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Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She is also a monthly columnist for Commentary magazine, one of the cohosts of The Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and senior editor at The New Atlantis.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Christine Rosen discuss the perils of online dating, the impact of public shaming, and why the internet makes it harder to develop a sense of self.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: There’s obviously a lot of concern about how AI is going to change the world. Jonathan Haidt has been on the podcast in the past and has since written a mega-bestselling book about the impact that social media has had, in particular, on teenage girls and other people growing up deeply immersed in that kind of culture.
You’re concerned about a slightly, perhaps less intense, but much broader harm, which is how the experience all of us have of the world is now mediated by all the digital devices which have entered every aspect of our life. Why should we broaden our concern in that kind of way?
Christine Rosen: Well, I was fascinated by these seemingly mundane experiences because I just started noticing more and more in the last, I would say, 10 years how many of them are mediated that didn’t used to be. I’m an old fogey, Gen X. So I’m this hybrid generation that grew up without a lot of these tools and then embraced them in adulthood. So I remember the before times. I remember before smartphones, before the internet. It just struck me that we were very quickly running towards this assumption that every new thing was going to improve our lives. I think in many cases that’s true, but I think in the case of some of our daily interactions, and in particular our daily human interactions—how we interact with each other as individuals, as families, as communities, and in public space—were starting to be transformed in ways that I think were worrisome.
It wasn’t entirely because of the digital technology, but the digital technology was enabling us to eliminate the kinds of friction and discomfort that used to be taken for granted as part of human relationships. So I thought it was worth exploring other areas of life that we might have too quickly passed over (and seen these tools on the smartphone in particular and internet and social media platforms as improvements on how to do things) and question whether that was the case.
Mounk: I’m torn about how to think about the subject because on the one hand, I take somewhat seriously the defense of smartphones that they just bundle in one incredibly useful tool all the different kinds of things that we might have done in the past. Earlier we might have had physical books that we schlepped around in order to read, and perhaps we had certain tapes in order to listen to an audiobook if we enjoyed that. We had a physical telephone on which we called people up. Then we had a television in the living room on which we watched the news.
If you add it up, all of those different kinds of activities took up probably a lot of hours in the life of somebody in 1990 or 1980. Well, now we’ve bundled all of these things into one machine. So, say you’re spending all of this time on your smartphone. Well, actually, I’m spending time brushing up on my Chinese vocab and reading the newspaper and reading a book and listening to a book and speaking to my friends. What’s wrong with all of that?
Now, on the other hand, of course, there is this sense that because it’s all in one machine, I certainly notice I have coffee with somebody and I look at my phone every few minutes in a way that I wouldn’t have glanced at a newspaper or switched on the television in the middle of a conversation. How should we think about those two ways of conceptualizing what’s going on?
Rosen: Well, you’re absolutely right to point out that the way we spend our time hasn’t entirely changed and that all of these things are pursuits that human beings will continue to do, whether they have the technology or not. I think the real qualitative difference here, though, is important. That’s because the mobility of the technology means these sorts of things are no longer place or time-specific. It turns out that how we interact as people, whether it’s with our friends or with our families or at the office or wherever—that those boundaries of time and space tend to actually shape how the quality of interaction plays out.
So if you’re having coffee with a friend and no one has a smartphone, you’re going to most likely pay attention to each other, and it would be rude to put a book in front of your face while your friend is talking to you. But somehow, as we navigate these new norms—people checking their phones under the table while their friend is talking to them—some people might find that rude and others might just say, I’m checking my messages. The urgency and the nowness and the must-respond-on-demand forms of contact are really new, as is the speed with which we can transform time and space.
What that means is that our individual experiences have, I think, in many ways been improved in all of the ways you describe. But our collective experiences have become impoverished in important ways. So if you think about public space and the subtle signals and rules that we have about how to behave in public space—when someone walks into a crowded elevator, you make eye contact, if you bump into someone, you both say you’re sorry—these actually grease the wheels of social interaction in a way that, once they’re removed, we start to notice and feel more anxiety, more tension, more frustration.
We see this play out in odd ways. Road rage rates are increasing. People are expecting on-demand experiences all the time in public space. In those very subtle ways, the technology encourages habits of mind and ways of behaving that are quite new and that I think we’re still working out the details of, whether or not they’re good for us or bad for us.
Mounk: That’s really interesting. I’m thinking through what impact this has had on our collective experience. One of the really striking things is that when the internet is invented in the 1990s, what the internet evangelists believe—and what most people think—is that it’s going to connect us to each other. It’s going to connect us to each other in the sense that it’s going to make it easier to speak to each other.
In the 1990s, if you have a family member on the West Coast and even the East Coast, it’s expensive to speak to each other on the telephone. I grew up in Germany with family in Denmark and Sweden, and my grandparents would call me up for two or three minutes every few days or once a week, and that was a very significant expense to them. So it’s very reasonable to think, hey, once we are able to speak for no or very little money, those family relationships are going to deepen.
