2022.05.18 过去10年美国人的生活为何如此愚蠢？

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过去10年美国人的生活为何如此愚蠢？
原创 Jonathan Haidt 利维坦 2022-05-18 20:58 发表于上海
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“Turris Babel”，Coenraet Decker，1679 © Nicolás Ortega
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本文作者乔纳森·海特（Jonathan Haidt）为美国社会心理学家，在道德心理学、商业伦理以及复杂社会系统方面均有深刻的洞见（国内出版过他的《象与骑象人：幸福的假设》和《正义之心：为什么人们总是坚持“我对你错”》）。仔细阅读完今天这篇长文，你会发现一条清晰的叙事线索：本世纪初基于互联网而诞生的社交媒体，是如何一步步依靠技术底层逻辑从分享/共享走向分化/分裂的。

虽然作者的叙事着重于美国意识形态下的互联网媒体社会，但某种意义上，这也是一个全球的普遍现状——互联网正在加剧放大、叠加人们的对立情绪，引发更多的恶意与仇恨，进而增加冗余的沟通成本，影响公权机构的政策制定。



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在巴别塔被毁后，仍生活在里面会是什么样子呢？



据《创世记》（Book of Genesis）记载，诺亚的后裔在示拿地（位于古巴比伦附近，译者注）建造了一座宏伟的城市。他们还建造了一座“通天”塔，为自己“扬名”。上帝被人类的狂妄冒犯，并说道：



看啊，他们属于同一种族，说着同一种语言；这只是他们要做之事的开始；如此下去，没有什么事是他们做不成的。来吧，我们下到人间，去变乱人类的语言，使他们彼此语言不通。


《创世记》中并没有提到上帝摧毁了这座通天塔，但在其许多演绎版本中，祂确实这样做了，所以让我们记住这个戏剧性的画面：人们在废墟中徘徊，无法沟通，注定不能相互理解。



巴别塔的故事是我找到的对2010年代美国所发生的事情以及对我们现在居住的这个支离破碎的国家最好的隐喻。突然间出现了很严重的问题。我们迷失了方向，无法说同样的语言，也无法认识同样的真理。我们切断了与彼此和过去的联系。



很长一段时间以来，人们已经很清楚，红色美国和蓝色美国（党派之间的极端对立，导致出现了深度分裂的红蓝“两个美国”，由共和党州长管理的州属于红色美国，由民主党州长管理的州属于蓝色美国，译者注）正变得像两个不同的国家，虽然都宣称拥有同一块领土，却有着不同版本的宪法、经济情况和历史。



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2008年、2012年、2016年和2020年美国总统选举四届结果统计（红色部分为共和党四次均胜，浅红为共和党胜出三次，紫色为共和党与民主党各赢两次，浅蓝为民主党胜出三次，蓝色为民主党四次均胜）。© wikipedia


但巴别塔不是一个关于部落主义的故事；而是关于一切碎片化的故事。它讲述的是所有看似坚固的事物会支离破碎，曾经一体的人们会四分五裂。它不仅隐喻了红蓝美国之间正在发生的事情，还隐喻了左翼和右翼内部，以及大学、公司、专业协会、博物馆，甚至家庭内部正在发生的事情。



巴别塔是一个隐喻，象征着某些形式的社交媒体对几乎所有于美国未来至关重要的团体和机构——以及对美国这个民族——所做的事情。这一切是如何发生的？又对美国人的生活有着怎样的预示？





现代巴别塔的崛起



历史是有方向的，即朝向更大规模的合作。



我们在生物进化中看到了这种趋势，在一系列的“重大变迁”中，首先出现的是多细胞生物，然后发展出新的共生关系。



我们在文化进化中也看到了这一点，正如罗伯特·赖特（Robert Wright）在其1999年的著作《非零和博弈：人类命运的逻辑》（Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny）中所阐释的那样。



赖特表明，历史历经了各种变迁，在不断上升的人口密度和新技术（文字、道路、印刷术）的推动下，互利贸易和学习有了新的可能性。许多零和冲突——比如依靠印刷术在欧洲各地传播异端邪说而引发的宗教战争——被当作是暂时的挫折，有时甚至是进步不可或缺的一部分。（他认为，这些宗教战争使公民拥有更广泛的知情权，可能使其所处社会过渡到现代民族国家。）比尔·克林顿（Bill Clinton）总统曾赞扬《非零和博弈》对技术持续进步所带来的更具合作精神的未来的乐观描述。

（www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1421398112）





20世纪90年代的早期互联网，包括聊天室、留言板和电子邮件，都是“非零和”理论的例证，2003年左右兴起的第一波社交媒体平台也是如此。Myspace、Friendster和Facebook使人们可以轻松地与朋友和陌生人联系，免费谈论共同的兴趣爱好，其覆盖规模前所未有。到了2008年，Facebook已经成为最大的社交平台，每月用户超过1亿，目前其总用户数量将近30亿。在新世纪的前十年，人们普遍认为社交媒体是民主的福音。



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占领华尔街运动海报。© Wikipedia


2011年可以说是技术民主乐观主义的高潮。这一年以“阿拉伯之春”（阿拉伯世界的一次颜色革命浪潮，导致上百万人死亡，造成数万亿美元的经济损失，译者注）开始，以全球“占领”运动（始于纽约“占领华尔街”的民众抗议活动，抗议浪潮一直持续并迅速蔓延至整个美国、英国、德国、日本、意大利等国家，译者注）结束。



这一年，几乎所有智能手机都能使用谷歌翻译，所以你可以说2011年是人类重建巴别塔的一年。我们比以往任何时候都更近似于“一个民族”，我们有效地克服了语言不通的诅咒。对于技术民主乐观主义者来说，这似乎只是人类能做之事的开始。



2012年2月，马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）准备将Facebook上市，他回顾了那段不同寻常的时期，并提出了自己的计划。他在给投资者的信中写道：“如今，我们的社会又到了一个转折点。”Facebook希望“改变人们传播和消费信息的方式”。通过赋予人们“分享的权利”来帮助他们“再次改变许多核心机构和行业”。



在此后的10年里，扎克伯格完全达成了目标。他确实改变了我们传播和消费信息的方式；确实改变了我们的机构，推动我们越过了转折点。



但结果并不像他预期的那样。





分崩离析



纵观历史，各种文明都依靠共同的血缘、神明和敌人来对抗随发展而逐步分裂的趋势。但是，是什么将美国和印度，或者说，现代英国和法国这样的多元化世俗民主大国凝聚在一起的呢？



社会科学家已经确定了至少三种将成功的民主国家凝聚在一起的主要力量：社会资本（具有高度信任的广泛社会网络）、强大的机构和共享的故事。社交媒体削弱了这三种力量。要了解其过程，我们必须了解社交媒体是如何随时间变化的，尤其是在2009年之后的几年里。



