Everything's a cult now

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If you're part of the culture, you're part of a cult. It's a shallow distillation of an idea I recently encountered. The idea was that our culture has become so fragmented, mostly because of the internet and the ways we've shaped our lives around it, that almost all of us are acting like we're in some kind of cult. The way we consume content, the way fandom works, the ways we sort ourselves into tribes and camps, even the way lots of industries work, including the news business, it all has shades of cultiness. Whether that sounds bogus or compelling to you, there is, in any case, something worth thinking about here. I mean, what even is a cult? I'm Sean Elling and this is the Gray Area. Today's guest is Derek Thompson. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of the podcast Plain English. And he's also the person who floated that big idea about the cultification of everything. And if you think it's a small idea, the kind of catchy thing, a social media pendant throws out there to catch some likes, then you probably don't know Derek or his work. He's thought this through and like me, he's really interested in the deeper questions this brings up about the fracturing of mass society and what it means when our shared cultural references collapse. This is the stuff I'm thinking about all the time or I'm trying to think about it all the time. So I invited Derek on the show to help me figure it out. Derek Thompson, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thank you. So we are going to do a deep dive, obviously, into all of this, but I want to start by just having you lay out as generally as you can your cultification thesis, which I love. I'm not sure that I've ever been able to go deep on it. I'm very interested in and I've always been very interested in culture, which I suppose is worth the finding. Culture is the way that we think about the world and the way that we influence each other's thoughts about the world and that can be through entertainment, it can be through religion, it can be through fashion and clothes, but it's the memes and ideas and ideologies that not only influence our own sense of reality, but other people sense of reality. And I've always been interested in how people sense of reality comes to be. So you can start with the late 19th century when the concept of a national reality was first possible, at least in America. You had technologies like the telephone and the telegraph that allowed newspapers to share information and report on information that truly was national. It allowed information to travel much faster than it ever traveled before. And so suddenly in the late 19th century, we had the possibility of a national and even international somewhat real time shared reality. And that shared reality might have come to its fullest expression maybe in the middle of the 20th century with the rise of television technology. You had just a handful of channels that were reaching tens of millions of people. And at the same time, you also had the rise of national newspapers and maybe the apogy of national newspapers in terms of their ability to monopolize local advertising revenue and become just enormous machines for getting tensed millions of Americans to read about a shared reality. And so you move from the 19th century with sort of the birth of this possibility of a shared reality in the 20th century where you really have the rise of a kind of monoculture, which was never really possible for the vast majority of human history. And what I'm interested in is the possibility that the internet has forever shattered that reality that we are in a way going back to the pre-20th century where culture is actually just a bunch of cults stacked on top of each other, a bunch of many local realities stacked on top of each other. And that we maybe will never have anything like monoculture ever again because the internet in a weird way thrusts us back into the 19th century. There's all sorts of fascinating things that can unspool from the fact that monoculture and shared reality as we briefly came to understand it is dead. Yeah, I think basically all of that is right. And I'm going to try to resist the temptation to start chewing on too much of it because I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here. I think it would be helpful first to also define another term that we're going to throw on a lot here and it deserves to be defined clearly so that people know what we're talking about. How do you define a cult? I think of a cult as a nascent movement outside the mainstream that often criticizes the mainstream and organizes itself around the idea that the mainstream is bad or broken in some way. So I suppose when I think about a cult, I'm not just thinking about a small movement with a lot of people who believe something fiercely. I'm also interested, especially in the modern idea of cults being oriented against the mainstream. That is when they form, they form as a criticism of what the people in that cult understand to be the mainstream. And cults, especially when we talk about them in religion, tend to be extreme, tend to be radical, tend to have really high social costs to belonging to them. You today, especially in the media and entertainment space, have this really interesting popularity of new influencers or new media makers adapting as their core personality, the idea that the mainstream is broken, that news is broken, that mass institutions are broken, that the elite are in some way broken and elite institutions are broken. The fragmentation of media that we're seeing and the rise of this sort of anti-institutional, somewhat paranoid style of understanding reality, I see these things as rising together in a way that I