Jonathan Haidt, being right about social media (again):

Despite years of heated debate, a consensus has now emerged about just how large the correlation is between social media use and mood disorders. In the SCA paper Twenge, Lozano, Cummins and I wrote, we compared the association of social media time with mental illness to other variables found in the same datasets. In that same UK dataset, mood disorders were more closely associated with social media use than with marijuana use and binge drinking, though less closely associated with sleep deprivation. I’m not saying that a day of social media use is worse for girls than a day of binge drinking. I’m simply saying that if we’re going to play the game of looking through lists of correlations, the proper comparison is not potatoes and eyeglasses; it is marijuana use and binge drinking.

Having looked at these studies and sounded the alarm for years now, Haidt then asks, “What would it take to show that social media use was causing teen girls to become depressed and anxious?”

But that is absolutely the wrong question.

Among the normal population of people, only the most willfully blind, idiotic, and lazy (which is to say, most of us) don’t “know” this to be true of social media.

There is one giant, obvious, international and gendered cause: social media. Instagram was founded in 2010. The iPhone 4 was released then too – the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, and that’s the year that its user base exploded. By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies and posting them for friends, enemies and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) superior bodies and lives. The hours girls spent each day on Instagram were taken from sleep, exercise, and time with friends and family. The arrival of smartphones rewired social life for an entire generation. What did we think would happen to them?

The question is not “How do you get the studies to show it?” or “How do you get people to believe the studies?” The question is, so what? So-the-fuck what? How do you get people to JUST STOP USING IT?

I hear often (and rightly, and encouragingly) about how the sociopaths running the giant social media and tech companies simply do not care about any of this. And they definitely, definitively don’t. But do you know you else doesn’t care? The fucking average human being.

That seems like a bigger problem to me.

Catching up on Peggy Noonan since resubscribing to the Wall Street Journal, and, well, this hits the nail on the head:

Google is another major developer of AI. It has been accused of monopolistic practices, attempting to keep secret its accidental exposure of user data, actions to avoid scrutiny of how it handles public information, and re-engineering and interfering with its own search results in response to political and financial pressure from interest groups, businesses and governments. Also of misleading publishers and advertisers about the pricing and processes of its ad auctions, and spying on its workers who were organizing employee protests.

These are the people we want in charge of rigorous and meticulous governance of a technology that could upend civilization?

At the dawn of the internet most people didn’t know what it was, but its inventors explained it. It would connect the world literally—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually—leading to greater wisdom and understanding through deeper communication.

No one saw its shadow self. But there was and is a shadow self. And much of it seems to have been connected to the Silicon Valley titans’ strongly felt need to be the richest, most celebrated and powerful human beings in the history of the world. They were, as a group, more or less figures of the left, not the right, and that will and always has had an impact on their decisions. 

I am sure that as individuals they have their own private ethical commitments, their own faiths perhaps. Surely as human beings they have consciences, but consciences have to be formed by something, shaped and made mature. It’s never been clear to me from their actions what shaped theirs. I have come to see them the past 40 years as, speaking generally, morally and ethically shallow—uniquely self-seeking and not at all preoccupied with potential harms done to others through their decisions. Also some are sociopaths.

AI will be as benign or malignant as its creators. That alone should throw a fright—“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”—but especially that crooked timber.

She goes on in a follow-up article:

I will be rude here and say that in the past 30 years we have not only come to understand the internet’s and high tech’s steep and brutal downsides—political polarization for profit, the knowing encouragement of internet addiction, the destruction of childhood, a nation that has grown shallower and less able to think—we have come to understand the visionaries who created it all, and those who now govern AI, are only arguably admirable or impressive.

You can’t have spent 30 years reading about them, listening to them, watching their interviews and not understand they’re half mad.

Now, I don’t find that rude in the slightest. It’s flatly true and, if anything, she’s being too nice. As Noonan points at at the start of the first article above, defenders of AI, and of Big Tech in general, are either stupid, preening, or greedy. I’m sure there is a less malicious, more quietly naive category for which “stupid” is too harsh a word, but still conceding its accuracy, I think those three categories pretty much cover it.

Granting all that, and completely agreeing: all of it only matters because the vast majority of us are too busy worrying about our own minute happiness to give a shit.