在早期阶段，Myspace和Facebook等平台相对无害。用户可以创建页面，在页面上发布照片、家庭动态，以及他们的朋友和心仪乐队的静态页面链接。如此，早期的社交媒体可以被视为技术改进漫长进程中的又一步——从电话邮政服务到电子邮件和短信——帮助人们实现维持社会关系的永恒目标。



但渐渐地，社交媒体用户变得更愿意与陌生人和企业分享他们的私密生活细节。正如我于2019年与托比亚斯·罗斯-斯托克韦尔（Tobias Rose-Stockwell）在《大西洋月刊》（Atlantic）联合发表的一篇文章所写，他们变得更善于表演和管理个人品牌——这些行为可能会给他人留下深刻印象，但不会像私人电话交谈那样加深友谊。



一旦社交媒体平台将用户训练成花更多时间表演、花更少时间与外界联系的人，它就为始于2009年的重大变革——病毒性互动的加剧创造了条件。





巴别塔不是一个关于部落主义的故事，而是关于一切碎片化的故事。





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© Digital Trends


在2009年之前，Facebook给用户提供了一个简单的时间线——由他们的朋友和各种人际关联生成的内容永无止境，最新的帖子在顶部，最老的帖子在底部。虽然数量巨大，但能准确地反映其他人发布的内容。这种情况从2009年开始发生变化，当时Facebook为用户提供了一种通过点击按钮公开“点赞”帖子的方式。同年，Twitter推出了更强大的功能：“转发”按钮，允许用户公开转载帖子，将其分享给所有的关注者。Facebook很快就效仿了这一功能，推出了“分享”按钮，并于2012年向智能手机用户开放。“点赞”和“分享”按钮迅速成为大多数其他平台的标准功能。



“点赞”按钮可以反映最能“吸引”用户的内容，在收集相关数据后不久，Facebook开发了一套算法，为每个用户推荐其最有可能“点赞”或发生其他互动的内容，当然也包括“分享”。后来的研究表明，触发情绪——尤其是对外部群体的愤怒——的帖子最有可能被分享。

（www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1618923114）


到2013年，社交媒体已经成为一种新游戏，其互动方式与2008年不同。如果你技术娴熟或运气好，你创建的帖子可能会“像病毒一样传播开来”，让你在几天内成为“网络名人”。如果你犯了错误，你可能会发现自己被恶毒的评论淹没。你的帖子因成千上万陌生人的点击而声名鹊起或声名狼藉，而你反过来又为这个游戏贡献了成千上万的点击量。



这个新游戏鼓励了不诚实、暴力的互动：用户不仅受到真实偏好的引导，还受到其他因素的引导，如他们过去的奖惩经验，以及对他人应对新行动的反应的预测。Twitter的一名工程师曾负责开发“转载”按钮，他后来透露，他悔于曾经做出的贡献，因为这使Twitter成为了一个更糟糕的地方。当他看到通过新功能在Twitter上塑造出的键盘侠时，他心想，“我们可能刚刚给一个4岁的孩子递上了一把上了膛的枪。”



作为一名研究情感、道德和政治的社会心理学家，我也看到了这种情况。调整后的平台设计得几乎完美，以展现最具“道德感”、最缺乏反思的自我。人们愤怒的程度令人震惊。



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© Nicolás Ortega


詹姆斯·麦迪逊（James Madison，美国政治家、开国元勋、第四任总统。因在起草和力荐《美国宪法》和《权利法案》中的关键作用被誉为“宪法之父”，编者注）在起草美国宪法时试图保护我们免受这种焦虑的、爆炸性的愤怒蔓延的影响。



宪法的制定者是优秀的社会心理学家。他们知道，民主有一个致命的弱点，因为它依赖于人民的集体判断，而民主社会又受制于“无法无天的激情下的动荡和脆弱”。因此，建立可持续发展的共和国的关键是建立相应的机制，以减缓事态的发展、冷却激情、寻求妥协，并让领导人在一定程度上免受当下狂热的影响，同时仍让他们定期在大选日对人民负责。

（founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0044）


从2009年到2012年，致力于改进病毒性互动的科技公司让我们深陷麦迪逊的噩梦。许多作者引用了他在《联邦党人文集》第十篇（Federalist No. 10）中关于人类与生俱来的“派系斗争”倾向的评论，他指出我们倾向于将自己划分成团队或政党，这些团队或政党“相互敌视”，以至于他们“更倾向于相互争吵和压迫，而非为了共同利益展开合作”。



但那篇文章继续谈论了一个较少被引用但同样重要的观点，即民主容易受到琐事的影响。麦迪逊指出，人们极易产生派系斗争，以至于“在没有重大场合出现的情况下，最无关紧要和虚幻的区别就足以点燃他们不友好的激情，引发最激烈的冲突”。



社交媒体放大并武装了这些无关紧要的区别。现在，我们在Twitter上为众议员亚历山大·奥卡西奥-科特兹（Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez）在纽约大都会艺术博物馆年度慈善舞会（Met Gala）上穿的“收富人税”礼服，以及梅拉尼娅·特朗普（Melania Trump）在9/11纪念活动上穿的礼服（其缝线看起来有点像摩天大楼）引发争论，我们的民主是否更加健康？参议员特德·克鲁兹（Ted Cruz）发布推文批评大鸟（美国电视史上最长久的儿童电视节目《芝麻街》 的主角，译者注）在Twitter上说自己接种了新冠疫苗，你如何看待这一行为？



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© AFP/Getty Images


重要的不仅仅是浪费时间和注意力，还有信任的不断削弱。专制的政体可以通过宣传或利用恐惧来激发它所期望的行为，但民主国家取决于对规则、标准和机构合法性的普遍内化接受。对任何个人或组织盲目且固执的信任都是完全不必要的。



但是，当公民对民选领导人、卫生局、法院、警察、大学和选举的公正性失去信任时，每一个决定都会受到质疑；每一次选举都会变成一场要从对立阵营手中拯救国家的生死斗争。最近的埃德尔曼信任度晴雨表（衡量公民对政府、企业、媒体和非政府组织信任程度的国际指标）显示，稳定、有能力的专政国家位居榜首，而美国、英国、西班牙和韩国等充满争吵的民主国家几乎垫底（尽管其排名高于俄罗斯）。