More broadly, we think, why is there prejudice against people in the world? Why are people tribal? Well, it’s really hard to speak to somebody in Kenya. It’s really hard to speak to somebody in Afghanistan. They’re too far away. It’s too expensive. You can send them a letter that would be delivered at relatively little cost, but it’ll take weeks, and then until you hear back, it’s a month. How can you actually communicate? Once we’re able to just hang out through Skype or whatever on the internet, all these prejudices are going to fall away. Of course, what’s happened instead is this weird resurgence of identity. That’s the weird paradox of the internet: we blast the cost of communication out of existence, but rather than deeper family relationships, more social activity, and greater understanding across cultural barriers, what we get is alienation, less time spent with each other, and a retreat into these tribal forms of organization, which very few people would have predicted at the time.
To double-click on the first part of this, why is it that this online experience seems to make it so much harder to find the time for in-person physical experience? Some of the statistics that are going around are about teenagers, who spend much less time hanging out with each other and perhaps, as a result, also have many fewer of the landmarks of adulthood. They’re less likely to drink, they’re less likely to be in romantic relationships, and so on.
But some of it is about adults. I saw a very interesting statistic recently that there’s pretty convincing evidence to suggest that the number of parties, dinner parties, barbecues, etc., among adults has radically reduced over the course of the last 20 years. I think it’s down by something like over 40%. What explains that?
Rosen: Well, I’m glad you mentioned what I call the kumbaya moment in the history of the internet. I remember these days, and I was as enthusiastic as the next person at the very beginning—this idea that connection would open up opportunities for people to really understand others better and connect more often. The ease of communication would also ease our relationships with each other. But of course, that failed to really deal with human nature.
The problem, as I saw it in real time unfolding decade after decade with the internet and then the smartphone, was that everyone could be heard, but fewer and fewer people actually wanted to listen. This goes to your question about in-person interactions. In-person interactions aren’t always easy. They’re often difficult. Learning how to read others’ social signals, their facial expressions, their hand gestures—all these ways that we communicate that are actually not verbal—we learn by practicing from a very young age. The first thing a baby looks at is a face.
If you want to understand the depth perception of an infant, a newborn sees just about the distance from lying in the crook of someone’s arm to looking at their mother or father’s face. So we are hardwired evolutionarily to seek out the human face and to understand each other in this important way.
When you introduce a screen of some sort (social scientists have been studying this for decades now) you start to have things like the online disinhibition effect, where you’re more willing to say and do things because you have this barrier and you’re not actually accountable in person, in physical space with another person. You’ll say and do things that you never would do otherwise.
Mounk: Incidentally, I think that’s a lot of what went into that strange cultural moment in 2020 with all of the irrational cancellations and all of those things. It’s one thing to sit in a conference room of 20 people and say, this person over there is an evil racist, even for a nice member of a community who’s never done anything particularly bad. It’s somehow a lot easier to type that into a chat or write that on Slack.
Rosen: Absolutely, because the consequences are not immediately felt by you, and you can also feel that you exercise an enormous amount of control. This is actually where, again, in human relationships, we cannot control the other person. If we are habituated by spending hours and hours in mediated interactions—whether that’s on a social media platform or in a Slack channel—we become habituated to this expectation that we should be able to just delete someone or cancel them.
Look at the buttons on your computer: they are escape, backspace, delete. We cannot treat each other this way, but we spend most of our time communicating with these tools. This is the old “the medium is the message.” We become more machine-like in our interactions, rather than making machines that help us become better humans.
That’s, I think, where we see cancellation and all these really radicalizing behaviors rewarded by these platforms. The platforms are designed to reward those kinds of interactions, not to reward thoughtfulness, ambiguity, and grace in conversation.
Mounk: You’d think that if, on the one side, the experience of being online is potentially scary and threatening and can lead to all of this conflict, and at the same time the ease of communication has become much greater—it’s much easier to organize a get-together, it’s much easier to say, hey, I have a free evening, let me spontaneously reach out to my friends and invite them to come along—what you’d expect is for people to flee into the offline world, for there to be more barbecues, for there to be more people hanging out. Instead, what you seem to get is less and less of that.
I guess part of that is just the addictive nature of algorithms and so on. I find it hard to really feel that from my own behavior. I certainly know that it’s easy in a moment of idleness, when you are in between doing something, to think, I’ll just check my Instagram. Then suddenly, half an hour later, you realize you’ve wasted half an hour watching random stupid reels. But I’ve never had the experience where I’m thinking, I have this appealing social invitation, but I’d rather stay at home and watch reels. So it’s a little hard for me to understand how this aggregate effect comes about. Why is it that this online experience ensnares us collectively so much, or changes the social incentive so much, or perhaps makes people so wary of real-life interaction that we get a large decline in people having backyard barbecues?
