Over the past month, my mind has kept going back to one of the most trivial, and perhaps also one of the most profound, internet scandals of recent times.
You remember the scene: A camera at a Coldplay concert is showing audience members enjoying the show, with lead singer Chris Martin making a few friendly comments about each fan. The camera cuts to an attractive middle-aged couple in the midst of a cute embrace, with the man holding the woman from behind as they sway to the music. Then the couple spots the Jumbotron, and a perfectly choreographed series of panicked actions unfolds. The woman, shocked, covers her face, and turns away from the camera. The man dives to his left, out of the camera’s view. A younger woman, sitting behind them, and evidently in the know about what is happening, comes into view, the look on her face a poetic mix of horror and glee. “Oh, what?” Martin comments. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.”
It didn’t take long for the internet to confirm Martin’s first hypothesis. The man was the CEO of a tech company, someone known in his milieu but far from famous. The woman was the company’s head of HR (or, to cite the correct corporate appellation, its Chief People Officer). Both were promptly tarred-and-feathered in the public sphere, and nearly as promptly resigned from their jobs. The clip of their embrace and its dissolution has been viewed by tens, perhaps by hundreds, of millions of people around the world.
A lot has been written about this incident. But the aspect of it which I found most striking has barely been mentioned: The culture of the second half of the twentieth century was in many ways defined by the worldwide growth of huge cities, and the relative anonymity they afforded—with all its opportunities to escape the constraining norms of smaller towns and villages, but also to engage in actions many would consider immoral. But this culture ended sometime in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. For even if you think that you are hiding in plain sight, with over 60,000 people surrounding you in a massive stadium, the power of social media can now expose you to a massive worldwide audience in a matter of minutes.
In a literal sense, cities are still growing and the world is still urbanizing. In a cultural—or, if you will, spiritual—sense, the urban interlude of human history has come to an end. We all live in a village again.
The Postwar Aberration
I’ve been thinking a lot of late about the ways in which the postwar world, which we took to be the baseline for what developed democracies would look like for the foreseeable future, has turned out to be a brief historic aberration.
Take the economy. North America and Western Europe experienced an extraordinary growth spurt in the decades after 1945. A huge portion of the population gained access to basic medical care like antibiotics, acquired household goods like fridges and washing machines, and got to own a car for the very first time. Even life expectancy rose markedly over the course of a few short decades. Despite the considerable political turbulence of the postwar era, which we have a tendency to underestimate with the benefit of hindsight, this gave the institutions of liberal democracy an extent of “output legitimacy“ that they are unlikely to enjoy again anytime soon.
Similar points could be made about the way in which other factors which helped to create a comparatively stable world in the postwar years have turned out to be artifacts of a very unusual era. The widespread commitment to the basic rules and norms of the democratic game, for example, was usually thought to be a hallmark of mature democracies, and widely expected to last indefinitely. But as the memory of the horrors of Nazism, and the contemporaneous evidence of the dysfunction of communism, faded from view, more and more citizens lost their attachment to liberal democracy; as I chronicled in some of my earliest academic work, a significant share of citizens now has deep skepticism about our political system.
The postwar years also saw the rise of a relatively orderly public sphere, with people often agreeing about the facts even when they disagreed about their opinions, and gatekeepers working at mainstream media outlets able to define the realm of the reasonable. This too was thought to come downstream from big structural transformations, such as the rise of literacy, the near-universal attainment of a high school degree, and the increase in the college-educated population. And yet that dynamic has turned out to be an artifact of the unusual conditions of the postwar era, with media companies located in a geographic center able to broadcast out to the periphery, but with the technological preconditions for any one individual to share their opinion with millions of others over social media not yet in place.
For the last few days, I’ve been reflecting on yet another way in which a postwar development which we took to presage what the world would look like for the foreseeable future has turned out to be a short aberration: a certain culture of personal freedom facilitated by urban life. For it turns out that the life of the city, with its attendant freedoms from neighborly supervision and collective constraint, was really just a short interlude in the history of humanity. Facilitated by social media, the village has returned with a vengeance—stripped of its warmth, and supercharged by the cruelty of the crowd.