（www.edelman.com/trust/2022-trust-barometer）


最近的学术研究表明，社交媒体确实会腐蚀人们对政府、新闻媒体以及一般人和机构的信任。由社会学家菲利普·洛伦兹-斯普林（Philipp Lorenz-Spreen）和丽莎·奥斯瓦尔德（Lisa Oswald）主导的一份研究报告给出了对这项研究最全面的汇报，其结论是：“数字媒体的使用和信任之间的大部分关联似乎对民主不利。”



文献很复杂——一些研究也显示了其益处，特别是在欠发达的民主国家——但报告发现，总的来说，社交媒体放大了政治两极化；煽动民粹主义，特别是右翼民粹主义；并且要为错误信息的传播负责。

（osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/p3z9v/）


当人们对机构失去信任时，他们也会对这些机构讲述的故事失去信任。对于负责儿童教育的机构来说尤其如此。历史课程经常引起政治争议，但Facebook和Twitter让家长们可能每天都因孩子历史课、数学课和文选课上的微小新变动，以及全国各地任何教学上的新变化而感到愤怒。教师和行政人员的动机受到质疑，过犹不及的法律或课程改革有时会随之而来，这使教育变得愚钝，并进一步降低人们对教育的信任度。



其结果是，在后巴别塔时代受教育的年轻人，对于作为一个民族来说我们是谁这样的问题，不太可能形成一个连贯的认知，也不太可能与那些在不同学校上学或在不同年代受教育的人分享这种认知。



前中情局分析员马丁·古里（Martin Gurri）在其2014年出版的《公众的反叛》（The Revolt of the Public）一书中预测了这些分裂效应。古里的分析从20世纪90年代的互联网开始，侧重于信息的指数级增长对权威的颠覆性影响。



近十年前，古里已经将社交媒体的力量视为一种万能溶剂，在其所及之处打破联系并削弱机构功能。他指出，分布式网络“可以抗议和推翻某些事物，但永远无法取而代之并进行统治”。他描述了2011年许多网上抗议运动的虚无主义，比如“占领华尔街”等运动要求摧毁现有机构，但却没有提供一个可替代的未来愿景或一个可以实现未来愿景的组织。



古里不喜欢上层集团或中央集权，但他注意到前数字时代的一个建设性特征：所有单一的“大众受众”都在消费相同的内容，就像他们都对着同一面巨大的镜子，从镜中看到了社会的映像。在对Vox的评论中，他回顾了后巴别塔时代的第一批侨民，他说：



数字革命打破了这面镜子，现在公众居住在这些玻璃碎片中。因此，公众不再是一个整体；而是高度分散且基本相互敌对的群体。多数人都在互相谩骂，生活在这样或那样的泡沫中。


扎克伯格可能并不希望这样。但是，对改变急于求成的寻求——包括对人类心理认知粗浅，对机构的复杂性知之甚少，对强加给社会的外部成本漠不关心——导致Facebook、Twitter、YouTube和其他大型平台在不知不觉中瓦解了信任、消融了公众对机构的信心，粉碎了将一个庞大而多样的世俗民主国家凝聚在一起的共享故事。



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掌握了社交媒体新互动方式的特朗普通过推特等一些列社交平台表达他的立场和观点。© BBC


我认为巴别塔的坍塌可以追溯到2011年（这年爆发的 “虚无主义”抗议活动受到了古里的关注）至2015年【其标志是左翼的“伟大觉醒”和右翼唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）的上台】之间。特朗普没有摧毁这座塔，他只是利用了它的坍塌。他是第一个掌握后巴别塔时代新互动方式的政治家，在这个时代，愤怒是病毒性互动的关键，舞台表演比能力重要，Twitter胜于全国所有报纸，而故事不能在几个相邻碎片间共享（或至少被信任），因此真相无法得到普遍认可。



包括我在内的许多分析师都认为特朗普无法赢得大选，他们依靠的是前巴别塔时期的直觉，认为诸如《走进好莱坞》（Access Hollywood）录音带（特朗普在其中吹嘘自己实施了性侵犯）这样的丑闻对总统竞选是致命的。



但在巴别塔倒塌后，没有什么东西真正有意义了——至少不是以一种持久且人们普遍认同的方式。





巴别塔倒塌后的政治



德国政治家奥托·冯·俾斯麦（Otto von Bismarck）在1867年说：“政治是可能性的艺术。”在后巴别塔的民主国家中，可能性的事情不多。



当然，美国的文化战争和跨党派合作的衰落早于社交媒体的兴起。国会的两极分化程度于20世纪中叶走入低谷，于七八十年代开始恢复到历史水平。两党之间的意识形态差距于20世纪90年代开始加速扩大。福克斯新闻和1994年的“共和党革命”使共和党变成了一个更具战斗性的政党。例如，众议院议长纽特·金里奇（Newt Gingrich）劝阻新的共和党国会议员搬到华盛顿特区，因为在那里他们可能会与民主党人及其家人建立社会联系。



因此，两党间的关系在2009年之前就已经很紧张了。但此后，社交媒体的病毒性互动增强，使人们看到与敌人交好，甚至没有尽全力攻击敌人的做法变得更加危险。在右翼党派中，RINO（名义上的共和党人）一词于2015年被更轻蔑的术语cuckservative所取代，该术语被特朗普的支持者在Twitter上广为传播。在左翼党派中，社交媒体于2012年之后的几年里掀起了控诉文化的浪潮，这令大学生活及后来整个英语世界的政治和文化发生了变革。



2010年代发生了什么变化？让我们重温一下Twitter工程师的比喻：将一把上了膛的枪递给了一个4岁的孩子。一篇刻薄的推文不会杀死任何人；它只是试图公开羞辱或惩罚某人，同时宣扬自己的美德、才华或对群体的忠诚。



与其说它是子弹，不如说是飞镖，会引起疼痛，但不会造成死亡。即便如此，从2009年到2012年，Facebook和Twitter在全球范围内大约投掷了10亿支飞镖枪。从那以后，我们一直在互相射击。



社交媒体让一些以前没有什么话语权的人有了话语权，也迫使有权势的人对他们的错误行为负责，这不仅表现在政治领域，还见于商业、艺术、学术等领域。在Twitter出现之前，性骚扰者可能会在匿名的博客帖子中被控诉，但如果没有主要平台提供的病毒性互动方式，很难想象#MeToo运动（美国反性骚扰运动，译者注）会如此成功。然而，社交媒体扭曲的“问责制”也从三个方面带来了不公正和政治失灵。



图片
© Nicolás Ortega


首先，社交媒体的飞镖属性赋予了挑衅者和煽动者更多力量，却让善良的公民沉默。政治学家亚历山大·博尔（Alexander Bor）和迈克尔·邦·彼得森（Michael Bang Petersen）的研究发现，社交媒体平台上的一小部分人极度在意地位的获得，并愿意用挑衅的方式来达到这一目的。他们承认经常在网络讨论中咒骂、取笑对手，并因此被其他用户拉黑，或因发表不当评论而被举报。

