mainstream is broken, that news is broken, that mass institutions are broken, that the elite are in some way broken, and elite institutions are broken,

the fragmentation of media that we're seeing, and the rise of this sort of anti-institutional somewhat paranoid style of understanding reality, I see these things as rising together in a way that I find very interesting. That whole message, you know, the they don't want you to know the real truth. They, the mainstream, aren't covering the real news or the real stories. What is the seductive power of that? I mean, what is the psychological reward of defining yourself against the normies in that way? There's a lot of possible answers here, but I guess I'll start with a,

favorite philosophical touchstone of yours. Let's, speaking of the 19th century, let's go to Nietzsche. Yes. I think it's about power. I think that cults, speaking of will to power, give people who feel like they don't have status or don't have power or don't have a clear understanding of or theory of the case of the world. It gives them all of that.

It gives them power. It gives them a kind of. weapon of status, and it gives them a theory of how the world works. If you're frustrated, for example, about COVID policies in 2020, 2021, it's not very empowering to say that nobody really understands what's going on and everyone's just doing their best in the fog of pandemic. That's not a very empowering message. It might be true. It actually is quite close to the truth, I believe, of our often failing elite institutions. But for many people, I think it is more empowering and more attractive to identify a clear

nemesis. Maybe it's Fauci. Maybe it's Trump. Maybe it's someone else in the CDC or the FDA. It's much more empowering to say, I know this person is the enemy and everything that goes wrong with COVID policy, I can blame it on them. When we think about, you know, why is anti-institutional or anti-elite messaging so popular these days, I think it's hard to separate the fact that a lot of people are searching for status, searching for a sense of power and understanding and identity, and here you have the possibility of finding and settling on a message that says, I know who the good guys and the bad guys are. And once you have that clear division of who is good or who is bad, well, that goes.

so deeply, I think, to what makes cults so powerful. Here is your in-group, and here is your in-group defined by the out-group. And that kind of out-group animosity not only goes aerodynamic on social media for a variety of reasons, I also think it sits very well with us when we're confused about the world and how it works. And it's not just the good-bad binary. It's not all that hard to understand the appeal of reducing the world to the people who get it, who are awake, and then there are the zombies who don't get it. And who doesn't want to be

in the it-getters camp? I mean, certainly I do. Of course, I get to the appeal of it. And I'm sure that there's lots of ways that my own writing and my own ideology sometimes falls into this sense of us versus them and in-groups versus out-groups. It's very difficult to stay outside of it entirely. to go one level deeper here, I think sometimes about what does it take to be a successful media entrepreneur these days? Like let's say that you and I want to launch some new podcast that explains the world to people.

We want it to be really, really popular and really, really powerful. Well, one I think easy blueprint to steal from is to say that what we need to prove is that everyone else is wrong. Like the first thing that a new entrant into the market has to do is to demonstrate why it's necessary to the consumers of that market to have a new entrant in the first place. And the easiest reason is that the marketplace

of ideas is broken in some way. And so what I see is a lot of new influencers and a lot of new media companies entering the market with the theory that the media capital T capital M is broken. And that tends to be the thesis that they exercise over and over and over again. And it creates this really interesting and somewhat even paradoxical dynamic where lots of people trust a media in order to understand the world. But because every media is telling them to distrust the media, capital T, capital M, everyone distrust the media while loving their own individual media. It's sort of the berserk example or berserk implication of, you know, love your congressman, hate Congress. But I think it does create a very bizarre dynamic in terms of trying to understand what's

happening in the world when you have so many different news. entrance and news entrepreneurs that really are, I think, highly incentivized to sort of incult their audience and tell them that there is a conspiracy against them. Do you think of something like crypto as a cult? Because it sure as shit feels like one. That's a great question. So, crypto is a cult. You can cut some of my pausing here, but let me think about this.