None of it should really be that surprising. Long before social media or Big Tech took over just about everything, we had Black Friday. In 2021, 180 million shoppers spent $54 billion on Black Friday. As Talbot Brewer recently pointed out:

Just consider what we now do when we set aside our work and gather to express the values that bind us together. Here in the United States, we cut short our Thanksgiving retreat and join long queues in front of big-box stores so we can elbow each other over Black Friday markdowns. And we do this, as often as not, to amass consumer goods for gift exchange at the next family gathering, which (at least nominally) celebrates the birth of a man who counseled his followers to sell all of their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.

It’s all so illogical and grandly stupid — and universal. What sort of bootstrap-pulling, courageous and virtuous gusto are we expecting from ourselves when it comes to any of this tech business?

The guilt of it all is spread so far and wide that I often have a hard time blaming anyone. But more often, I have a harder time not blaming everyone.

David Dark:

To the extent that we aspire to bear witness to beloved community, our hopes for America, its citizenry, and the rest of the world won’t be dictated by any government or political party. Beloved community is a call to embody a more comprehensive patriotism wherever we find ourselves. Like discipleship, the practice of democracy is a widening of our capacities for moral awareness and an expansion of our sphere of respect. If we have a steadily narrowing vision of people to whom we’re willing to accord respect or if the company we keep is slowly diminishing to include only the folks who’ve learned to pretend to agree with us, we can be assured that we’re in danger of developing around ourselves a kind of death cult, a frightened, trigger-happy defensiveness that is neither godly nor, in any righteous sense, American. Or as one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s characters famously asked, “What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry?” Might beloved community come to serve as a norm, the core ethic of what we mean when we speak of America as a hope?

In such dreams begin deep responsibilities. Beloved community is an enlarged sense of neighborliness that strives to maintain “neighbor” as an ever-widening category, even when the neighbor appears before us as a threat or an enemy. The injunction to love the neighbor in the minute particulars of speech and action has never been an easy one, but it might be the nearest and most immediate form of patriotism available to any of us. It is also the one vocation that, if neglected, will lead to the forfeiting of any and all soul.

. . . Thoreau argued that our responsibilities to ourselves and others include all the ways we’re complicit in unrighteous norms. We aren’t responsible only for our own ideas; we’re responsible for the conflicts we avoid to more effectively get by, the lies we allow others to voice and propagate unchallenged in our presence. He worried over all the ways he played along and didn’t raise a fuss in the face of the terrors his government enacted and aided and the subtle fashion in which his own behavior, by proving polite and acceptable, abided injustice: “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

Overcoming the impulse to play long along to get along (the drive to cave to deferential fear) is what Congressman John Lewis refers to as “good trouble,” that disruptive social newness we undertake when we recall that we need never resign our consciences to legislators, law enforcement officers, or those who accrue cred and coin through creating, pushing, and perpetuating disinformation. If we aren’t agitated by the abuse being carried out with our presumed consent, we aren’t paying attention. but the question is always this: What do we do with our agitation? 

Happy 4th, everyone.

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Antón Barba-Kay:

The fact that Google’s parent company is called Alphabet or that Amazon’s logo is the letter A linked by a smile to Z suggests their awareness of the territory at stake: our life in letters, our presence of mind, our spirit coded and rendered into data. “We’re creating God,” as Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer of a Google AI research arm, modestly put it.

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I’ve had a bit of an anti-Google impulse lately. Nothing crazy, I don’t think, and certainly not anything I’d call a boycott. (I rarely boycott anything. And I can’t help but laugh when I hear things like “Boycott Chic Filet” or “Boycott Target.” Since I find myself in a Target about two times a year, and at a Chic Filet approximately once every five years, the thought of me boycotting them is self-evidently hilarious.) It’s more of a “just do the right thing” kick. Or, since that notion naturally sounds like something we should all be doing all the time (“That is what we’re doing, right everybody? Right?”) it’s just my conscious effort to extend that notion to an area that I (and, I’m pretty sure, most of us) rarely think about.

I know that I will not personally make a dent in the monopoly or the corruption or the overconfident manipulation or the data theft of a company like Google, and I’m okay with that. But I can absolutely do without it! (And so can you.) In fact, it’s been fun so far figuring out how to, like our friend above in the Honda Element, give Google the middle finger.

Chrome is gone, on the phone and the computer. I’m trying Firefox for now, and I’m perfectly happy thus far. The only things that might count as “loss” in the process could be described as simple reflexes: I’m having to change the way I reflexively use apps and browsers. I’m more or less choosing to see that as an opportunity to relearn, and therefore re-appreciate, what I do with these devices. But it’s amazing how much these reflexes alone dictate what I/we will do with or do without, what changes we are willing to make. (Spoiler alert: the folks at Google know this about you and they know it better than you do.)