（psyarxiv.com/hwb83/）


博尔和彼得森进行了八项研究，研究显示，网络并没有使大多数人变得更有攻击性或敌意；更准确地说，它使少数具有攻击性的人有机会攻击更多的受害者。他们发现，即使是一小部分混蛋也能在讨论区中占据主导地位，因为正常人很容易被在线政治讨论拒之门外。其他研究发现，女性和黑人被骚扰的比例过高，所以数字公共广场不太乐意接纳他们的声音。



其次，社交媒体的飞镖属性赋予了政治极端分子更多的力量和话语权，而多数温和派的力量和声音却被削弱了。More in Common是一个支持民主的团体，该团体进行了“隐藏群体”研究，在2017年和2018年测试了8000名美国人，并确定了七个有共同信仰和行为的群体。最右翼的群体被称为“忠实保守派”，占美国总人口的6%。最左翼的群体叫“激进改革派”，占总人口的8%。迄今为止，激进改革派是社交媒体上最多产的群体：70%的成员在过去一年中分享过政治内容。紧随其后的是忠实保守派，比例达56%。

（hiddentribes.us/media/qfpekz4g/hidden_tribes_report.pdf）


这两个极端群体惊人地相似。他们是七个群体中白种人和富人占比最高的，这表明美国正被两个精英阶层间的斗争撕裂，而这两个阶层无法代表整个社会。更重要的是，他们是在道德和政治态度上表现出最大同质性的两个群体。



该研究的作者推测，这种观点的一致性很可能是社交媒体思想监控的结果：“那些对对立群体观点表示理解的人可能会遭受同伴的强烈抵制。”换句话说，政治极端分子不止向敌人投掷飞镖；他们还把大量的飞镖瞄准了自己群体中的异见者或想法有细微出入的思想家。这样一来，社交媒体使基于妥协的政治体系逐渐瘫痪。



最后，社交媒体给了每个人一支飞镖枪，在没有正当程序的情况下，授权每个人行使审判职能。像Twitter这样的平台沦为了“西部荒野”，没有治安人员履行职责。一次成功的抨击会收获大量点赞，并引发后续的攻击。因此，强化的病毒性互动平台促使人们大规模集体惩罚微小或假想的违法行为，并影响了现实世界，例如无辜者失去工作并羞愧自杀。当公共广场被不受正当程序约束的暴力互动支配时，公正和包容就荡然无存了；我们的社会也会无视背景、均衡、仁慈和真相。





结构性愚昧



自巴别塔倒塌以来，各种各样的争论变得越来越混乱。好好思考的最大障碍是确认偏误（Confirmation bias），即人类倾向于只搜寻符合我们偏好信念的证据。甚至在社交媒体出现之前，搜索引擎就已经增强了确认偏误，使人们更容易为荒谬的信念和阴谋论找到证据，例如地球是平的，美国政府策划了9/11袭击。但社交媒体让事情变得更糟。

（core.ac.uk/download/pdf/301367349.pdf）


治疗确认偏误最可靠的方法是与那些不认同你信仰的人互动。他们会用反证和抗辩来驳斥你。约翰·斯图尔特·密尔（John Stuart Mill）说：“只了解己方观点的人，其实知之甚少。”他敦促我们“从真正相信自己的人那里”寻找冲突的见解。那些想法不同，并且在与你意见相左时愿意直言不讳的人让你变得更聪明，就好像他们是你大脑的延伸。试图压制或恐吓反对者的人会让自己变得更愚蠢，就好像他们在向自己的大脑投掷飞镖。





美国在20世纪建立了人类历史上最有能力的知识生产机构。在过去的十年里，他们变得更加愚蠢。







乔纳森·劳赫（Jonathan Rauch）在其著作《知识的构成》（The Constitution of Knowledge）中描述了西方社会取得的历史性突破：开发了“认识论操作系统”——即一系列从有偏见和认知敬畏的个人的互动中产生知识的机构。



英国法律发展出了对抗机制，以便有偏见的辩护律师可以向公正的陪审团陈述案件的两面性。充满谎言的报社演变成了专业的新闻企业，其行业标准是要求寻找故事的多个侧面，然后进行编辑校阅和事实核查。大学从封闭的中世纪机构演变为研究中心，并创立了一个体系——学者们要提出有证据支持的主张，并意识到世界各地的其他学者会通过反证来获得声望。



美国在20世纪变得强大的部分原因在于它建立了人类历史上最有能力、最具活力和最有成效的知识生产机构网络，将世界上最好的大学、把科学进步转化为改变生活的消费产品的私营公司，以及支持科学研究并领导人类登月的政府机构连接在一起。



但劳赫指出，这种安排“不是自我维持的；它依赖于一系列有时很脆弱的社会环境和理解，以及需要被理解、肯定和保护的人”。那么，若一个机构的人民在意识形态上趋同或害怕异见，导致该机构没有得到很好的维护且内部分歧消失时，会发生什么呢？



我认为，这就是2010年代中后期美国许多重要机构面临的状况。因为社交媒体逐步向成员们灌输被抨击带来的长久恐惧，他们都变得更加愚蠢了。这种转变在大学、学术协会、创意产业和各级政治组织（国家、州和地方）中最为明显，转变遍布各处，以至于似乎一夜之间就建立了由新政策支持的新的行为规范。



强化的、具有病毒性互动的新社交媒体无所不在，这意味着教授、领导或记者说的任何一句话，即使出发点是积极的，也可能引发社交媒体风暴，从而被机构立即除名或经历一场由机构主导的旷日持久的调查。主要机构的参与者都开始进行病态的自我审查，不对他们认为缺乏依据或错误的政策和观点——甚至是学生们在课堂上提出的观点——进行任何批判。



但是，当机构开始惩罚内部异见时，就等同于向自己的大脑射出了飞镖。



右翼和左翼以不同的方式推进这个骇人的过程，因为他们的激进分子认同的叙事体系不尽相同，且有着不同的神圣价值观。“隐藏群体”研究显示，“忠实保守派”在与独裁主义有关的信仰方面得分最高。他们有一个共同的叙事，即美国永远处于外部敌人和内部颠覆者的威胁之下；他们将生活视为爱国者和叛徒之间的斗争。政治学家凯伦·斯滕纳（Karen Stenner）的研究表明，他们在心理上不同于人口数量更大的“传统保守派”（占美国总人口的19%），后者强调秩序、礼节和缓慢而非激进的变革。



只有在忠实保守派的叙事背景下，特朗普的演讲才有意义，无论是他竞选时对墨西哥“强奸犯”的谩骂开场白，还是他在2021年1月6日的警告：“如果不拼命战斗，国家将不复存在。”