Rosen: Well, I would say one thing is that you’re likely of the generation that got to practice those skills before a lot of this was mediated. There is a real generational difference. Each new generation is spending less time face-to-face with each other. I think that’s in part because these are skills you practice. We used to take for granted that we didn’t even think about it as practice. It was the only way of doing things.
When you introduce an alternative—one that makes it much easier to communicate without any of the burdens of leaving your house or getting dressed or getting on a bus or all of the challenges of basic social interaction—human beings will choose the easy path every time. We know this about ourselves. Sometimes that’s fine. But if you think about the younger generations, where a majority of their interactions from a very young age were in this mediated environment—and I have a lot of sympathy for these kids—there’s a lot of anxiety in actually doing it the old-fashioned way. I’ve spoken to a lot of kids who talk about this. They want to get together with their friends, but first of all, getting enough people to agree to that, and then everybody going and putting their phones down and having those interactions. They enjoy that, and many of them do that, but it’s a skill they have to practice now. They have to choose it deliberately. They have to overcome whatever concerns they have logistically and about the inconvenience of it.
I do think that, again, human nature will choose the easy path, which means we still have emotional experiences in these mediated environments. We’re feeling real things, even if we’re sitting by ourselves in our room scrolling Instagram reels. We’re willing to accept that qualitatively limited experience over the qualitatively richer one because it’s more convenient, it’s right there, and we don’t have to think much about it.
Mounk: I think I’m just going to keep posing the same question to you over and over because it just puzzles me so much. What about some of the most basic human drives? I feel like the urge of teenagers to hang out with friends is just so strong. When you look at the decline of romantic relationships, the urge for romantic connection and the sexual urges—I would have thought those are so strong in humans that they could overcome that. Yet it doesn’t appear to be.
I just spent two and a half weeks in China, and I spoke to somebody who’s doing research there and has a lot of access to data, who quite credibly showed me not only that the number of romantic relationships has significantly declined in China, that a lot of people are not getting married, not interested in getting married, and not interested in having kids—which is, of course, reflected in the birth rates—but also that when you ask young people in particular about the priorities in life, anything like love and romantic relationships is the thing that they’re least likely to mention as important—and also the thing that they’re most likely to mention affirmatively as unimportant to them.
I was slightly skeptical of this. I think there’s a kind of orientalizing strain of journalism and research—this idea of, oh, these weird people in Korea and Japan who never date anymore. But I talked to a bunch of people there, and this seems at least to be believed by smart people in China itself. So it’s not an orientalist view. It’s certainly a view that is shared by smart observers in China. That may still mean it’s wrong. It may still mean it’s missing something.
But I was again really struck by that. Isn’t the desire to find a romantic partner, to share that aspect of life, strong enough to overcome this? Again, if you were giving me all of this as a prediction 15 or 20 years ago, I think I wouldn’t take it seriously. I think I would say, I just don’t buy it. But there’s enough empirical evidence to suggest that this is really happening. Yet I struggle to make sense of how all of these mechanisms you point to—which seem perfectly reasonable and plausible to me—can possibly be strong enough to override what seem to be pretty fundamental aspects of human nature.
Rosen: It’s funny you say you wouldn’t have believed this prediction, because one of the first assignments I gave myself at The New Atlantis, when we founded this journal more than 20 years ago, was early online dating. Internet dating was just starting to gain steam, and I was fascinated by exactly this question—was it going to change how people meet, fall in love, and form families?
In those early stages, we didn’t have a ton of data. We just had impressions, and we could study on a small scale some of these early sites. But what I instantly saw were two patterns. They seem almost contradictory, but what you’re describing, I think, is this principle coming to fruition. It’s an aversion to risk. If there’s anything that’s risky in life, it’s romantic relationships. There’s always risk. I think you’re absolutely right—human nature overcomes the risk aversion because you think, no, I want to meet someone, I want to fall in love.
What I was finding on these sites was that people were forming habits of mind and using them in a way that said: put all the risk up front. I want to know everything about you—a whole dossier. I don’t want to find that out later. I can’t waste time with someone who might have this weird thing that I don’t like. So there was that impulse combined with—this seems like a contradiction—but even if you did find someone you liked, there was always, in the back of your mind, the thought that there are thousands of other people out there who I matched with, who I might like better. There’s a seemingly limitless number of options, and then more and more aversion to the risk of a real romantic relationship. Those forces combined, I think, are what we’re seeing play out with some of these younger generations in particular.
To go out into the world, into the wild, as they say, and just meet someone is almost unheard of for many. I know lots of people who are happily married and found their spouse on a dating app. The ones that are most successful, though, were the ones, I think, that very quickly out of the gate said, this is my limiting principle and I won’t move beyond it—Jewish dating sites, Catholic dating sites, vegetarian dating sites, carnivore dating sites. They could find each other. That was harder in the pre-internet age.