Yeah, we're not lying so. Take a ton. Yeah. And by the way, I'm not even saying that crypto is a cult. is all bullshit or mostly bullshit, frankly, I don't even really understand crypto. So it's not really a commentary on that. It's just simply a question more about the self-understanding of people who are involved in it and the way it is spread and talked about and defended and celebrated. Yeah. Let me give you two thoughts about crypto, one of which is probably very basic and another,

which is maybe a little bit unexpected. I think a lot of enthusiasm for crypto came out of what can be best described as boredom. There was a ton of boredom that I think initially fed the crypto craze of 2019, 2020, 2021. You had all these people in Silicon Valley, and frankly, you had people like me too saying, aren't we somewhat depressed by the state of technological progress? Isn't it a little bit sad that we were promised flying cars and got, 140 characters than 280 characters and also a lot of ways for optimizing ad revenue from Silicon

Valley. And so I think that there was an appetite for a technology that had inscribed in its very DNA a utopian promise for reforming the world. There's a paper called Why Strict Churches are Strong. And this is a paper that was published back in March of 1994, but I feel like it might be a kind of skeleton key, a kind of little Rosetta Stone for a lot of different phenomena that I see today. So why strict churches are strong was this professor's way of trying to figure out what he considered a bit of a paradox in religious demographics, which is that overall, mainstream Protestantism in the 1990s was declining, and mainstream Catholicism in the 1990s was declining. So these lenient religions were losing members.

And ironically, it was these stricter religions, the religions that had higher social cost that were growing. So Orthodox Judaism, I believe, he said, was growing. Church of Latter-day Saints, Mormonism was growing. Religions that often ask people to either be kosher or to give up things like alcohol or caffeine, they were growing while lenient mainstream religions were declining. And one of his theories was that strictness makes organizations stronger and more attractive because it reduces free writing. And I wonder if there was something about crypto where similarly it was a kind of strict church. There was no way to free ride Bitcoin.

You were invested in it. You bought it at $10,000 or $20,000 and you wanted to see it grow up. So in a way, I think crypto was a kind of perfect, secular, strict church because it was a theory about the future, a theory about technological progress that for its hardest believers did somewhat require that you sacrifice a bit of your own savings in order to participate in the church. Is Taylor Swift the closest thing we have to a mass cult today? I don't think there's such thing as the mass cult. That's what I'm saying, but the closest thing we have to a mass cult. No, I think she's the closest thing we have to Christianity. Taylor Swift is not Mormonism.

Taylor Swift is Protestantism. Taylor Swift is the mainstream. Caitlin Clark, Taylor Swift, Travis Kelsey, these things that get tens of millions of people behind them and that in many cases, you know, don't ask much of us, right? Lots of people are Taylor Swift fans and they enjoy their Taylor Swift fandom by simply paying Spotify, whatever it is, $14 a month and playing the songs over and over again. What's interesting about modern life is that it's very easy to switch between churches, right? There is nothing exclusive about being a Taylor Swift fan.

The same way there is something exclusive about being an Orthodox Jew or a Mormon. If I'm an Orthodox Jew or a Mormon, I can't also be, you know, a Protestant, Episcopalian Muslim. But if I'm a Taylor Swift fan, what is stopping me from listening to Billy Eilish? What's stopping me from listening to Coleplay? What stopped me from listening to Keith Jared, Miles Davis? Nothing. So in a way, the fact that we have some really strong attachments to some products that seem cultish actually is not cultish at all. It's something else.

We shift our allegiances between these products in an almost interchangeable way, even though we seem to be devotees of them when we're embedded in those groups. maybe in an age of increasing secularization and declining religion, we want to replace God with something at the top of that pedestal. The sort of superabundance of these cults or microcults or whatever you want to call them online really is fascinating to me. You know, I'm not on TikTok. I use YouTube, but, you know, it's mostly for videos that show me how to remove the muffler from my motorcycle or change a diaper with one hand or something like that, you know.