对叛国罪的惩罚历来都是死刑，因此1月6日的战斗口号是：“绞死迈克·彭斯（Mike Pence）”。事实证明，右翼的死亡威胁（许多是由匿名账户发出的）在恐吓传统保守派方面非常有效，例如，驱逐未能“阻止偷窃”的地方选举官员。



对持不同意见的共和党国会议员的威胁浪潮同样迫使许多现存的温和派退出或保持沉默，如此，只剩下一个更加脱离保守主义传统、宪法责任和现实的政党。如今的共和党把对美国国会大厦的暴力袭击说成是“合法的政治诉求”，并得到一系列右翼智囊团和媒体组织的支持——或者至少没有遭到反对。



右翼的愚蠢最为明显地体现在许多阴谋论中，这些阴谋论在右翼媒体上传播，现在还传进了国会。“披萨门”（2016年美国大选前的一场阴谋论，一则毫无根据和佐证的说法在互联网上传播，声称希拉里及民主党精英在华盛顿一家披萨店经营儿童性交易，译者注）、匿名者Q（各种阴谋论的集合，其核心阴谋论是美国的表面政府内部存在一个“深层政府”，由犹太金融家、资本巨鳄、好莱坞精英等构成的集团把持，只有特朗普才能与“深层政府”战斗，拯救美国，译者注）、确信疫苗中含有微芯片、坚信特朗普会连任——如果没有Facebook和Twitter，这些想法或信仰体系很难达到如此可怕的水平。



图片
Vanity，Nicolas Régnier，约1626年。© Nicolás Ortega


尽管方式不同，但民主党也受到了结构性愚蠢的沉重打击。在民主党内，激进派和温和派之间的斗争是公开且持久的，结果往往是温和派获胜。但问题是，左翼控制着文化的制高点：大学、新闻机构、好莱坞、艺术博物馆、广告、硅谷的大部分地区，以及主导K-12教育（美国基础教育的统称，K代表学前教育，12代表初、中、高等教育的12个年级，译者注）的教师工会和教学学院。在许多这样的机构中，异见被扼杀了：2010年代初，每个人手中都握着飞镖枪，许多左倾机构开始向自己的大脑射击。而不幸的是，他们的大脑正是为全美国大多数人提供信息、指导和娱乐的大脑。



20世纪末的自由主义者有一个共同的信念，社会学家克里斯蒂安·史密斯（Christian Smith）称之为“自由主义进步”叙事，即美国曾经是极度不公正且充满压迫的，在活跃分子和英雄们的斗争下，才在实现建国时的崇高承诺方面取得了（并将继续取得）进步。



这个故事极易成为自由爱国主义的支撑，也是巴拉克·奥巴马（Barack Obama）总统任期内的生动叙事。这也是“隐藏群体”研究中“传统自由派”（占美国总人口的11%）的观点，他们具有强烈的人道主义价值观，年龄大于平均水平，主要是领导美国文化和知识机构的人。



但是，当新的病毒性互动社交媒体平台赋予了每个人一把飞镖枪的时候，年轻的激进改革派射得飞镖最多，他们将大量飞镖瞄准了年长的自由派领导人。出于困惑和恐惧，自由派领导人很少挑战激进派或他们的非自由主义叙事，即每个机构的生活都是身份群体之间永恒的零和博弈，上层的人通过压迫底层来达到目的。这种新的叙事是僵化的平等主义——只注重结果的平等，而不是权利或机会的平等。它不关心个人权利。



对不赞同这种叙事的人，最常见的指控不是“叛徒”，而是“种族主义者”、“变性人”、“卡伦”（Karen，指代歧视有色人种的白人妇女，译者注），或一些相关的红字（旧时被判通奸者佩带的标记，尤用于美国清教徒间，译者注），将犯罪者标记为仇恨或伤害边缘群体的人。对这种罪行的正确惩罚方式不是处以死刑，而是公开羞辱，令其社死。



当一个左翼人士仅对质疑或反驳激进改革派所秉持的信仰进行研究时，你能最清楚地看到这种骇人过程。在Twitter上有人会想办法把异见者与种族主义联系起来，其他人就会跟风扎推。例如，在乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）遇害后第一周的抗议活动（涉及暴力）中，当时受雇于Civis Analytics（美国的一家大数据公司，译者注）的激进政策分析家师大卫·肖尔（David Shor）在Twitter上发布了一个研究链接，链接显示，20世纪60年代的暴力抗议活动曾导致民主党在附近县市的选举受挫。肖尔显然是想提供帮助，但在随后掀起的愤怒狂潮中，他被指控“反黑人”，并很快被解雇。（Civis Analytics否认是这条推文导致了肖尔的悲剧。）



肖尔案一举成名，不过每一个用Twitter的人都早已见过数十起类似的案例，这些案例传达了一个基本的教训：不要质疑己方的信仰、政策或行动。而当传统自由派沉默不语时（就像2020年夏天那样），激进改革派更极端的叙事就会取而代之，成为一个组织占据统治地位的叙事。



这就是为什么许多认知机构似乎在2020年和2021年迅速“觉醒”，从《纽约时报》（The New York Times）和其他报纸的争议和辞职浪潮开始，一直到医生团体和医学协会的社会正义宣言（例如，美国医学协会和美国医学院协会的一份出版刊物，建议专业医疗人士将邻里和社区称为“被压迫的”或“被系统性剥夺的”，而不是“弱势的”或“贫困的”），以及纽约市最昂贵的私立学校匆忙进行的课程改革。

（www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/busin ... -post-protests.html）


可悲的是，左翼和右翼在对抗新冠病毒时都运用了这种骇人的手段。右翼一直致力于将新冠病毒的感染风险降到最低，所以他们把新冠病毒列为了共和党人致死率最高的疾病。激进的左翼致力于最大限度地宣扬新冠病毒的危险性，所以他们在疫苗、口罩和社交距离方面采取了同样最大化、同一化的策略——即使会影响儿童。



这些政策并不像四散的有关疫苗的谣言和由此引发的恐慌那样致命，但其中许多政策对儿童的心理健康和教育造成了毁灭性的影响，孩子们急需上学，需要与同龄人玩耍；几乎没有确凿的证据表明关闭学校和强迫孩子戴口罩可以减少新冠病毒造成的死亡。最值得注意的是，在我讲述的事件中，那些反对关闭学校的激进家长在社交媒体上经常被猛烈抨击，并遭到无处不在的左翼对种族主义和白人至上主义的指责。蓝色美国的其他人都学会了闭嘴。

（nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-masking-kids-at-school-remains-uncertain.html）