find very interesting. That whole message, they don't want you to know the real truth, they, the mainstream, aren't covering the real news or the real stories. What is the seductive power of that? What is the psychological reward of defining yourself against the normies in that way? There's a lot of possible answers here, but I guess I'll start with a favorite philosophical touchstone of yours. Let's speak in the 19th century, let's go to Nietzsche. Yes. About power, I think that cults, speaking of will to power, give people who feel like they don't have status or don't have power or don't have a clear understanding of or theory of the case of the world, it gives them all of that, it gives them power, it gives them a kind of weapon of status, and it gives them a theory of how the world works. If you're frustrated, for example, about COVID policies in 2020-2021, it's not very empowering to say that nobody really understands what's going on and everyone's just doing their best in the fog of pandemic. That's not a very empowering message, it might be true, it actually is quite close to the truth, I believe, of our often failing elite institutions. And for many people, I think it is more empowering and more attractive. to identify a clear nemesis. Maybe it's Fauci, maybe it's Trump, maybe it's someone else in the CDC or the FDA. It's much more empowering to say, "I know this person is the enemy "and everything that goes wrong with COVID policy, "I can blame it on them." When we think about, you know, why is anti-institutional or anti-elite messaging so popular these days, I think it's hard to separate the fact that a lot of people are searching for status, searching for a sense of power and understanding and identity, and here you have the possibility of finding and settling on a message that says, "I know who the good guys and the bad guys are." And once you have that clear division of who is good or who is bad, well, that goes so deeply, I think, to what makes cults so powerful. Here's your in-group, and here is your in-group defined by the out-group, and that kind of out-group animosity not only goes aerodynamic on social media for a variety of reasons, I also think it sits very well with us when we're confused about the world and how it works. - And it's not just the good, bad binary. It's not all that hard to understand the appeal of producing the world to the people who get it, who are awake, and then there are these zombies, who don't get it. And who doesn't wanna be in the it-gitters camp? I mean, certainly I do. - Of course, I could see the appeal of it. And I'm sure that there's lots of ways that my own writing and my own ideology sometimes falls into this sense of us versus them and in-groups versus out-groups. It's very difficult to stay outside of it entirely. To go one level deeper here, I think sometimes about what does it take to be a successful media entrepreneur these days? Like let's say that you and I want to launch some new podcast that explains the world to people. We want it to be really, really popular and really, really powerful. Well, one I think easy blueprint to steal from is to say that what we need to prove is that everyone else is wrong. Like the first thing that a new entrant into the market has to do is to demonstrate why it's necessary to the consumers of that market to have a new entrant in the first place. And the easiest reason is that the marketplace of ideas is broken in some way. And so what I see is a lot of new influencers and a lot of new media companies entering the market with the theory that the media, capital T, capital M is broken. And that tends to be the thesis that they exercise over and over and over again. And it creates this really interesting and somewhat even paradoxical dynamic where lots of people trust a media in order to understand the world. But because every media is telling them to distrust the media, capital T, capital M, everyone distrusts the media while loving their own individual media. It's sort of the berserk example or berserk implication of love your congressman, hate congress. But I think it does create a very bizarre dynamic in terms of trying to understand what's happening in the world when you have so many different news entrants and news entrepreneurs that really are, I think, highly incentivized to sort of incult their audience and tell them that there is a conspiracy against them. - Do you think it's something like crypto as a cult? 'Cause it sure shit feels like one. - That's a great question. So crypto is a cult. You can cut some of my pausing here, but let me think about this. - Yeah, we're not laughing. - So take your time. - Yeah. And well, the way I'm not even saying that crypto is all bullshit or mostly bullshit, frankly, I don't even really understand crypto. So it's not really a commentary on that. It's just simply a question more about the self-understanding of people who are involved in it and the way it is spread and talked about and defended and celebrated. - Yeah. Let me give you two thoughts about crypto, one of which is probably very basic and another, which is maybe a little bit unexpected. I think a lot of enthusiasm for crypto came out of what can be best described as boredom. There was a ton of boredom that I think initially fed the crypto craze of 2019, 2020, 2021. You had all these people in Silicon Valley, and frankly, you had people like me too saying, aren't we somewhat depressed by the state of technological progress? Isn't it a little bit sad that we were promised flying cars and got 140 characters, then 280 characters, and also a lot of ways for optimizing ad revenue from Silicon Valley. And so I think that there was an appetite for a technology that had inscribed in its very DNA, a utopian promise for reforming the world. There's a