But it does seem genuinely. new to have these super powerful affinity groups in YouTube and TikTok organized around people, almost no one outside of those groups have ever even heard of. I still don't know what the hell Mr. Beast is, but he appears to have like 10 trillion followers and probably half a billion dollars at this point. That is a new thing. I do think it's a new thing. And I also agree that this kind of fragmentation of culture has no rewind button on it. It is only going to go forward. I suppose it's like time itself. I would ask you a question, though, Sean, what do you think is the difference between a cult and a fandom?

Interesting question. Because as you think about it, I think some of these things that we're talking about are fandoms, a person who loves Taylor Swift and buys Taylor Swift water mugs and Taylor Swift T-shirts and Taylor Swift sweatpants. These people are not members of a Taylor Swift cult. They're not going to sacrifice themselves for Taylor Swift, at least the vast majority of them, I suppose, or not. They really, really like her, the same way that people really, really like the Beatles,

the same way that actually in the 19th century, Lichtenia, not just a great song by Phoenix, I believe it was also a crazy fandom about the piano piano player and composer Lished. People were just obsessed with how wonderful he was on the keys, and so Listomania became a thing in Europe. Dramatic fandoms, I think, are actually rather old, and they are old and distinct from what I would think of as cults.

When I think about a cult, I think what's very important about the definition of cult that I have in my head is that cults aren't just for something. They are against something. They are small anti-mainstream groups that are arrayed around a set of rules that organize themselves to oppose the mainstream. So the reason I think that it makes more sense

to think about Tucker Carlson's fandom as being inculted rather than Taylor Swift's is that Taylor Swift is not asking her music listeners to not listen to Olivia Rodriguez. She's just like, here I am, I'm at a concert, pay $1,000 to see it, whereas Tucker Carlson is very dramatically and very explicitly trying to make his followers distrust the mainstream media. And that I find interesting and more cult-like than I find a phenomenon like Taylor Swift. Yeah, that's interesting.

So in some ways, you make that shift from fandom to cult member when your identity or your membership in that group is defined by a negation. when you're defined by what you are not, by what you stand against. That's right. And the last thing that I would add is that I think in terms of the classic definition of cult, is that when you think about cults in terrorism or in the military or the mafia or crime gangs or in religion, there tends to be what a supposed an economist would call costly signaling. That is, it costs something to be in that group. And I don't think it costs a whole lot to be a Taylor Swift fan, just as it didn't cost a whole lot to be a Beatles fan.

But I do think it is costly, for example, to refuse to take a vaccine and harbor and espouse a conspiracy theory about it, especially when people around you think that you're crazy. Is American politics just a bunch of cults now? American politics is definitely more powered by negation than it used to be. I think for a lot of voters, the power of negative partisanship has made it easier for people to explain what it is there against than to explain what it is that they're for. It's fascinating to me that among, say, Republicans and among Trump voters, it didn't seem to me like a lot of people that were Trump supporters had a clear theory of how, how, for example, he would reduce inflation.

They were clearly upset about inflation, and they clearly thought that Biden was to blame for it. But when you scrutinize Trump's policies, when you look at the fact that he wants to extend tax cuts, which is somewhat inflationary, and he didn't want to cut spending in lots of places, which is inflationary, and he wanted to impose a 10% tariffs on imports, which is inflationary. You add it all up, and it actually seems like Trump's economic policy is more inflationary than Biden's, But this never seems to make contact with the discourse about Trump. And part of that, I think, is the fact that politics today is more about what we oppose than what we stand for.

Is there something culty about that? I think maybe. And I think it's possible that as more people get their news from sources that are small, pirate-like organizations that are trying to oppose the mainstream, rather than define an alternative clearly, that I do think there's a cult-like mentality to that. I like this because I'm grasping for a better word than polarized to capture what's happened. Because it's not like we're sorted into coherent ideological groups.