But the combination of risk aversion and the seemingly limitless options that this mediated experience of meeting others provides, I think, has genuinely changed everyone. The flattening cultural effect of doing these things online means that I don’t think it’s just because some societies are more conformist than others. We’re more independent, but we’re all behaving this way. Mating practices of the human race have altered significantly across the board when you look at some of these studies.
Mounk: Yeah, I’m a little bit skeptical about overemphasizing the evilness of social media companies and platforms. I think a lot of this is an emergent behavior of how our psychology works in these online platforms more than them doing brilliant, evil things to keep us addicted.
One of the most shocking things I’ve heard, though, about online dating platforms—which I believe is true—is that they obviously have access to your IP address. They also know when two people have matched. Apparently, one thing that happens is that when two users are seen multiple times at the same IP address, suggesting that they’re perhaps starting to form a relationship, the algorithm will deliver more attractive new options to the members of this emerging couple in order to tempt them away from their potential unit and say, hey, there are hotter people who I could be meeting instead.
Rosen: Yes. I’ve heard this too. Exactly. There’s a hotter and better person two blocks away, right? Of course. It’s a business.
Mounk: That really is one of the most evil things I’ve heard, I have to say. One of the dynamics on social media is that there are slightly different ways in which men and women tend to behave and rate each other on those platforms. It’s quite well-documented. Men swipe right and evince interest in a much greater share of women than women do in men.
What tends to happen is that there’s a large tail of men who can’t get any matches online, and a relatively small number of men who get a lot of matches. Those men are often tempted to go on many dates with different women, perhaps sleep with many different women, and then move on to the next one. The women get burned, because women are often the ones who are looking for a serious relationship. They go on four or five dates with somebody, start to develop a real romantic interest, and then suddenly that doesn’t work out. Eventually, they become very bitter and angry at that experience. So there are women who feel like they’re being treated in a very unfair way by the people they meet on those platforms, and men who can’t get dates who feel that those platforms are locking them out. By two very different routes, people perhaps end up tuning out of the dating market.
Rosen: One of the things about becoming a fully-formed adult is learning how to handle rejection. But I think what’s changed is that we are not designed to handle rejection at this scale. Whether it’s the woman who has a couple of dates with a guy and then he ghosts her, or the man who can’t get a date with any of the women because they all swipe left rather than right, that kind of industrialized rejection, which the platforms enable—perhaps we’re not wired yet to deal with that.
Will we learn to adjust these behaviors? I think we have. I think there continue to be interesting markets in the online dating world. When women, for example, got sick of some of the larger platforms like Match.com and Plenty of Fish, sites were developed that were designed by women so that the women could make the offer of interest. There are all these ways that you can game the system.
From my perspective, the question we should ask is: has this proven to be a better system than some of the other ways we used to do this? When we were out in public space, when we allowed for time and a slow reveal of each other’s personalities to someone with whom we had interest. Particularly for romantic relationships—but for friendships and family as well—you do have to be patient with other people. These devices, which we spend seven or eight hours a day on, do not encourage patience by any stretch of the imagination. I do think we see that bleeding over into people’s interactions with each other.
Mounk: One of the strange things about online dating is that I remember very vividly when those sites first came up, it was weird to be online dating. For a number of years, it was something for losers—like, well, you can’t go and find a girlfriend or boyfriend in the real world, so you have to go to these online sites. There’s something really odd about you. Now, of course, it’s been completely normalized. At this point, a plurality of relationships are formed through online dating. In younger age groups, I believe it’s a majority. It continues to rise very, very quickly.
You might have predicted in the 1990s that it would be easier to get people to make friends online than to date online, because the stakes are lower. In a way, it’s easier to say, hey, we share this obsessive interest in some random band or some random thing—let’s be friends. And yet, if you’re looking for friends online, that is still a little bit weird. You might make friends online and kind of run with it. I have Twitter friends, I suppose, from commenting on things. We mention something, then talk about it, because you’re also part of a professional circle or something.
There were attempts—Bumble, for example, had an attempt to do a friend-dating thing, where rather than opting into a romantic form of matchmaking, you opt into wanting to make friends. Especially in a relatively mobile society like the United States, you’d think there would be a real understanding of the need for that. Hey, I just took a job in Cleveland, Ohio. I don’t know anybody here. I want to go and grab coffee with a few people who might become my friends. You’d think that this algorithm could somehow facilitate that form of sociability. Yet, for whatever reason, even as romantic online matchmaking has become completely mainstream and dominant in society, that form of friend-making is still quite marginal. Even though various forms of it exist—like Meetup and so on—that’s still regarded as a little bit strange. If you need to go online to make a friend, people ask, what’s wrong with you?