paper called Why Strict Churches Are Strong. And this is a paper that was published back in March of 1994, but I feel like it might be a kind of skeleton key, a kind of little Rosetta stone for a lot of different phenomena that I see today. So why Strict Churches Are Strong was this professor's way of trying to figure out what he considered a bit of a paradox in religious demographics, which is that overall mainstream Protestantism in the 1990s was declining, and mainstream Catholicism in the 1990s was declining. So these lenient religions were losing members, and ironically it was these stricter religions, the religions that had higher social cost that were growing. So Orthodox Judaism, I believe he said, was growing. Church of Latter-day Stainst, Mormonism was growing, religions that often asked people to either be kosher or to give up things like alcohol or caffeine, they were growing while lenient mainstream religions were declining. And one of his theories was that strictness makes organizations stronger and more attractive because it reduces free writing. And I wonder if there was something about crypto where similarly it was a kind of strict church. There was no way to free ride Bitcoin. You were invested in it. You bought it at 10,000 or 20,000 and you wanted to see it grow up. So in a way I think crypto was a kind of perfect secular strict church because it was a theory about the future, a theory about technological progress that for its hardest believers did somewhat require that you sacrifice a bit of your own savings in order to participate in the church. - Is Taylor Swift the closest thing we have to a mass cult today? - I don't think there's such thing as a mass cult. - Well that's what I'm saying, but the closest thing we have to a mass cult. - I know, I think she's the closest thing we have to Christianity. (laughing) Taylor Swift is not Mormonism. Taylor Swift is Protestantism. Taylor Swift is the mainstream. Caitlin Clark, Taylor Swift, Travis Kelsey, these things that get tens of millions of people behind them and that in many cases don't ask much of us, right? That lots of people are Taylor Swift fans and they enjoy their Taylor Swift fandom by simply paying Spotify whatever it is, $14 a month and then playing the songs over and over again. What's interesting about modern life is that it's very easy to switch between churches, right? There is nothing exclusive about being a Taylor Swift fan. The same way there is something exclusive about being an Orthodox Jew or a Mormon. If I'm an Orthodox Jew or a Mormon, I can't also be a Protestant, a Piscopalian Muslim. But if I'm a Taylor Swift fan, what is stopping me from listening to Billy Eilish? What's stopping me from listening to Coldplay? What's stopping me from listening to Keith Jarrett, Miles Davis, nothing. So in a way, the fact that we have some really strong attachments to some products that seem cultish actually is not cultish at all. It's something else. We shift our allegiances between these products in an almost interchangeable way, even though we seem to be devotees of them when we're embedded in those groups. Maybe in an age of increasing secularization and declining religion, we want to replace God with something at the top of that pedestal. The sort of super abundance of these cults or micro-cultures or whatever you want to call them online really is fascinating to me. I'm not on TikTok. I use YouTube, but it's mostly for videos that show me how to remove the muffler from my motorcycle or change a diaper with one hand or something like that. But it does seem genuinely new to have these super powerful affinity groups in YouTube and TikTok organized around people, almost no one outside of those groups have ever even heard of. I still don't know what the hell Mr. Beast is, but he appears to have like 10 trillion followers and probably half a billion dollars at this point. That is a new thing. I do think it's a new thing, and I also agree that this kind of fragmentation of culture has no rewind button on it. It is only going to go forward, I suppose it's like time itself. I would ask you a question, Ashon. What do you think is the difference between a cult and a fandom? Interesting question. Because as you think about it, I think some of these things that we're talking about are fandoms, a person who loves Taylor Swift and buys Taylor Swift watermugs and Taylor Swift t-shirts and Taylor Swift sweatpants. And these people are not members of the community. of a Taylor Swift cult. They're not going to sacrifice themselves for Taylor Swift. At least the vast majority of them, I suppose, are not. They really, really like her the same way that people really, really like the Beatles. The same way that actually in the 19th century, Lischdomania, not just a great song by Phoenix, I believe it was also a crazy fandom about the piano player and composer Lischt. People were just obsessed with how wonderful he was on the keys and so Lischdomania became a thing in Europe. Dramatic fandoms, I think, are actually rather old and they are old and distinct from what I would think of as cults. When I think about a cult, I think what's very important about the definition of cult that I have in my head is that cults aren't just for something. They are against something. They are small anti-mainstream groups that are arrayed around a set of rules that organize themselves to oppose the mainstream. The reason I think that it makes more sense to think about Tucker Carlson's fandom as being inculted rather than Taylor Swift's is that Taylor Swift is not asking her music listeners to not listen to Olivia Rodrigo. She's just like, here I am, I'm at a concert, pay $1,000 to see it, whereas Tucker Carlson is very dramatically and very explicitly trying to make his followers distrust the