The Cage of Norms
For most of human history, most of the human race lived in roaming bands of hunter-gatherers, or in small sedentary settlements engaged in agriculture. These two forms of early human organization have important differences, which anthropologists have explored at length. But they also have one crucial commonality: Both create small communities of people in which most people know each other, and the actions of each individual are subject to constant social surveillance.
This social surveillance has historically served an important function. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, famously argued that we need a coercive political order to keep the worst angels of human nature in check. When the state isn’t able to monopolize violence, simple conflicts between different individuals will quickly escalate, producing a “war of all against all” that renders life “nasty, brutish, and short.” But as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have pointed out in The Narrow Corridor, the best ethnographic evidence suggests that such mayhem is much rarer than Hobbes imagined; in truth, most rural societies in which state authority is absent or very limited are governed by a strict “cage of norms.”
Traditional societies tend to evolve elaborate, and often highly repressive, codes of conduct. Even in the absence of a formal police force or court system, they turn out to be extremely effective at enforcing these moral strictures. Since everybody knows each other, and village life makes it very difficult to conceal anything you do, violations of that moral code are easily discovered. And since people in rural areas traditionally rely on a significant amount of mutual aid, and social death is a fear that millennia of evolution have baked deeply into our DNA, the mechanisms of ostracism are nearly as effective a deterrent to deviance as a modern-day penal code.
Another way of saying this is that for most of human history, most of the human race has lived in fear of cancellation. Rural life had many advantages. At its best, it provided a genuine sense of community; a thick social network of deeply familiar people; and collective help in everything from child-rearing to building a new barn. But the cage of norms that facilitated that cooperation came at a steep price for personal liberty—a fact to which just about any member of an ethnic, religious, or sexual minority group, or indeed any individual with idiosyncratic tastes or opinions, could vividly attest.
The Urban Interlude
It wasn’t primarily a change in moral convictions or a decline in religiosity or even the resistance of those it oppressed which eventually set us free from the cage of norms; it was urbanization.
Urbanization roughly proceeded in four phases. The first and slowest of these phases involved the emergence of a small number of moderately sized towns, which housed a vanishingly small percentage of the overall human population, but played an outsized role in creating the modern world.1 The second phase, which roughly started with the Industrial Revolution, saw the rapid emergence of bigger urban conglomerations, which in virtually every country remained home to a minority of the overall population, but started to erode the hold that the cage of norms enjoyed over national life.2 The third phase, which shaped the first half of the 20th century, saw a rapid growth of cities, with countries like France, Germany and the United States all seeing a majority of their populations living in urban areas for the first time in history, raising the expectation that the relative anonymity of the city would remain the default mode for the indefinite future. The fourth phase, which started around 1950, saw this process of urbanization expand to much poorer parts of the world, with the United Nations estimating that a majority of the total human population has lived in urban centers since sometime in the first decade of the 21st century; the urban future had seemingly gone global.
Many key elements of postwar culture are downstream from that structural transformation. The sexual liberation movement, for example, had nearly as much to do with the ability not to be branded with a Scarlet Letter as it did with the invention of the pill. (Tellingly, mid-17th century Boston, the setting for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel, had fewer than 2,500 inhabitants at the time.) Contraceptive methods, though far less reliable, were in widespread use even before the revolutionary invention of the pill; but the ability to engage in sex before marriage also required freedom from the reputational consequences for engaging in such “immoral” acts, which could previously include professional ruin for the man and an inability to find suitable marriage partners for the woman.