美国政治变得越来越荒谬，越来越异常，这不是因为美国人变蠢了，这是个结构性问题。由于病毒性互动社交媒体的发展壮大，许多机构中的异见者都会受到惩罚，这意味着鬼点子也会应用于官方政策。





情况会变得更加糟糕



在2018年的一次采访中，特朗普的前顾问史蒂夫·班农（Steve Bannon）说，对付媒体的方法是“满口胡话”。他所说的是俄罗斯虚假信息项目开创的“谎言灌喷”战术（像消防水管一样对民众进行大量、密集的谎言喷射，译者注），目的是让美国人感到困惑、迷惘和愤怒。但当时（2018年）谎言的数量是有上限的，因为所有谎言都需由人制造（机器人程序生成的劣质东西不算在内）。

（www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html）


然而如今，人工智能几乎能使高度逼真的虚假信息得以无限传播。人工智能程序GPT-3已经非常成熟，只要给它一个主题和基调，它就能生成数不清的连贯且无语法错误的文章。一两年后，当该程序升级到GPT-4时，其性能又会大大增强。斯坦福互联网天文台的调研经理勒内·迪雷斯塔（Renée DiResta）在2020年发表的文章《虚假信息很快将实现无限量》（The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite）中表明，传播虚假信息——无论是通过文本、图像还是深度伪造的视频——将很快变得极其容易。（这篇文章是她与人工智能程序GPT-3合著的。）

（www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv ... r-generated/616400/）


图片
© John Phillips/Life Magazine via Getty / Arsh Raziuddin


美国派系不会是唯一使用人工智能和社交媒体来进行攻击的人；我们的对手也会。在2018年发表的一篇题为《数字马其诺防线》（The Digital Maginot Line）的文章中，迪雷斯塔直言不讳地描述了这种状况。她写道：“我们陷入了一场不断演化发展的冲突：一场信息世界战争，在此战争中，国家行为体、恐怖分子和意识形态极端分子利用支撑日常生活的社会基础设施来挑拨离间、侵蚀共同的现实。”苏联曾经不得不派遣特工或培养愿意听其命令的美国人。但社交媒体使俄罗斯的互联网研究机构能够轻易地以低廉的成本捏造虚假事件或歪曲事实（通常关乎种族问题），以煽动左翼和右翼的愤怒。后来的研究显示，2013年Twitter首先掀起了一场密集运动，但运动很快就蔓延到了Facebook、Instagram和YouTube等平台。其主要目标之一是分化美国公众、全面深化不信任——在麦迪逊已经明确的薄弱环节上实现分裂。

（www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/28/the-digital-maginot-line/）
（digitalcommons.unl.edu/senatedocs/1/）




如果不尽快进行大改革，那我们的机构、政治制度和整个社会可能都会崩溃。







20世纪，美国享有带领世界为民主安全而战斗的身份认同，这是一股强大的力量，有助于将文化和政体联结在一起。21世纪，美国的科技公司又改变了世界，创造了一些新兴产物，这些产物现在看来破坏了民主，阻碍了共识，摧毁了现代巴别塔。





巴别塔倒塌后的民主



我们永远无法回到前数字时代。在技术使一切都变得更快、更多向，而绕过专业把关人又是如此容易的情况下，漫长的大众传播时代发展起来的规范、机构和政治参与形式已不再有效。然而，美国的民主现在已超出了可持续发展的范围。如果不尽快进行大改革，那我们的机构、政治制度和整个社会可能都会在下一次大战、流行病、金融风暴或宪政危机中崩溃。



我们需要哪些改革？为数字时代重建民主体制远远超出了我的能力，但我可以提出三种改革——如果要在后巴别塔时代保持民主的活力，就必须实现以下三个目标。我们必须强化民主机构，使其能够承受长期的愤怒和不信任；改革社交媒体，削弱其社会腐蚀性；并为下一代在新时代成为民主公民做好准备。



强化民主机构



在可预见的未来，政治两极化可能会加剧。因此，无论我们做什么，都必须对核心机构进行改革，如此一来，即使未来的愤怒、误导和暴力程度远超现今水平，它们仍能继续发挥作用。



例如，立法部门旨在达成妥协，但国会、社交媒体和党派有线电视新闻频道的共同发展，使得任何越线的立法者都可能在几小时内直面己方党内极端分子的愤怒，这会令其难以筹款，且在下一个选举周期未通过初选的风险也会增加。



改革应削弱愤怒的极端分子的巨大影响力，让立法者对所属地区的普通选民做出更积极的回应。这类改革的一个例证是停止封闭的党内初选，代之以单一的、无党派的、公开的初选，初选中排名靠前的几位候选人进入大选，大选采用排序复选制投票制。这种投票制度已经在阿拉斯加州施行，这似乎给了参议员丽莎·穆尔科斯基（Lisa Murkowski）更大的自由度以反对前总统特朗普，因为在封闭的共和党初选中，特朗普青睐的候选人会对穆尔科斯基构成威胁，但在公开初选中却不会。



强化民主机构的第二个方法是，通过诸如划定首选选区或选择监督选举官员等方式来削弱任何一个政党利用相关体系制度获利的权力。这些工作都应该以无党派的方式进行。关于程序正义的研究表明，若人们认为过程是公平的，则更可能接受违背其利益之决策的合法性。2016年大选前9个月，参议院的共和党领导层拒绝让梅里克·加兰（Merrick Garland）担任美国最高法院大法官的职位，然后在2020年匆忙通过了艾米·科尼·巴雷特（Amy Coney Barrett）的任命，这已经对最高法院的合法性造成了损害。一项广受讨论的改革将结束这种政治博弈，将大法官的任期改为18年交错任期，这样每位总统每两年就有机会提名一位大法官。



改革社交媒体



如果一个民主国家的公民害怕在公共广场发声，亦不能通过公共广场达成稳定共识，那该民主国家就无法幸存。社交媒体对极左翼、极右翼、国内暴徒和外国特工的授权正在创造一个看起来更不民主，更像由最激进的人统治的体制。



图片
The Arch Heretics，古斯塔夫·多雷，约1861年。© Nicolás Ortega


但我们可以削弱社交媒体瓦解信任和煽动结构性愚蠢行为的能力。改革应该限制社交媒体平台对激进边缘群体的放大作用，同时给予被More in Common称为“筋疲力尽的大多数”普通人更多话语权。