Is the solution here not to turn back to the offline world, but to expand the online world? Would it be helpful to have a change in norms where, when you move to a new city, you really can make friends online in this kind of way? Why is it that there is this, again, somewhat surprising discrepancy between these two different things you might think of doing online?
Rosen: I would say, yes, meetup groups are great, and people do use them, but they don’t have the ubiquity that I think you’re pointing to with online dating. The difference is this: I think the internet can be—and social media platforms in particular can be—very useful if you have an existing interest and you move to a new place and want to join a group that’s already doing that. You can find those people more efficiently and join that real-world group. That’s a great thing.
The great Neil Postman, a cultural critic in the 20th century, made this point about television and politics, which I still think resonates—he said, when you introduce television into the realm of politics, you no longer have politics with television. You have a new politics. I think that’s true of friendships and romantic relationships, even neighborly relationships. When you introduce a social media platform to that relationship, you no longer have that thing anymore. You have a new thing.
Think of Nextdoor, which was created with great fanfare to bring neighbors together. You would be able to communicate—garage sales, emergencies—it would all be great. I did a little study of Nextdoor, and in some cases it works really well. It gets news out to the local neighbors. You have to identify yourself. You have to live in the neighborhood to contribute. So there was some gatekeeping for that platform that hadn’t existed before.
But it very quickly devolved into the worst sort of vicious gossip, finger-pointing, tattling on each other. I have a pretty active Nextdoor neighborhood group that I just watch in awe and amazement. Because of scale, because of the online disinhibition effect, we are not acting neighborly. We’re not going out into the street, because it’s easier to sit at our keyboards and have our say than it is to actually confront someone and say, your dog’s a little crazy, can you put him on a leash? That’s because of the risk—you have to actually deal with another human being who might be volatile, who might be unfriendly, who might say something scary. That’s where I do think we need to remember, even with friendships, even with romantic relationships, what we’re talking about here isn’t the old way. It’s a new thing. We’re still developing norms to adapt to that. I have a lot of confidence that we’ll find those—we already have found some—but we have to at least acknowledge that it isn’t the same thing, because those old rules don’t apply in many of these cases.
Mounk: I wonder if another development here is that you can get a lot of shallow community that then replaces deep community. The ease of finding shallow community somehow pushes away deep community.
The extreme form of this that I see sometimes is on the different social media platforms. I quite like Reddit because I think its algorithm is better and it can be entertaining in weird ways. But so often, you get somebody saying, I’ve been friends with this person for 20 years, and they said this one thing to me yesterday that I find kind of hurtful or whatever, and I’ve decided to cut them out of my life completely. Am I the asshole? The answer that is given is always no. If somebody has said something that doesn’t value you perfectly at every moment, they are toxic and you must cut them out of your life. I think that’s gotten a little bit better over the last few years, but there’s certainly a tendency where these members of a very shallow community—people you’ve never met personally, who you might never have had a two-way conversation with, who are perhaps just commenting on some random post of yours—encourage you to cut those real-life community ties. That’s a particular example. I’m sure you can find examples that go in the other direction, but perhaps that’s what’s going on here.
Rosen: I think that’s a really important point, because what it shows is that, again, humans are hardwired to seek the approval and connection of others in our communities. Our community now can potentially be limitless online. So if you are spending less time in person with the people who know you best—who might provide, for example, a leavening influence on your impulse to cut someone out of your life because they looked at you sideways—those people might say, you might be overreacting, think about it, sleep on it. They would give you all that good advice that friends and loved ones give us when we’re acting crazy. But that’s one person, one voice, if you happen to see them or text them this question.
Then you can go online and get thousands and thousands of strangers telling you, you are brave, you have to do this, I did this too. Our urge to belong and connect is triggered and rewarded. You’re rewarded for doing the more extreme thing, even if it’s not actually what’s best for you. Combine that with a presentist way of going about our daily lives. We want instant answers, just like we want our Seamless order delivered instantly when we feel like a cheeseburger. There’s this tendency to not really think, to not take the time. This speaks to the patience point, but we’re becoming habituated to those forms of decision-making.
Look, my favorite Reddit thread is Instant Karma—when people who drive like maniacs immediately get pulled over by the cops. I love watching those videos. I’m like, ha, finally, justice. We have these impulses that, when taken to an online platform, become extreme. But then we get extreme rewards for them, and so we keep doing them. It’s difficult to step back. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t check my phone during interstitial moments of my day, because it’s too easy, as you said earlier, to end up an hour and a half later wondering what you’ve just done with your time. There’s a version of that with relationships. Go seek out someone whose judgment you actually trust and listen to them. Ask them that question. Don’t go to Reddit first. You can still go to Reddit, but get the wisdom and judgment of someone who knows you first. That’s what we’re not doing. We’re skipping that step now.