Other cultural transformations tell a similar story. Homosexuality, for example, has been prohibited and punished in the vast majority of rural settings. This is a reason why those gays and lesbians lucky enough to enjoy some agency over their lives have long been drawn to the relative anonymity of larger towns and cities. It is why gay life began to thrive over the course of the second half of the twentieth century in cities like San Francisco and London and Cologne and Chengdu. And it is why the gay rights movement developed at this particular juncture in history, with the attitudes of most citizens in developed democracies swinging from unabashed hostility towards homosexuality to widespread acceptance over the course of the late 20th century.
These changes long seemed unstoppable, even inevitable. In the year 2000, most social scientists would likely have argued that the decline of the extent to which communities policed the moral deviance of their members was rooted in attitudinal shifts produced by the process of modernization. According to the eminent sociologist Ronald Inglehart, for example, the second half of the twentieth century was characterized by the rise of “postmaterialist” values. As people became better able to procure the bases of a materially prosperous life, they set their sights on higher ambitions like self-actualization. This was reflected in a liberalization of their attitudes about the world, one that would slowly spread from the most affluent to the great majority.
If all of this was true, then it was also natural to assume that the relative freedom of city life in the second half of the twentieth century would prove resilient to technological change. Perhaps it was just about possible to imagine a regression to “materialist” values if the share of the urban population rapidly declined, if serious material hardship made a comeback, or if a major war focused minds on survival and tribal loyalty. But technological changes that give people a greater ability to express themselves, and to connect with each other, it was widely assumed, would only accelerate the spread of postmaterialist values. The future, Inglehart and most of his contemporaries believed, would be more and more tolerant.
As we now know, that assumption was hopelessly naive.
The Structural Transformation of the Social Media Sphere
The process of urbanization is continuing apace at the beginning of the 21st century. Every year, a greater share of the world’s population lives in cities. Countries like China, which were overwhelmingly rural in living memory, are now predominantly urban.
But there has also been another massive change, which has transformed the culture of our age even more profoundly. In a strange historical irony, the very decade which saw a majority of the world population living in urban areas for the first time in history also saw the invention of a technology which ensures that all of us have now effectively returned to the moral structure of village life: social media.
Social media has a lot of benefits.3 It also has two major effects which undo the anonymity of city life, and thereby reintroduce the cage of norms under modern conditions. First, it creates the danger that anybody who violates a social norm may suffer social shame on a massive scale. (Interestingly, this is even true when the social norm in question is widely violated and comparatively minor.) And second, it transforms each community with thick social connections into a digital village, allowing for the supervision and enforcement of norms even in the absence of national publicity.
The “Coldplay Couple” is a perfect example of the first dynamic. Marital fidelity is of course an important virtue; but it is one that millions of people across the world breach every day. And at a concert with tens of thousands of attendees, a secret couple must of course expect that many people will “see” them; but, as per the realities of urban life, they may reasonably hope that none of the people who see them will know or care who they are. You can see why the Coldplay couple expected to remain anonymous during their outing, and thereby to avoid the adverse social consequences for their infidelity.
But social media has fundamentally changed the structure of the public sphere, making it dangerous to keep relying on the presumption of anonymity we have inherited from the urban interlude. If some video clip is sufficiently compelling, it can pull two concert attendees out of their relative obscurity, beaming their image across millions of smartphones in a matter of hours. And when their illicit behavior is thus presented to a vast global audience, the relatively common nature of their misdeed does not protect them from being fired, ridiculed, and socially ostracized. In this way, social media facilitates the stochastic enforcement of the cage of norms: While most people can get away with breaching social norms most of the time, everyone must live in fear that their particular transgression—whether serious or trivial—will randomly be brought to the world’s attention.
When we think of the ways in which social media robs us of the anonymity of big city life, our minds turn to famous incidents like the Coldplay couple. But important as those are, this is an optical illusion. Most social media drama plays out on a much more local scale. Every day, thousands of people around the world suffer severe social punishment in their high school, on their university campus, or in some local community, because of social media posts that are seen not by millions but by thousands or hundreds or dozens of people.