It isn't really about ideas or arguments or policies very often. It is more that people inside these tribes or groups, cannot even imagine what people outside their group are thinking, or even how they're living, because we don't talk to each other, we live in different places, and a lot of our political and social lives are lived virtually. I definitely think it's the case that identity seems more important to politics than it used to be. I remember in my conversation with various sociologists and economists and anthropologists when I was doing my cult research is that at one point I was asking them, what would it mean to you for

everything to become a little bit more cultish? And one of them made the really interesting observation that we've gotten so damn good at making products with good physical attributes, at making good enough stuff, that the commercial war of the future won't be about value or quality, it'll be about identity. are you the kind of person who buys this product rather than is this a product that does more for you? When you transpose that to politics, it is at least a little illuminating

that idea that the commercial war of the future will be more about identity, who are you, than value, what can this do for you? Because that would seem to describe or predict an election in the near future that is less about policy and more about, let's just say it, vibes. And that is in a way the election that we're headed

into. It's kind of astonishing to me how little we're hearing about policy, how little we're hearing about any kind of policy debate, how little even this election seems to be about policy at all. Like when I think about the last 20 years, I feel like there's a policy theme to almost every single election. This election clearly has an identity theme, but I'm not sure it has a policy value theme. I don't think I'll ever be able to say politics is fully post-materialist, but I have been on the vibes bandwagon for a while now. And I co-wrote a book about the history of media and democracy a couple of years ago. And the main thing we track in that book is this pattern that recurs throughout time. Whenever there's a revolution and communication technology,

it is hugely disruptive to society in lots of unpredictable ways. I mean, you were talking about the phone and a telegraph earlier. But the thing about newer technologies like radio and TV, for instance, is that they really helped create something like a mass culture. The public was more or less watching the same movie we call reality. And for all the downsides of that, and there were many. It did have the benefit of grounding society and a shared reality. Do you think of that loss as a genuine cultural

and political crisis? Or is it possible that it's just another period of technological change, not that different from earlier periods, and we'll figure it out? I do think that in so many ways, we're just going back to the middle of the 19th century. We're going back to the historical norm

rather than being flung into the exosphere into some unprecedented state of popular discombobulation, the idea that a shared reality, a shared national reality in real time is even possible is so historically young. Just one quick aside, I was doing some reporting for the book

that I'm writing right now and saw in an Eric Hobbsbaum book called The Age of Revolutions that when the Bastille fell, in 1789, a Canton 30 minutes away from Paris didn't realize the French Revolution had happened for a full month. That was the speed at which information used to travel. It was the speed at which a man could ride a horse or walk next to his horse. You need a whiz-bang technology that can somehow transmit at something like the speed of light, certainly one would hope the speed of sound,

information across fast distances. You only had that with the invention. of the telegram and the telephone, and then later radio. So I think if you want to know where we're going, look where we came from. In the 19th century, of course, we had lots of chaos, but we also had an American democracy

for decades and decades. So it's not obvious to me that the erosion of the monoculture or the erosion of the news mainstream is anathema to American democracy, but I do think that it probably shattered, the very brief dream of everyone getting together and sitting down on a couch and watching the same Walter Cronkite hour.

I mean, that is never coming back. And whatever benefits and drawbacks of that world, and there are drawbacks of having the news be controlled by a handful of, you know, in all likelihood, white men who probably lived on the coast and therefore had a very pinched view of what was important in the world. There are drawbacks of that world, but we're never getting it back. There's no putting the software genie back in its box. It may not be incompatible with American democracy as such, but I do think it's probably incompatible with the model of liberal democracy we've become accustomed to since mid-20th century or so.

Tell me more. Yeah. Why do you think, you might be totally right. This is one place where the bridge goes too far for me to have. a ready-made answered, I'm not exactly sure why a more riotously antagonistic and fragmented news ecosystem would be perilous to liberal democracy. It's possible that it would be, but what do you think is the strongest, like what's the causal mechanism by which wildly fragmented media leads to a backlash in liberal democracy? I just think it creates

a kind of collective action problem that makes dealing with the sort of problems we deal with in the kind of modern, global, interconnected world, like almost insoluble. I mean, did you read that Martin Gurry book, The Revolt of the Public? I did, yeah. I thought he had a very useful metaphor. Something to the effect that, like, you know, the public, for a very long time, used to sort of look into the same mirror, and that mirror was basically mass culture, but the Internet just shattered that mirror into a billion little pieces. And now there are all these little subgroup staring into their own mirrors. And when that occurs in this sort of digital era where we have all these technologies that

are optimized for spectacle and outrage, that just seems like a combustible cocktail. And I just don't know how you manage that. I agree with the idea that we're all looking in the same mirror or all looking into fewer mirrors. But it's not obvious to me that the mirrors we were looking into. were reflecting reality. They were reflecting a version of reality that left out a lot.