Mounk: I have a gripe against primary elections in the United States. The reason I have a gripe against primary elections is that I think there are two kinds of mechanisms I trust. One is stakeholders. In Europe, most political parties have party members who pay party dues, and they elect officers. Those officers make the most important decisions, like who to nominate for Chancellor of Germany or whatever. These people have a long-term stake in the well-being of the organization. They’ve put a lot of work and effort into it, and they have a sense of its history—of past successes and failures. They have skin in the game.
Then I believe in democratic elections, in which everybody participates and votes. I actually think that most people are reasonable. I don’t always agree with the opinion of the majority of my fellow citizens, but, by and large, I think people are reasonable and decent. That’s why democracy works. That’s why I believe in democracy.
The problem with primary elections is that they select for highly engaged, low-stakes people—people who are very engaged and willing to turn out, but who don’t have skin in the game like insiders. In a way, what these kinds of online communities recreate is the primary system. It’s not your mom and dad. It’s not your best friend. It’s not the stakeholders who know your history and know that you’ve already cast three people out of your life over random reasons. Perhaps you’re just a little oversensitive. It’s not the people who actually care about your long-term well-being. It’s not the average person, who may be much more psychologically well-calibrated and who doesn’t have that kind of stake in your personal well-being, but who probably has common sense.
It is the small subsection of people who spend all of their life commenting on people’s Am I the Asshole threads on Reddit. With all honor to the great Am I the Asshole community, they are likely to be psychologically pretty different from the average person. So it’s a weird selection effect of who you’re allowing to make those decisions for you.
Rosen: There’s also something I think you’re pointing to, which American politics has been suffering from for a little while now—the decline in the power and respect for institutions. You used to have active political parties in this country that had some power and exercised judgment over who should run at the state level, federal level, and so on. That disappeared.
In our current populist moment, it’s whoever has the most followers on X or Bluesky or wherever. We do see that. My wonderful colleague Yuval Levin has written about this—how the institutions that should shape people’s behavior and judgment, and to which we should appeal for authority, like Congress and elsewhere, have flipped. Now you have people using the institutional platform to promote their individual goals. The individual control that is offered to each of us when we go online is encouraged in part because we are a radically individualistic society in the United States. I think a lot of our politics has become this game of one-upmanship, not just among the highly-engaged but perhaps not completely mainstream people who participate at the primary level and in these online discussions, but among our politicians themselves. They are also reflecting that impulse, because they are rewarded for it.
I can’t say often enough how, on both the right and the left, you have a whole bunch of politicians who are more concerned about followers than constituents. Their constituents are the people they are supposed to answer to, but they answer to their followers, many of whom don’t live in their district and have no concern beyond signaling their tribal loyalty online. This has been very bad for democracy. It continues to pose a challenge in our election process.
In our personal relationships, you’re absolutely right. The mediating institutions—the human institutions—matter. I sometimes get called a scold because I love to take the quiet car on the Acela train, and I’m the first person who politely jumps up and says, this is the quiet car, could you please stop talking on your phone? I always try to be nice, but I’m pretty firm. I’m that scold. But that’s a social role I’m fulfilling. You see that deteriorating, first because everybody is just staring at their screen and doesn’t care about the people around them in public space. But that’s a kind of institutional structure that we shouldn’t let go of. Yes, we can film bad behavior on our phones and make people infamous in real time in a split second. But are we actually doing the hard work of being good human beings who call out bad behavior and hold someone accountable in real time? Not just filming them, but going up and saying, hey, knock it off, or breaking up the fight. Don’t film it and post it on an internet site. That’s a kind of cultural institutional function that I fear is disappearing.
Mounk: This question of social norms is really important, because some social norms are very healthy. It’s very good to have one car on the Amtrak—with lots of other cars where people can go and have conversations—in which people can do some work and enjoy some quiet. It takes people to get the balance right. If every time someone spoke—and I’ve seen that sometimes happen on the quiet car—people just shouted at them and created a huge ruckus, that’s counterproductive. You’re disturbing people more with your reprimand than the person originally was with their disturbance. It also just becomes a very unpleasant social environment. At the same time, if nobody ever enforced the norm at all, the norm would very quickly go away.
Some elements of the in-person world encourage the right calibration of this. It can go wrong, but we have long-evolved instincts for how to do that. Online, what we end up with is very vague norms, which are not as bound to a specific locus as the Amtrak quiet car. Different norms can clash, or you never know which norm is going to be applied to which situation. That can then be enforced out of all proportion to the underlying offense. We’re recording this a few days after a relatively small incident—one among literally a million others happening every day—which is two spouses cheating on each other. But that has consumed the internet and led to a huge degree of opprobrium for the people involved—I’m speaking of the Coldplay couple kissing on the kiss cam.