For email, I have an ancient Yahoo! account that I’ve used for most of my adult life, and I have a couple of Gmail accounts. I have not yet figured out how I will get away from this. WordPress, for instance, offers a custom domain email (such as, suchandsuch@tinyroofnail.com), but it seems like they use Google to do this anyway. Proton Mail might be a good solution, but I’m still looking it. But, like I mentioned before, I’m not boycotting Google. If there are some areas that Google works well for, I’m fine with that. Gmail might just be one of them; I don’t know yet (but it probably isn’t). Google Maps is certainly not. Neither is Google Search.

Instead of Google Maps, I’ve been using an app called Pocket Earth. While you can use it to navigate much like Google and Apple Maps, I have found it much more enjoyable to use like you would a physical map. And you can download regions by state to use offline. As for search engines, DuckDuckGo does everything I need a search engine to do.

The fact is, there are plenty of alternatives to a company like Google. And barely 10 years ago any one of them would have seemed unbelievably fascinating and helpful and convenient. Yet Google dominates almost everywhere. It doesn’t have to be that way. With devices that easily occupy 25% of our conscious life—not to mention how much of our unconscious life—why should choosing which apps I use be any less important than choosing which store I buy from, which company I shore up, which candidate I support?

On a similar note, while I have not done it yet, I think I’ve decided that, in the very near future, it will be worth the 30 or 40 dollars per month for an extra cellphone line, to have a second “dumb phone” to leave the house with when I so choose. I admit, I rely too much on the smart phone for regular, weekly tasks to get rid of it completely. So for now, I’m planning to take a baby step, to pay for a certain kind of freedom — that is, a certain kind of openness — that I think is very much worth paying for.

Jonathan Sacks:

There are moral choices and there are the consequences of those choices. The market gives us choices, and morality itself is [we tell ourselves] just a set of choices in which right or wrong have no meaning beyond the satisfaction or frustration of desire. The result is that we find it increasingly hard to understand why there might be things we want to do, can afford to do, and have a legal right to do, that nonetheless we should not do because they are unjust or dishonorable or disloyal or demeaning: in a word, unethical. Ethics is reduced to economics.

Jadranka Brnčić:

Holy Saturday is a silent phase between the Good Friday and the Resurrection, but it is not an empty phase. On the contrary, in the experience of silence and notable absence, the solidarity of God with those who are suffering grief, pain, and abandonment is most clearly expressed. The experience of “no news” in the situation where good news is hoped for is an experience of deepest desperation, insecurity which paralyses human capacities to act – shall we accept the emptiness of death, or shall we continue hoping? Holy Saturday therefore offers a salvific reading of the situation of insecurity – sometimes there is nothing we can do to know more about the events or to change them, yet we constantly experience social or emotional pressure to “do something” or to “change something.” The theology of Holy Saturday therefore stands in juxtaposition to this pressure; it tells those who are deprived of means to change events that “doing nothing” save remembering is not an empty activity but a state of profound truth-seeking and truth-telling.

This little painted rock lies up against a metal post on the walking path near us here in Bozeman. Lest you get too idyllic an image, it is the post on which the bucket for dog poop hangs.

I love the phrase, “Let life surprise you.” Or I love the idea, anyway. The phrase is, of course, remarkably cheesy and a little cliché. But I love the idea, especially in a less common phrasing: “Stay for the surprises.” (I take the phrase from an interview with Jamie Tworkowski.) Because some of the best joys and happinesses in life are (perhaps by definition) unexpected, and therefore yet to come.

This is Sarah Lindsay’s poem “Small Moth“:

She’s slicing ripe white peaches
into the Tony the Tiger bowl
and dropping slivers for the dog
poised vibrating by her foot to stop their fall
when she spots it, camouflaged,
a glimmer and then full on—
happiness, plashing blunt soft wings
inside her as if it wants
to escape again.

Sometimes, even the daily — no, even the moment-to-moment fluctuations are enough to remind me when I am down or angry or whatever: wait a bit, stick around, let life — let joy or happiness or whatever you want to call it — surprise you. It always does.

The Dispatch:

All of what Trump has shown disregard for—the letter and spirit of the law, the security of sensitive information, the foundational republican compact of the country that elevates the Constitution and the rule of law over the will of its leaders—is not good for anyone. And with every opportunity that responsible leaders fail to do something about it, Americans just get more used to it.

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Jesse Singal:

Alas. The fundamental problem, going back to the AMA/Endocrine Society nonsense, is that most people don’t know much about this issue. So the average person is going to see a statement like this one and, well, believe it. Those are very impressive-seeming organization names!