那些反对监管社交媒体的人通常担忧的是，政府规定的内容限制在实践中会演变成审查，这一担忧合情合理。但社交媒体的主要问题不是有人发布虚假或有害内容；而是那些虚假和引起愤怒的内容，其覆盖范围和影响力与2009年以前相比，简直前所未有。Facebook吹哨人弗朗西斯·豪根（Frances Haugen）主张对平台的架构进行简单的改变，而不是大费周章地对所有内容进行徒劳无益的监管。例如，她建议修改Facebook的“分享”功能，对于任何已被分享过两次的内容，如果有第三个人想分享，他/她必须花时间将内容复制并粘贴到一个新的帖子中。这样的改革不是审查；是观点中立、内容中立的，适用于所有语言。这类改革不会阻止任何人发声；它们只是减缓了那些就平均水平而言不太真实的内容的传播。



也许，能减少现有平台病毒性互动的最大改变是用户验证，这是获取社交媒体提供的算法放大的前提条件。



银行和其他行业有“了解客户”的规定，因此他们不能与通过非法企业洗钱的匿名客户做生意。大型社交媒体平台也应该这样做。这并不意味着用户必须用真实姓名发帖；他们仍然可以使用化名。这只是意味着，在一个平台向数百万人传播你的言论之前，它有义务核实（也许通过第三方或非营利组织）你是一个真实的人，生活在某个国家，达到了可以使用该平台的年龄。目前有亿万机器人程序和虚假账户在污染主要的社交媒体平台，其中的大部分都将被这一变化清除。它还能普遍降低死亡威胁、强奸威胁、种族主义恶行和恶意挑衅的频率。研究表明，当人们觉得自己的身份不为人知、无法追踪时，更容易在网络上实施反社会行为。



无论如何，越来越多的证据表明社交媒体正在破坏民主，这足以让联邦通信委员会或联邦贸易委员会等监管机构加强监督。首要任务之一应该是要求平台与学术研究人员共享其数据和算法。



为下一代做好准备



Z世代成员——1997年以后出生的人——对我们所处的困境不承担任何责任，但他们将继承这一困境，而初步迹象表明，老一辈的人会阻止他们学习如何处理它。



近几代人的童年受到了更为严格的限制——自由、随意玩耍的机会变少了；无人监督的户外活动时间减少了；上网时间增加了。暂且抛开这些变化的其他影响，对于许多年轻人来说，这些变化可能阻碍了他们有效自我管理能力的发展。无监督的自由玩耍是大自然教导幼年哺乳动物掌握成人所需技能的方式，对人类来说，这包括合作、制定和执行规则、妥协、调解冲突和接受失败的能力。

（www.psychologytoday.com/files/at ... -play-published.pdf）


经济学家史蒂芬·霍维茨（Steven Horwitz）在2015年发表的一篇文章中指出，自由玩耍让孩子们为“结社艺术”做好了准备，而亚历克西斯·德·托克维尔（Alexis de Tocqueville）认为结社是美国民主活力的关键；他还认为，结社艺术的衰退“对自由社会构成了严重威胁”。霍维茨警告说，没有学过这些社交技能的一代人会习惯性地求助于当局来解决争端，他们将遭受“粗鲁的社交互动”，并因此“创造一个充斥着更多冲突和暴力的世界”。

（cosmosandtaxis.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/horwitz.pdf）


虽然社交媒体已经侵蚀了整个社会的结社艺术，但它可能正在青少年身上留下最深刻、最持久的印记。2010年代初，美国青少年的焦虑、抑郁和自残率突然飙升。（加拿大和英国的青少年也有同样的倾向。）原因不得而知，但从时间上看，社交媒体是一个重要因素——就在大多数美国青少年成为主要平台的日常用户时，这种飙升开始了。相关性和实验性研究证实了社交媒体与抑郁症和焦虑症的关联，年轻人自己的记述、Facebook的相关研究，以及《华尔街日报》（The Wall Street Journal）的报道，也都印证了这一点。

（www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv ... -teen-girls/620767/）
（docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-olnkPyWcgF5BiAtBEy0/edit#heading=h.uj5mgiudhp60）


抑郁症使人们不太想结交新朋友、接触新想法、体验新经历。焦虑症使新事物看起来更具威胁性。随着这些情况的增加，以及自由玩耍（可以通过自由玩耍学习细微的社会行为）的耽搁，许多年轻人对不同观点的容忍度和解决争端的能力都在降低。例如，在Z世代开始升入大学后，原本能够接纳各种演讲者（直到2010年都是如此）的大学在随后几年里开始失去这种能力。拒绝邀请客座演讲者的尝试在增多。学生们不仅反对邀请客座演讲者；有些人甚至认为这些演讲是危险的、具有情感毁灭性的暴力形式。由于青少年抑郁症和焦虑症的发病率在2020年代持续上升，我们可以预期这些观点会在以后几代人中继续存在，甚至变本加厉。

（www.thefire.org/research/disinvitation-database/）
（www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/ ... health-advisory.pdf）


为了减少社交媒体对儿童的破坏性影响，我们能做的最重要的改变是提高年龄准入门槛，要求他们度过青春期后再开始使用社交媒体。国会应该更新《儿童在线隐私保护法》，该法案早在1998年就将所谓的互联网成年年龄（各类公司可以不经父母同意收集儿童个人信息的年龄）定为13岁，但几乎没有规定确保其有效执行，此举非常不明智。该年龄应至少提高到16岁，且公司应严格执行这一法规。



一般来说，为了让下一代为后巴别塔时代的民主做好准备，也许我们能做的最重要的事情是让他们出去玩。不要再让孩子们失去成为好公民最需要的体验：在成人尽可能不监督的情况下，与各个年龄段的小孩自由玩耍。每个州都应该效仿犹他州、俄克拉荷马州和德克萨斯州的做法，通过“野放教养”法案——如果发现八九岁的孩子独自在公园玩耍，其父母不会因疏忽而受到调查。有了这样的法案，学校、教育工作者和公共卫生机构应该鼓励父母让孩子们步行上学，在户外集体玩耍，就像以前的孩子们那样。





巴别塔倒塌后的希望



前文所述希望渺茫，几乎没有证据表明美国会在未来五到十年内慢慢恢复正常和稳定。哪一方会愿意和解呢？国会实施重大改革以强化民主机构或为社交媒体解毒的可能性有多大？



然而，当我们不再关注功能失调的联邦政府，切断与社交媒体的联系，与邻居直接交谈时，事情似乎更有希望。More in Common报告中的大部分美国人都属于“精疲力竭的大多数”，他们厌倦了争斗，愿意倾听对方意见并做出妥协。如今，大多数美国人看到了社交媒体对国家产生的负面影响，并且越来越意识到它对儿童的破坏性影响。



我们能做些什么吗？



托克维尔曾于19世纪30年代访问美国，当时他对美国人的惯常行为印象深刻，即成立志愿者协会以解决当地的问题，而不是像欧洲人那样等待国王或贵族采取行动。这种习惯至今仍在。近年来，美国成立了数百个团体和组织，旨在跨越政治分歧建立信任和友谊，其中包括桥梁美国（BridgeUSA）、勇敢天使（Braver Angels，我在其董事会任职），以及BridgeAlliance.us网站上列出的许多其他组织。我们不能指望国会和科技公司来拯救我们。我们必须改变自己和社会。



在巴别塔被毁后仍生活在里面会是什么样子呢？我们心知肚明。这是一个混乱和缺失的时代，但也是反思、倾听和建设的时代。



IDEAS
WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID
It’s not just a phase.