mainstream media. That I find interesting and more cult-like than I find a phenomenon like Taylor Swift. Yeah, that's interesting. In some ways, you make that shift from fandom to cult number when your identity or your membership in that group is defined by a negation, when you're defined by what you are not, by what you stand against. That's right. The last that I would add is that I think in terms of the classic definition of cult, is that when you think about cults in terrorism or in the military or the mafia or crime gangs or in religion, there tends to be what a supposed economist would call costly signaling. That is, it costs something to be in that group. I don't think it costs a whole lot to be a Taylor Swift fan, just as it didn't cost a whole lot to be a Beatles fan. But I do think it is costly, for example, to refuse to take a vaccine and harbor an espouse of conspiracy theory about it, especially when people around you think that you're crazy. That seems to be more costly in terms of costly signaling than just being a fan of a popular artist. When we get back from break, has American politics become culty? Stay with us. Support for the gray area comes from Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. The experts at Delete Me do the heavy lifting of wiping personal information from data broker websites for you and your family. This isn't a one-time service. Delete Me sends you regular personalized privacy reports showing the info they found, where they found it, and what they removed. Our colleague Claire White recently tried Delete Me. 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Public figures and private citizens alike. Delete Me can help protect you and your family's personal privacy or the privacy of your business from doxing attacks before sensitive info can be exploited. Delete Me is a tool that anyone online should have in their back pocket. Delete Me has saved me not only hours of removing my data from online but has saved me hours of worrying about who has their hands on my data and what they're doing with it. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to join DeleteMe.com/box and use promo code Vox@Jekka. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joinDeleteMe.com/box and enter code Vox@Jekka. That's joinDeleteMe.com/boxCodeVox. I don't want to overstate this but is American politics just a bunch of cults now? American politics is definitely more powered by negation than it used to be. I think for a lot of voters the power of negative partisanship has made it easier for people to explain what it is there against than to explain what it is that they're for. It's fascinating to me that among say Republicans and among Trump voters, it didn't seem to me like a lot of people that were Trump supporters had a clear theory of how for example he would reduce inflation. They were clearly upset about inflation and they clearly thought that Biden was to blame for it. But when you scrutinize Trump's policies, when you look at the fact that he wants to extend tax cuts, which is somewhat inflationary, and he didn't want to cut spending in lots of places, which is inflationary and he wanted to impose a 10% tariffs on imports, which is inflationary. You add it all up and it actually seems like Trump's economic policy is more inflationary than Biden's, but this never seems to make contact with the discourse about Trump. Part of that I think is the fact that politics today is more about what we oppose than what we stand for. Is there something culty about that? I think maybe. And I think it's possible that as more people get their news from sources that are small pirate-like organizations that are trying to oppose the mainstream rather than define an alternative clearly, that I do think there's a cult-like mentality to that. I like this because I'm grasping for a better word than polarized to capture what's happened. Because it's not like we're sorted into coherent ideological groups. It isn't really about ideas or arguments or policies very often. It is more that people inside these tribes or groups cannot even imagine what people outside their group are thinking or even how they're living because we don't talk to each other, we live in different places. And a lot of our political and social lives are lived virtually. I definitely think it's the case that identity seems more important to politics than it used to be. I remember in my conversation with various sociologists and economists and anthropologists when I was doing my cult research, is that at one point I was asking them what would it mean to you for everything to become become a little bit more cultish. And one of the really interesting observation that we've gotten so damn good at making products with good physical attributes, at making good enough stuff, that the commercial war of the future won't be about value or quality. It'll be about identity. Are you the kind of person who buys this product rather than is this a product that does more for you? When you transpose that to politics, it is at least a little illuminating that idea that the commercial war of the future will be more about identity. Who are you than value? What can this do for you? Because that would seem to describe or predict an election in the near future that is less about policy and more about, let's just say it, vibes. And that is in a way the election that we're headed into. It's kind of astonishing to me how little we're hearing about policy, how little we're hearing about any kind of policy debate, how little even this election seems to be about policy at all. Like when I think about the last 20 years, I feel like there's a policy theme to almost every single election. This election clearly has an identity theme, but I'm not sure it has a policy value theme. - I don't