The news of the 20th century did not report on racial justice at anything like the level of quality that we now expect reports on racial justice to do. The mirrors of the 20th century and news reports of the 20th century did not, I think, uncover all sorts of problems of governance that took years to understand, didn't report on the environmental degradation

of industrial America in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Protests had to fill the void of media that was underrepresenting minorities in urban America. None of this is to accuse you personally of overlooking those problems. I'm sure you would agree with all of them. But it's to remind all of us that when we feel nostalgia for the media environment of the 1940s and 1950s, we are feeling nostalgia for a news media ecosystem that in many ways was inferior to and even blind to the problems that we know to pay attention to today.

And I do think that in many ways, the fragmentation of the media can sometimes create competition that allows us to see behind corners and understand things, root out problems that we didn't see before. I'm a capitalist overall, and I think that more competition in most markets is good. I just think it's important to understand as we do in some markets that there can be negative externalities and a huge gaping negative externality, as you've said, as Martin Gurry is absolutely intelligently written on and as I see, a huge negative externality of abundance in media is that superabundant media creates a scenario where news entrants feel like they have to be antagonistic. They have to be both collective. Here's why you should read me. Here's why you should listen

to me and exclusive. Here's why everyone else is a big, fat idiot. And a news environment like that is going to create a lot of distrust, it's going to create a lot of disharmony, it's going to confuse a lot of people. And it will replace a world with a small number of flawed mirrors with a riotous and huge, unthinkable number of mirrors, some of which are absolute bullshit mirrors and some of which are quite good. I mean, it's where I always hated the phrase post-truth because it implied that before all of this we were living in truth. Absolutely despised that term. It's complete bullshit. But I do think we lived in a period where there was more trust in authority, in part because of this near monopoly on information at the top.

And when that shattered, I think that began this process of erosion in social trust, trust and authority, trust in experts, trust in information. And that makes society less than governable if that makes any sense. Yeah, I think I agree with a lot of that. What I most want to hold down on is the idea that almost all nostalgia for a past golden age is nostalgia for a world that did not exist or a world that we today, if it replaced our reality, this moment, we would find inexcusably terrible. And so when we think about, you know, being nostalgic for the 1950s, 1960s, I mean,

just in terms of environmental degradation and racial injustice, if we believe that, and I'm not including you and the we, I'm just saying, why didn't that

shared reality lead to a world where we fixed our problems faster? Why didn't a shared reality more expeditiously reveal the injustice of Jim Crow

and voting laws before the 1965 Act. Why didn't it help us see the terrible things that we were doing to leaded gasoline and the air and the water? Why essentially was the world

of monocultural news so flawed if monocultural news is so useful for showing the electorate what is important in the world? That's the question that I feel like is never

answered when people start waxing nostalgic about the middle of the 20th century. I understand waxing nostalgic for a world where lots of journalists felt comfortable and secure in their jobs. I mean, who wouldn't want to feel that in their industry? But when we start taking the next step and saying the world was easier to govern when there was greater and stronger claim on authority and more trust, well, then my question is, Why were there so many problems in this period that we would consider absolutely horrendous today? I think it's a good question. And look, it's entirely possible that we will live in a better and more just world on the other side of this transition.

It may just be really fucking bumpy. But hey, look, you know, the Gutenberg Revolution unleashed religious wars across Europe that devoured the continent and they survive. So maybe we can survive TikTok. I think you probably will survive TikTok, but it obviously is the case that media technology changes. It changes all the time. Its change is inevitable. Its change is inevitably wrenching. But history moves in one direction.