I’d argue the American Medical Association and Endocrine Society have a fundamental obligation to, at the very least, not spread outright nonsense. . . .

But highly respected institutions, like these organizations and like countless media outlets, do keep spreading misinformation on this subject. At a certain point, if you’re just trying to figure out the truth about these subjects, why wouldn’t you give up on the AMA or the Endocrine Society or the AAP or Scientific American or Science Vs? Seriously. Once it’s established that these institutions are much more interested in coming down on the “right” side of a hyper-politicized debate than in making a good-faith effort to communicate the truth — once they’ve shown, over and over and over, that they only deploy the full powers of their reasoning and skepticism selectively — what is the point of trusting them?

I’m not totally blackpilled. These organizations all still have good people working for them and are capable of solid work. I would still trust The New York Times or even Science Vs over the countless maniacs spreading conspiracy theories on YouTube. But I’m gaining a better and better understanding of how said maniacs gain a foothold. When someone comes to me and complains that they just can’t trust mainstream institutions anymore, what can I do, knowing what I know, other than shrug?

Folks like Alex Jones will always have some influence, unfortunately, even in otherwise healthy epistemic landscapes. Humans are imperfect and our brains are easily hijacked by charismatic madmen. But why make it such a cakewalk for the Joneses of the world? Why give people easy excuses to abandon mainstream sources of knowledge?

Don’t complain when you dislike where those disillusioned folks eventually end up, is all I’m saying.

I’m not really a fan of the “bothsidesing” business — dumb is dumb, wrong is wrong, you aren’t justified, no one made you do it — but that doesn’t mean that good points can’t be made and understood in terms of cumulative cultural extremes. It seems objectively true that, as Anne Applebaum put it, “the process of radicalization [is] mutually reinforcing.”

Here’s how she put it exactly:

Both would blame the other for accelerating the dynamic, but in fact the process of radicalization was mutually reinforcing. Milder, more moderate members of both communities began to choose sides. Being a bystander got harder; remaining neutral became impossible.

The reason I think it’s worth understanding — worth having a permanent place in our understanding — is not to make excuses for anyone, least of all ourselves. It’s important because it helps us to understand, or at least attempt to understand, those drawn to the most extreme sides of our current cultural battles. And doing so might actually take us a step or two closer to turning those battles back into conversations. The attempt really matters, because it reflects a disposition without which there can be no peace. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s mother said, in a letter to him not long after he was imprisoned,

What Augustine said was indeed right: “The ear hears according to the disposition of the heart.”

If I’m being completely honest, I don’t like the cardiac dispositions of almost everyone I meet these days. And I’m finding my own disposition to be increasingly negative and hopeless. I do attempt to find and pay attention to the best voices with the best dispositions, but that can be very hard work. Quite frankly, it’s exhausting. And I am often exhausted. But I also can’t think of many things more important than the task of finding truth-tellers, sharing what they are saying, and attempting to do the same truth-telling ourselves.

Here’s Daniel Dennet in 2017:

As usual with arms races, both in human warfare and in natural selection, advances in offense are cheaper than the defensive responses to counter them. This is especially true in epistemology, the world of fact, knowledge and belief. No matter how carefully you, or your organization, gathers, tests and evaluates evidence, your reputation for objectivity and truth-telling can be shattered with a few well-aimed lies by your opponents. With your reputation shattered, your goods, however valuable in fact, will be almost unsalable. Skepticism and doubt is cheap, confidence is expensive. This asymmetry is a major problem, and it will take patient and unrelenting effort to restore confidence in sources that deserve confidence.

Or, better, it will take patient effort and unrelenting courage. Patient (i.e. “long-suffering”) effort because it really is difficult, endless work (especially at the beginning) to find solid ground and to avoid the reactionary news set by the lowest possible bars. And unrelenting courage because, unless you are very lucky, you will often be doing this without the company or the approval of many around you.

As Stanislas Vinaver (known as Constantine) put it in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “Yes. For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up on the deep peace of being in opposition.”

Dennet says something else that summarizes pretty well what it is I hope I’m doing—not as any sort of specific project as yet (although the blogging is something), but as the near-constant background noise of every single day, no matter the situation. He says, “What we need to do is enlarge these islands [of reliable trust], patiently building from small to large, creating resilient webs of trust to replace those that have been dissolving in the onslaught of the media.”

That sounds like pretty good daily work to me. But it’s always worth remembering what T. S. Eliot wrote in “East Coker”:

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.