think I'll ever be able to say politics is fully post materialist, but I have been on the vibes bandwagon for a while now. And I corrode a book about the history of media and democracy a couple of years ago. And the main thing we track in that book is this pattern that occurs throughout time. Whenever there's a revolution in communication technology, it is hugely disruptive to society in lots of unpredictable ways. I mean, you were talking about the phone and the telegraph earlier, but the thing about newer technologies like radio and TV, for instance, is that they really helped create something like a mass culture. The public was more or less watching the same movie we call reality. And for all the downsides of that, and there were many, it did have the benefit of grounding society in a shared reality. Do you think of that loss as a genuine cultural and political crisis, or is it possible that it's just another period of technological change, not that different from earlier periods? And we'll figure it out. - I do think that in so many ways, we're just going back to the middle of the 19th century. We're going back to the historical norm, rather than being flung into the exosphere, into some unprecedented state of popular discombobulation. The idea that a shared reality, a shared national reality in real time is even possible, is so historically young. Just one quick aside, I was doing some reporting for the book that I'm writing right now and saw in an Eric Hobbesbomb book called The Age of Revolutions that when the Bastille fell in 1789, a Canton 30 minutes away from Paris didn't realize the French Revolution had happened for a full month. That was the speed at which information used to travel. It was the speed at which a man could ride a horse or walk next to his horse. You need a whiz-bang technology that can somehow transmit it. Something like the speed of light, certainly one would hope the speed of sound, information across vast distances. You only had that with the invention of the telegram and the telephone and then later radio. So I think if you wanna know where we're going, look where we came from. In the 19th century, of course, we had lots of chaos, but we also had an American democracy for decades and decades. So it's not obvious to me that the erosion of the monoculture or the erosion of the news mainstream is an ethema to American democracy, but I do think that it probably shatters the very brief dream of everyone getting together and sitting down on a couch and watching the same Walter Cronkite hour. I mean, that is never coming back and whatever benefits and drawbacks of that world. And there are drawbacks of having the news be controlled by a handful of likelihood white men who probably lived on the coast and therefore had a very pinched view of what was important in the world. There are drawbacks of that world, but we're not getting it back. There's no putting the software juni back in its box. - It may not be incompatible with American democracy as such, but I do think it's probably incompatible with the model of liberal democracy. We've become accustomed to since mid 20th century or so. - Tell me more, yeah, why do you think, you might be totally right. This is one place where the bridge goes too far for me to have a ready made answered. I'm not exactly sure why a more riotously antagonistic and fragmented news ecosystem would be perilous to liberal democracy. It's possible that it would be, but what do you think is the strongest, what's the causal mechanism by which wildly fragmented media leads to a backlash in liberal democracy? - I just think it creates a kind of collective action problem that makes dealing with the sort of problems we deal with in the kind of modern, global interconnected world, like almost insoluble. Did you read that Martin Gurry book, The Revolt of the Public? - I did, yeah. - I thought he had a very useful metaphor, something to the effect of the public for a very long time used to sort of look into the same mirror. And that mirror was basically mass culture, but the internet just shattered that mirror into a billion little pieces. And now there are all these little subgroups staring into their own mirrors. And when that occurs in this sort of digital era where we have all these technologies that are optimized for spectacle and outrage, that just seems like a combustible cocktail and I just don't know how you manage that. - I agree with the idea that we're all looking in the same mirror or all looking into fewer mirrors, but it's not obvious to me that the mirrors we were looking into were reflecting reality. They were reflecting a version of reality that left out a lot. The news of the 20th century did not report on racial justice at anything like the level of quality, that we now expect reports on racial justice to do. The mirrors of the 20th century and news reports of the 20th century did not, I think, uncover all sorts of problems of governance that took years to understand. Didn't report on the environmental degradation of industrial America in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Protests had to fill the void of media that was under representing minorities in urban America. None of this is too accused you personally of overlooking those problems. I'm gonna show you what agree with all of them, but it's to remind all of us that when we feel nostalgia for the media environment of the 1940s and 1950s, we are feeling nostalgia for a news media ecosystem that in many ways was inferior to and even blind to the problems that we know to pay attention to today. And I do think that in many ways, the fragmentation of the media can sometimes create competition that allows us to see behind corners and understand things, root out problems that we didn't see before. I'm a capitalist