And so rather than pretend that there is a break to pull on this machine, we should try as fast as possible to figure out what these machines are doing to us and doing to our sense. of reality and our own identities. That is maybe what scares me the most. I think we're tinkering with our own minds in ways we just don't quite understand. There's a guinea pig quality to all of it. Everything is a mixed bag, I suppose. And it's such a golden age for content and creators, so much content, so many creators, and it's intersected with these technologies that exert so much pull on our minds and

attention. It's never been easier to be entertained, but it's also never been harder, it seems, to just go outside and do stuff with other people because we're mainlining content all the damn time. And you've written a lot about the loneliness epidemic. Do you see this story about the cultification of life and culture and the superabundance of content bound up with this other story about loneliness and increasing loneliness?

I don't think they're the same story. I think they are two distinct tendrils of the internet revolution, at a very abstract level, what is it that the internet does to us? One answer to that question is that it makes it easier for groups of like-minded people to form.

The internet in many ways, in social media in particular, is a kind of machine for grouping. And it's a machine for grouping in wonderful ways, helping people find each other, helping parents figure out how to deal with sick kids. This is certainly a use of the internet

that I'm very familiar with right now. But it's also obviously that same group formation function serves for white nationalists. It serves for polarized politics. It serves for new media entrance. Follow me and I'll tell you the truth. So on the one hand, I think the internet is a very efficient group formation machine.

And on the other hand, I think the internet is a very efficient, absorbent of our attention. And it's here in this second category where I think the internet is turning the 21st century into the antisocial century. In the last 20 years, the average American socializes in person, 35% less than he or she used to. For teenagers, it's 50% less. For unmarried black men, it's about 50% less. It's also the demise of third spaces as people spend more time at home on their couches. It's also the fact that youth sports is in decline, again, for a lot of complicated reasons, but one of them is that young people are much more happy than they used to be and much more

entertained than they used to be just staying home on their couch. And it is also, to fold religion back into it, it has to do with the decline of religion as well. I was really surprised in some of my research to find that in the 20th century, Gallup was asking people every single year, do you go to church or some other house of worship somewhat regularly? And between the years of 1937 and the 1990s, the answer was yes for about 70% of Americans. It since plummeted to less than 50% for the first time in recorded history. In the last 90 years, we have no record of any time when fewer people have gone to houses of worship.

And it's a secular reform Jew. I wouldn't be particularly exercised about that, except that this is happening at the same time that young people say they have fewer friends than ever and everyone is hanging out with each other less. Something is going on here. And it's not just the internet, but golly, gee, is the internet poured gasoline on a very important fire. I think you say in your Atlantic piece about the loneliness problem. The best evidence we have suggests that the quality of our relationships, our connections to other people is one of, if not the most important determinants of happiness in life. and many of these trends we've been talking about pull us away from real social connections.

I mean, that seems to be, at least so far, the price of the immersive convenience these technologies provide. And the culty nature of so many of these online communities offer the illusion of connection, but as you've written about, it is often rooted in psychologically unhealthy activities. And beyond that, the depth of those connections are so paper-thin, in comparison to real world relationships. So I don't see any solution to these challenges that doesn't involve spending less time online and more time in the world with other people.

I guess I'm preaching at this point, but whatever, it's my podcast. Yeah, feel free to preach, and you're definitely preaching to the choir here. I think it's ironic, and again, this belongs in the category of we're still learning what kind of world we've built. I just did a podcast with J. Van Bavel,

who's an NYU psychologist, who's studied essentially the mechanics of social media, all about how the dark laws of engagement on social media include things like negativity drives engagement, extremism drives engagement, outrage drives engagement, and outgroup animosity drives engagement. We've built a virtual world that espouses all the opposite virtues of the world that philosophers and psychologists have told us we should want to live in, which is to fight extreme interpretations of reality, to fight negativity, to fight the instinct to divide the world into good versus evil, in groups versus outgroups, and to see the world

as a set of problems that is generally fixable or at least replaceable with a better set of problems. The internet doesn't do this, but we can find those principles and use those principles in the real world. They exist. All right, Derek, I read your work, and I really do think you're one of the smartest in our business. If there was an all-media NBA-style thing, I would have you in my starting five. You could run point.