There’s that kind of fear: if I go out into the real world, I might be shamed in a way that feels out of proportion to the underlying offense. As with many examples of cancellation, some cases become very famous, but lots and lots do not. People now experience, especially as teenagers, all kinds of all-consuming drama—often with forms of cancellation in the local community that never make any headlines. They’re certainly never written up in The New York Times and don’t go viral on Twitter with tens of millions of people watching that entertaining six-second clip. Nevertheless, these experiences may leave people so traumatized that they say, I’m just worried about any form of social interaction that might potentially expose me to that form of collective response.
Rosen: This is an irony of our current age, because one of the early promises of these technologies was that they would be liberatory. We would have more freedom, more accountability, more control as individuals. The state couldn’t crush us because we could film bad actors sent out by the state. But in fact, because we can all survey each other now, we behave differently. We know from many studies that if you know you’re being watched, you’re going to act in ways that are different from when you’re not being watched. There’s also an aspect of this that I think doesn’t get enough attention: how it shapes our expectations for justice.
These platforms don’t just reward the embarrassment of public figures; they reward moral grandstanding. They turn almost every single discussion into a moral discussion. But everything isn’t a moral debate, just like everything shouldn’t be politics. If moral judgment is what’s rewarded on these platforms—where most people are having their conversations, where, unfortunately, most people are getting their news, often by seeing a link but never reading the story—then that exacerbates the human tendency to mete out justice, to judge others’ behavior, and to shame people.
I feel for the families of those two spouses. They themselves have been brought into this global shaming campaign and the mockery that’s ensued. The punishment from this kind of shaming is orders of magnitude out of proportion to how humans usually judge and deal with bad behavior within communities. The outsourcing of that to the internet has been a very bad thing—not just for politics, but for personal relationships. How many times have you seen, out in the wild, some people starting to argue and everyone pulls out their phones? It’s like: now I’m going to film you. I’m going to show your worst self. It’s a threat. It has become a weapon in the hands of people who don’t want to deal with conflict in the way that we should. It becomes a deflection and a tool to shame people. That is very bad. It’s been going on for a long time. We have not developed norms, as I think that recent episode you just described demonstrates. We haven’t figured that part of it out yet.
Mounk: My producer rightly chides me that the couple was cuddling, not kissing. I’m sure they kissed at some point.
Rosen: Kissing was implied. That was not an HR approved cuddle. Let’s just put it that way.
Mounk: Perhaps there was a golden period of urban anonymity that is never coming back. In the village, you didn’t have anonymity because your friends, your neighbors, and your relatives always knew what you were up to. That is very restrictive to people. It also, by the way, led to a certain set of very socially conservative norms, which were in part necessitated by the state of reproductive technology at the time, but also facilitated by the inbuilt forms of social surveillance in the geographic modalities in which most human beings lived for much of human history. You were just very easily observed.
Then you had this brief period where about 50% of the world population lived in cities—relatively anonymous places—where your neighbors might have been able to observe you, but they were not part of the same friend and kinship network, and they probably didn’t care that much about what you were doing. That actually gave people a lot of freedom. One way of thinking about what happens with these forms of online surveillance and social shaming and people taking out their phones to record is that you have a kind of sporadic re-village-ization. Normally, you can go around New York doing whatever you want, but if, for whatever reason, what you do is sufficiently outrageous or terrible—or it’s just a common behavior like cheating on your spouse, which, sadly, is relatively common—but it somehow gets caught in a way that captures the imagination, because it’s the perfect six-second clip of people diving in shame out of the frame of a picture, and so on, then suddenly you are subject to the norms of the village of the past.
This conversation reminds me of the obvious point people have made: that the internet turns us into a global village in some very bad ways. What’s interesting, though, is that the village comes with inbuilt strengths. My friend who’s of Greek origin always says, my country has solved the problem of loneliness. It is impossible to be lonely in a Greek village because the moment you step out, your neighbors talk to you, chat with you, ask you about your day.
When I spend time in Italy, there’s a one-minute walk from the house where my mother lives part of the year to the local bar in the village, and often it takes half an hour because you run into so many neighbors and acquaintances. You say, I just want to get my damn coffee, but it takes half an hour, because you have a really interesting, nice, friendly chat with people. It’s one of the beautiful things about living there. What you’re describing is the social opprobrium and the judgmentalism. Including, perhaps, as you see sometimes in supposedly progressive spaces, the emergence of conservative social norms. It is the left that is saying—everybody kind of mentioned it in the last few days—these evil adulterers, in a way that sounds a little bit like 19th-century schoolmarms. But it’s without the benefits of the village—without the deep social ties, without the social network, without the person who says, hey, you look a little sad today, is everything all right? Can I come over and make you some food or something? So it’s kind of like the worst version of the village.
Rosen: It is because there’s no trust in that village. If you think about the old forms of that—particularly in the urban context—one of the concerns about all the people who fled the small village to go to the big city was that they would be anonymous and lost and without protection.