overall and I think that more competition in most markets is good. I just think it's important to understand, as we do in some markets, that there can be negative externalities and a huge gaping, negative externalities. You've said as Martin Gurry is absolutely intelligently written on as I see, a huge negative externality of abundance in media is that super abundant media creates a scenario where news entrance feel like they have to be antagonistic. They have to be both collective. Here's why you should read me, here's why I should listen to me, and exclusive. Here's why everyone else is a big fat idiot. And a news environment like that is going to create a lot of distrust, is going to create a lot of disharmony, it's going to confuse a lot of people, and it will replace a world with a small number of flawed mirrors with a riotous and huge, unthinkable number of mirrors, some of which are absolute bullshit mirrors and some of which are quite good. I mean, this is why I always hated the phrase post truth, because it implied that before all of this, we were living in truth. Absolutely despised that term. It's complete bullshit. But I do think we lived in a period where there was more trust and authority, in part because of this near monopoly on information at the top. And when that shattered, I think that began this process of erosion in social trust, trust and authority, trust in experts, trust in information. And that makes society less governable, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I think I agree with a lot of that. What I most want to hold down on is the idea that almost all nostalgia for a past golden age is nostalgia for a world that did not exist or a world that we today, if it replaced our reality this moment, we would find inexcusably terrible. And so when we think about it, about being nostalgic for the 1950s, 1960s, just in terms of environmental degradation and racial injustice, if we believe that, and I'm not including you and the we, I'm just saying, why didn't that shared reality lead to a world where we fixed our problems faster? Why didn't a shared reality more expeditiously reveal the injustice of Jim Crow and voting laws before the 1965 act? Why didn't it help us see the terrible things that we were doing to let it gasoline and the air and the water? Why essentially was the world of monocultural news so flawed if monocultural news is so useful for showing the electorate what is important in the world? That's the question that I feel like is never answered when people start waxing nostalgic about the middle of the 20th century. I understand waxing nostalgic for a world where lots of journalists felt comfortable and secure in their jobs. I mean, who wouldn't want to feel that in their industry? But when we start taking the next step and saying the world was easier to govern when there was greater and stronger claim on authority and more trust, well, then my question is, why were there so many problems in this period that we would consider absolutely horrendous today? I think it's a good question. And look, it's entirely possible that we will live in a better and more just world on the other side of this transition. It may just be really fucking bumpy. But hey, look, the Gutenberg Revolution unleashed religious wars across Europe that devoured the continent and they survived. So maybe we can survive TikTok. I think you're probably going to survive TikTok. But it obviously is the case that media technology changes. It changes all the time. It's change is inevitable. It's change is inevitably wrenching, but history moves in one direction. And so rather than pretend that there is a break to pull on this machine, we should try as fast as possible to figure out what these machines are doing to us and doing to our sense of reality and our own identities. That is maybe what scares me the most. I think we're tinkering with our own minds in ways we just don't quite understand. There's a guinea pig quality to all of it. Everything is a mixed bag, I suppose. And it's such a golden age for content and creators, so much content, so many creators. And it's intersected with these technologies that exert so much pull on our minds and attention. It's never been easier to be entertained, but it's also never been harder. It seems to just go outside and do stuff with other people because we're mainlining content all the damn time. And you've written a lot about the loneliness epidemic. Do you see this story about the cultification of life and culture and the superabundance of content bound up with this other story about loneliness and increasing loneliness? I don't think they're the same story. I think they are two distinct tendrils of the internet revolution at a very abstract level. Is it that the internet does to us? One answer to that question is that it makes it easier for groups of like-minded people to form. The internet in many ways, in social media in particular, is a kind of machine for grouping. And it's a machine for grouping in wonderful ways, helping people find each other, helping parents figure out how to deal with sick kids. This is certainly a use of the internet that I'm very familiar with right now. But it's also obviously that same group formation function serves for white nationalist. It serves for polarized politics. It serves for new media entrance. Follow me and I'll tell you the truth. So on the one hand, I think the internet is a very efficient group formation machine. And on the other hand, I think the internet is a very efficient absorbent of our attention. It's here in this second category where I think the internet is turning the 21st century into the anti-social century. In the last 20 years, the average American socializes in person, 35% less than he or she used to. 14-aggers, it's 50% less