Or maybe you're a three-and-D guy. I'm five-eight. And not particularly good at shooting, so I'm happy to run point here and pass other people for the jump shots. I'm buttering you up here a little bit because I also think of you as someone who's un-synical,

if that's the word, and that is somewhat distinctive in our business. I'm not un-synical. I am anti-synical. I am a anti-synical. I am against cynicism. I think it's largely pointless. And I do my best to spend most of my time covering issues where I can see the glimmer of hope and the glimmers of solutions.

There are lots of problems in the world where I have no idea what the solution is. Like, do not ask me about the Israel-Palestan conflict. I have no idea where to even begin with offering a solution there. But when it comes to something like the antisocial century, when it comes to something like teenagers and smartphones, when it comes to something like people being diluted by the high daguerian promises of Tucker Carlson and the ominous they selves of the media, there are solutions to all of this. The solution to being inside is going outside. And many, many people have that faculty. The solution to being on your phone too much is getting the

off your phone. That is, again, something that is entirely in people's control. The solution to not being diluted by the Tucker Carlson's of the world is for people like you and me and most of the people that I know that are optimistic and interested in reality to fight harder every single day, to make their interpretations of reality more sticky, entertaining, viral aerodynamic, to grow our audiences and point out what is real in the world. This is why I wake up. This is why I work so hard. So I'm extremely motivated and optimistic about my ability to point out what is true and false in the world.

I think the best way to be optimistic about the present. And the best way to be optimistic maybe even about the future is to have a sense of history. 500 years ago, half of human beings died before they turned five. Now it's what? 1 in 10,000? How can you not be optimistic about the world knowing that? I wouldn't, and I bet most other people

wouldn't trade being alive today with being alive in almost any other year in human history permanently. Would I love to visit 1891? Yeah, I'd be fascinated to see America in the Second Industrial Revolution.

Do I want to live in a world with that kind of pollution and that kind of disease? absolutely not. So a lot of my optimism comes from the historical perspective that so many things are better today than they used to be. I don't think there's any reasonable way to come away from a true and honest historical understanding of where we came from and not be optimistic about the general trajectory forward across a lot of different verticals, right? Not just media and entertainment, but also medicine, not just politics, but also technology. So, but I also think

A challenge for people like you and me is going to be competing in a news environment where cynicism is going to be sticky. Cynicism is going to be aerodynamic. And we're just going to have to wake up every day and fight like hell. It is regrettably easy to forget that we are, in fact, living in the absolute best possible time in human history by almost every conceivable metric, which makes the fact that people seem to be less and less happy all the more mystifying. troubling. It is. This is one of the reasons why I write so much about anxiety and happiness and especially teenage hopelessness is because of exactly the tension that you pointed to. That if you're going to say, oh, look at all these things getting better, well, it should frigging flabbergast and fascinate you that young Americans today are more anxious and miserable than they have at least

told the CDC they are in any time in the last few decades. Like, we should be fascinated by that. So I'm interested in these mysteries, but I spend the most time with subject areas where I think there's a way out. And here in particular, I do think there's a way out. And I think we have to find some way to think about social media, the way that we think about alcohol. Alcohol isn't bad. I loves whiskey. I love wine. I love social media.

I use Twitter all the time. But we have to find some way to think about reasonable moderation and limits on use if we want to be able to live with this thing for decades and not. have it drive us to madness. You just put that better than I ever have or probably could. So, thanks for that. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Biroldi. We've got new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. If you like what you're hearing, give us five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. For feedback and episode suggestions, email us at Plain English. At Spotify. Spotify.com.