For the most part, discipline is now exacted and punishment imposed in the semi-obscurity of our highly diffuse social networks. Just as social media facilitates near-total communication, so too does it facilitate near-total surveillance, a panopticon much more omniscient than those dreamt up by Jeremy Bentham and dreaded by Michel Foucault.
One Cage, Many Rules
Villages have varied widely in the content of the norms that they have enforced on their inhabitants. Most villages are patriarchal, some matriarchal. Most villages strongly impose monogamy and punish premarital sex, some favor different sexual and marital arrangements. Most villages discourage homosexuality and persecute those who engage in it, a few are tolerant of certain forms of same-sex attraction.
When I say that the brief urban interlude is ending, and that we are returning to the moral constraints of village life, I am therefore not predicting that all of the cultural changes of the last two centuries will somehow vanish. The content of the cage of norms can vary widely even as its form stays constant. And while in many parts of the world, from rural India to urban China, social media is often being used to impose a conservative notion of sexual morality, I have always thought invocations of The Handmaid’s Tale to be a deeply misguided metaphor for the United States: the prospect of an America whose most dominant cultural figures are Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and LeBron James turning into a theocracy are slim indeed.
Nor are all of us residents of the global village in which we now find ourselves likely to be subjected to the exact same norms. In the past, customs could vary significantly from one village to the next. Today, the norms whose breach may lead to social death can vary widely from one online community to another.
But what the online cage of norms shares with the one that is offline is the basic mechanism that is used to discipline and punish. The content of the norms to which you are subject are ultimately arbitrary; what remains unchanging is that these norms are deeply coercive, and that any breach of them, real or imagined, has such steep social costs that most people choose to stay in line.
A Bizzarro Global Village Without the Joys of Rural Life
Villages have benefits that can, to some extent, compensate for their vices.
I am writing these lines in the Italian village in which my family has owned a modest home for two decades. When there is a problem with the house in our absence, we have local friends who never hesitate to help. I do not worry about burglars because our neighbors are likely to spot and remember any stranger walking up or down the street. And when I try to buy coffee at the bar that is a hundred yards away, it sometimes takes me half an hour to get there, because I end up chatting with so many people along the way.
One year, a cat somehow snuck into our house as we were departing from the country, and got locked in while we were away. When a passerby heard her pitiful meowing a few days later, a complex rescue operation began. A neighbor had the key to an absent neighbor’s house who had the key to an absent neighbor’s house who had the key to our house. Within half an hour, the poor kitty was freed and fed.
The revillageification of the world thus poses a double problem: it deprives us of the most important benefits of big city life without affording us the compensating benefits that have traditionally accompanied village life. If a pipe has burst in your home, the people surveilling your behavior online aren’t going to stop the flood. If someone is about to break into your house, the people calling for you to be canceled because you broke the unwritten norms of the chess world or the knitting community aren’t going to call the police. And when you are feeling down, your Facebook friends and TikTok followers sure aren’t going to bump into you on your way to the bar, holding you up with the kind of chitchat that makes it so hard to feel true loneliness in a bustling village.
As for so much of human history, we all live in a village now. But it is a digital village, a bizarro version of the original, hypercharged with the easy judgments and harsh punishments of rural life, and painfully devoid of its joys.
Most estimates suggest that as late as 1800, less than 10 percent of the global population lived in cities.
The notable exception is the United Kingdom, which likely crossed the threshold to being majority urban in the second half of the 19th century.
For example, it connects members of minority groups which might previously have been isolated. If you have a rare disability or an obscure intellectual interest or a niche sexual fetish, social media makes it much easier to find people who are similar to you. This can allow people who would previously have suffered judgment or discrimination at the hands of the majority to build community and grow in confidence. But while this was initially expected to create a challenge to the cage of norms, which had already been pried wide open by two centuries of urbanization, the opposite has turned out to be the case—for other ways in which social media transforms the structure of our culture have turned out to predominate.