for unmarried black men, it's about 50% less. It's also the demise of third spaces as people spend more time at home on their couches. It's also the fact that youth sports is in decline. And for a lot of complicated reasons, but one of them is that young people are much more happy than they used to be and much more entertained than they used to be just staying home on their couch. And it is also to fold religion back into it. It has to do with the decline of religion as well. I was really surprised in some of my research to find that in the 20th century, Gallup was asking people every single year, do you go to church or some other house of worship somewhat regularly? And between the years of 1937 and the 1990s, the answer was yes for about 70% of Americans. It since plummeted to less than 50% for the first time in recorded history. In the last 90 years, we have no record of any time when fewer people have gone to houses of worship. And it's a secular reformed Jew. I wouldn't be particularly exercised about that except that this is happening at the same time that young people say they have fewer friends than ever and everyone is hanging out with each other less. Everything is going on here and it's not just the internet, but Golly G is the internet poured gasoline on a very important fire. I think you say in your Atlantic piece about the loneliness problem. The best evidence we have suggests that the quality of our relationships, our connections to other people is one of if not the most important determinants of happiness in life. And many of these trends we've been talking about pull us away from real social connections. That seems to be at least so far the price of the immersive convenience these technologies provide. And the culty nature of so many of these online communities offer the illusion of connection. But as you've written about it, it is often rooted in psychologically unhealthy activities. And beyond that, the depth of those connections are so paper thin in comparison to real world relationships. So I don't see any solution to these challenges that doesn't involve spending less time online and more time in the world with other people. I guess I'm preaching at this point, but whatever. It's my podcast. Yeah, feel free to preach and you're definitely preaching to the choir here. I think it's ironic and again, this belongs in the category of we're still learning what kind of world we've built. Just in a podcast with J. Van Bavill, who's an NYU psychologist who's studied essentially the mechanics of social media, all about how the dark laws of engagement on social media include things like negativity drives engagement, extremism drives engagement, outrage drives engagement, and out group animosity drives engagement. We've built a virtual world that espouses all the opposite virtues of the world that philosophers and psychologists have told us we should want to live in, which is to fight extreme interpretations of reality, to fight negativity, to fight the instinct to divide the world into good versus evil in groups versus out groups, and to see the world as a set of problems that is generally fixable or at least replaceable with a better set of problems. The internet doesn't do this, but we can find those principles and use those principles in the real world. They exist. That was one of the better distalations of the problem I think I've ever heard. Thank you, sir. After one more short break, Derek gives us his best case for feeling optimistic. Stay with us. Honestly, God, like f*ck skinny, I want to be jacked without context, tone and sculpt are rooted in diet culture. We're inheriting a lot of nonsense that makes specifically women feel like they have to shrink in order to expand. And I'm just saying, no, let's just like lift heavy s*ck and like take up space. I'm Reverend Artson and this week on Project Swagger, I break down the strategies that helped me build confidence and feel at home in my body, especially after two babies. Listen now at Project Swagger, wherever you get your podcasts. Support for today's show comes from Hungry Root. With so many things going on in your day, do you really have time to go grocery shopping? Instead, why not check out Hungry Root? Hungry Root basically works like a person in nutrition coach and shopper in one by planning, recommending and shopping everything for you. They take care of the weekly grocery shopping, recommending healthy groceries tailored to your taste, nutrition preferences and health goals. I've actually had a chance to try Hungry Root and it's been great. I've never really been a meal delivery service guy, but I am increasingly not a let's cook dinner ourselves every night guy. So it's really convenient and the food is healthy and Most importantly, it tastes good. I've really enjoyed it. Hungry Root wants to make it simple for you to eat healthier without overthinking it. Take advantage of this exclusive offer. For a limited time, get 40% off your first box, plus get a free item in every box for life. Go to hungryroot.com/grayarea and use code grayarea. That's hungryroot.com/grayarea, code grayarea to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. From Iran to Venezuela to China, what is driving President Trump's foreign policy? Both Russian, China are big losers if there's a transition in the nature of the Iranian government, which again is why I think we have to see this campaign through. I'm Jake Sullivan. And I'm John Finer, and we're the hosts of the long game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, Trump's former national security adviser, a charming master, and deputy national security adviser, Matt Pottenger. Join us. The episode's out now. Search for and follow the long game, wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) All