The work that Jane Jacobs did in New York, for example, was fascinating because she said, actually, there is this whole informal network of eyes on the street. People do, just as you described in that Italian village, watch each other—not with hostility, and not necessarily with benevolence either, but simply because it’s shared space. We’re all in this together. Let’s all just keep an eye on each other. That meant that you probably did have one or two busybody, nosy people who were going to bother you with stuff you’d rather they did not know about. But it was also a protective mechanism. If you needed help, you could ask several people, because the eyes on the street were all in it together.
That’s where I worry, particularly about the younger generations. We don’t have eyes on the street now. We have surveillance—constant surveillance—of each other. Because of the way the platforms are designed, that encourages a kind of instant rush to judgment.
What that means for these younger generations of kids, if that’s the expectation in the world they grow up in, is that they don’t have what, in bioethics, we call an "open future." It’s why many bioethicists argue you should not do genetic manipulation of your children—because you’re robbing them of all the opportunities that an open future, one not pre-determined by genetic design, would give them. It’s permanent. You can’t take it back. So we don’t genetically engineer our kids for that reason: because it robs them of freedom.
Mounk: I know this is a side note, but aren’t the kids going to be determined by one genetic makeup or the other?
Rosen: Yes, but you don’t fiddle with that. They’re going to be half of their parents on either side, but what you don’t do is take an embryo and say, I’m going to select for height, I’m going to select for sex—some people would even argue, barring a genetic condition that’s sex-related, you shouldn’t even select for sex. That’s the parents imposing on the future of this child without the child’s consent. So, from the moment that embryo is engineered by the parents, pathways of freedom for that future child are cut off.
Mounk: That’s interesting. I guess I get the argument. It seems to me like there’s a distinction between a range of different possibilities, and the parents are selecting between those possibilities—which seems to be an accurate description of that case—and a rather different idea, which is that we don’t want parents to overdetermine the choices of their children.
In one obvious way, this is one of the key arguments against female genital mutilation: that you are depriving the child of the possibility of exploring various forms of sexual pleasure by doing this kind of operation. Even though we accept that parents have a lot of authority over young children—because children can’t make choices for themselves—what we don’t accept is that parents can foreclose those kinds of choices later in life. At a certain point, when the kid turns 18 or whatever the age is, they should be able to make those choices for themselves.
But here, there’s a case where—whether your genetic makeup is A or your genetic makeup is B—you have no agency over that. You’re born one way or the other, and once you’re born, you have no choice. It’s not clear to me that the parents are reducing the choice of the embryo. They are determining one pathway or the other, but since either of the hypothetical children wouldn’t have any choice in what the genetic makeup was anyway, you’re not reducing the choice that the children have.
Rosen: I suppose it’s more the overdetermination point. For example, take sex selection, which is where a lot of these debates happen. Parents who’ve had two boys but desperately want a girl—what expectations are built into their understanding of what a girl child will do? What if that girl grows up to be a tomboy who doesn’t want to take ballet and they wanted a ballerina? It’s the imposition of expectations that, if they’re seen all the way through, will result in that child having a miserable childhood and not being able to fully develop. It’s probably a bad analogy, but when you think about young people growing up online and the embarrassing mistakes everyone makes—I, for one, was in the marching band in high school, and thank God the internet was not around yet, because while that wouldn’t have prevented me from having a future career, it would have been an embarrassing moment in my past. Those embarrassing moments now track people throughout their lives.
The ability to reinvent oneself is actually a core value in the history of America. This idea that when we had a frontier, you could just leave where you’re from, go somewhere else, and start over. You can’t do that in the same way anymore. As you said earlier, everybody was embarrassed when early online dating was going on and wouldn’t admit to it. Now, however, I had a friend who was set up with someone—not online, but through another friend—and she Googled this man. He didn’t have an internet presence, basically because of the work he does, but she found that highly suspicious. She’s convinced he’s a serial killer. That’s a very short span of time in which our expectations have shifted: you must be out there on the internet, you must have a digital identity that people can examine and check.
For children—and even for adults like us—that has consequences. Adults just live with that reality. But if you grow up in a world where everything you’ve done is tracked, surveyed, photographed, put online, and your digital footprint by the time you’re 12 years old is massive—forget what the big companies do with buying and selling that information—how does that form a healthy sense of self? What happens when someone hits 15 and says, actually, I’m not the goth with all those piercings—I like philosophy, I want to do something else. It’s more and more challenging for kids to develop a healthy sense of self and make all those mistakes. I think that’s where Jonathan Haidt’s work is a good starting point for saying: maybe some of the crises these kids face is that they don’t have that freedom anymore, and they know it. They know it all the time. Every time they look at their phones, they know it.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Christine discuss OnlyFans, why authenticity is so valued, and how to defend the human. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