right, Derek, I read your work and I really do think you're one of the smartest in our business. If there was an all media NBA style thing, I would have you. I would have you in my starting five. You could run point. Or maybe you're three in D.Ga. I'm five eight. And not particularly good at shooting. So I'm happy to run point here and pass other people for the jump shots. I'm buttering you up here a little bit because I also think you do as someone who's unsinnical. If that's the word, and that is somewhat distinctive in our business. I'm not unsinnical. I am anti-sinnical. I am against cynicism. I think it's largely pointless. And I do my best to spend most of my time covering issues where I can see the glimmer of hope and the glimmers of solutions. There are lots of problems in the world where I have no idea what the solution is. They do not ask me about the isopalicent conflict. I have no idea where to even begin with offering a solution there. But when it comes to something like the anti-social century, when it comes to something like teenagers and smartphones, when it comes to something like people being diluted by the high-degarian promises of Tucker Carlson and the ominous they-cells of the media, there are solutions to all of this. The solution to being inside is going outside. And many, many people have that faculty. The solution to being on your phone too much is getting off your phone. That is again, something that is entirely in people's control. The solution to not being diluted by the Tucker Carlson's of the world is for people like you and me and most of the people that I know that are optimistic and interested in reality to fight harder every single day to make their interpretations of reality more sticky, entertaining, viral, aerodynamic to grow our audiences and point out what is real in the world. This is why I wake up. This is why I work so hard. So I'm extremely motivated and optimistic about my ability to point out what is true and false in the world. I think the best way to be optimistic about the present and the best way to be optimistic maybe even about the future is to have a sense of history. A 500 years ago, half of human beings died before they turned five. Now it's what, one in 10,000? How can you not be optimistic about the world knowing that? I wouldn't and I bet most other people wouldn't trade being alive today with being alive in almost any other year in human history permanently. Like, would I love to visit 1891? Yeah, I'd be fascinated to see America in the second industry evolution. Do I want to live in a world with that kind of pollution and that kind of disease? Absolutely not. So a lot of my optimism comes from historical perspective that so many things are better today than they used to be. I don't think there's any reasonable way to come away from a true and honest historical understanding of where we came from and not be optimistic about the general trajectory forward across a lot of different verticals not just media and entertainment but also medicine, not just politics but also technology. So, but I also think each challenge for people like you and me is going to be competing in a news environment where cynicism is going to be sticky. Synicism is going to be aerodynamic and we're just going to have to wake up every day and fight like hell. It is regrettably easy to forget that we are in fact living in the absolute best possible time in human history by almost every conceivable metric which makes the fact that people seem to be less and less happy all the more mystifying and troubling. It is. This is one of the reasons why I write so much about anxiety and happiness and especially teenage hopelessness is because of exactly the tension that you pointed to that if you're going to say, "Oh, look at all these things getting better," well, it should frigging flabbergast and fascinate you that young Americans today are more anxious and miserable than they have at least told the CDC they are in any time in the last few decades. Like, we should be fascinated by that. So, I'm interested in these mysteries but I spend the most time with subject areas where I think there's a way out. And here in particular, I do think there's a way out and I think we have to find some way to think about social media the way that we think about alcohol. Alcohol isn't bad. I love whiskey. I love wine. I love social media. I use Twitter all the time. But we have to find some way to think about reasonable moderation and limits on use if we want to be able to live with this thing for decades and not have a driver's to madness. You just put that better than I ever have or probably could. So, thanks for that. Thank you. Is there anything else you want to say or add here before we sail off into the sunset? Let's sail off. Derek, where should people go to follow your work? I host the podcast, Plain English, with the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm a staff writer with the Atlantic. You can find me on Twitter. I'm not going to use its one letter, pseudonym, at DK Thomp, DK-TH-O-M-P. Derek Thompson, everyone. Thanks for doing this button. Thanks, Ben. Alright, Colts, Coltiness, Colt Hood. Are you in one? Am I in one? What do you think? We were kind of ziggin' and zaggin' in this one, but I guess that's just what thinking in real time sounds like. I hope you got something out of this. I enjoyed the hell out of it. As always, tell us what you think. Drop us a line at the Gray Area at Vox.com. I read all those emails, so keep them coming. And rate, review, subscribe, all that. This episode was produced by John Ayrons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays, Listen, and Subscribe. The Gray Area is part of Vox, which doesn't have a paywall. Help us keep Vox free by going to vox.com/give. [BLANK_AUDIO]