By Jonathan Haidt
Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega
illustration with 1679 engraving of the tower of babel with pixellated clouds and pieces disintegrating digitally
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: "Turris Babel," Coenraet Decker, 1679.
APRIL 11, 2022
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What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said:

Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.

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The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.


From the December 2001 issue: David Brooks on Red and Blue America

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?

The Rise of the Modern Tower
there is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance.

The early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?

The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.

In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans. “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” he wrote in a letter to investors. Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.

Things Fall Apart
historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?

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Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.

In their early incarnations, platforms such as Myspace and Facebook were relatively harmless. They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and links to the mostly static pages of their friends and favorite bands. In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvements—from the Postal Service through the telephone to email and texting—that helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties.

But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.

From the December 2019 issue: The dark psychology of social networks


Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.

Babel is not a story about tribalism. It’s a story about the fragmentation of everything.
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.

Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.

illustration with an 1820 painting of outdoor feast with people in historical dress fleeing a giant flaming Facebook logo in a colonnaded courtyard
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Belshazzar’s Feast, John Martin, 1820.
By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

From the October 2018 issue: America is living James Madison’s nightmare

The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare. Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”

But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?

Read: The Ukraine crisis briefly put America’s culture war in perspective

It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).

Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.

From the April 2021 issue: The internet doesn’t have to be awful

When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children. History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country. The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.

The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.

Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said:

The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.
Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.

I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.

The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.

Politics After Babel
“politics is the art of the possible,” the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much may be possible.

Of course, the American culture war and the decline of cross-party cooperation predates social media’s arrival. The mid-20th century was a time of unusually low polarization in Congress, which began reverting back to historical levels in the 1970s and ’80s. The ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the 1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a more combative party. For example, House Speaker Newt Gingrich discouraged new Republican members of Congress from moving their families to Washington, D.C., where they were likely to form social ties with Democrats and their families.

So cross-party relationships were already strained before 2009. But the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the enemy with sufficient vigor. On the right, the term RINO (Republican in Name Only) was superseded in 2015 by the more contemptuous term cuckservative, popularized on Twitter by Trump supporters. On the left, social media launched callout culture in the years after 2012, with transformative effects on university life and later on politics and culture throughout the English-speaking world.

From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind

What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.

Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds, not just in politics but in business, the arts, academia, and elsewhere. Sexual harassers could have been called out in anonymous blog posts before Twitter, but it’s hard to imagine that the #MeToo movement would have been nearly so successful without the viral enhancement that the major platforms offered. However, the warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.

First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens. Research by the political scientists Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Petersen found that a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so. They admit that in their online discussions they often curse, make fun of their opponents, and get blocked by other users or reported for inappropriate comments. Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums, Bor and Petersen found, because nonjerks are easily turned off from online discussions of politics. Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.

illustration with detail from 19th-century painting of hand holding dart with an email "send" logo in place of its flights
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Venus and Cupid, Pierre-Maximilien Delafontaine, by 1860.
Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: “Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.

From the October 2021 issue: Anne Applebaum on how mob justice is trampling democratic discourse

Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes. A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on strikes. Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.

Structural Stupidity
since the tower fell, debates of all kinds have grown more and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs. Even before the advent of social media, search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theories, such as that the Earth is flat and that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attacks. But social media made things much worse.

From the September 2018 issue: The cognitive biases tricking your brain

The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.

In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse.
In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals. English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury. Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking. Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.

Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history, linking together the world’s best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon.

But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent?

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.

But when an institution punishes internal dissent, it shoots darts into its own brain.

The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values. The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors. According to the political scientist Karen Stenner, whose work the “Hidden Tribes” study drew upon, they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.

Only within the devoted conservatives’ narratives do Donald Trump’s speeches make sense, from his campaign’s ominous opening diatribe about Mexican “rapists” to his warning on January 6, 2021: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.” Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives, for example in driving out local election officials who failed to “stop the steal.” The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality. We now have a Republican Party that describes a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol as “legitimate political discourse,” supported—or at least not contradicted—by an array of right-wing think tanks and media organizations.

The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress. “Pizzagate,” QAnon, the belief that vaccines contain microchips, the conviction that Donald Trump won reelection—it’s hard to imagine any of these ideas or belief systems reaching the levels that they have without Facebook and Twitter.

illustration with 17th-century painting of woman looking in mirror that is shattered around the thumbs-up "like" symbol
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Vanity, Nicolas Régnier, c. 1626.
The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win. The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled: When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.

Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress toward realizing the noble promise of its founding. This story easily supports liberal patriotism, and it was the animating narrative of Barack Obama’s presidency. It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s cultural and intellectual institutions.

But when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders. Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.

The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.

You can see the stupefaction process most clearly when a person on the left merely points to research that questions or contradicts a favored belief among progressive activists. Someone on Twitter will find a way to associate the dissenter with racism, and others will pile on. For example, in the first week of protests after the killing of George Floyd, some of which included violence, the progressive policy analyst David Shor, then employed by Civis Analytics, tweeted a link to a study showing that violent protests back in the 1960s led to electoral setbacks for the Democrats in nearby counties. Shor was clearly trying to be helpful, but in the ensuing outrage he was accused of “anti-Blackness” and was soon dismissed from his job. (Civis Analytics has denied that the tweet led to Shor’s firing.)

The Shor case became famous, but anyone on Twitter had already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don’t question your own side’s beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists’ more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization. This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to “go woke” in rapid succession that year and the next, beginning with a wave of controversies and resignations at The New York Times and other newspapers, and continuing on to social-justice pronouncements by groups of doctors and medical associations (one publication by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, for instance, advised medical professionals to refer to neighborhoods and communities as “oppressed” or “systematically divested” instead of “vulnerable” or “poor”), and the hurried transformation of curricula at New York City’s most expensive private schools.


Tragically, we see stupefaction playing out on both sides in the COVID wars. The right has been so committed to minimizing the risks of COVID that it has turned the disease into one that preferentially kills Republicans. The progressive left is so committed to maximizing the dangers of COVID that it often embraces an equally maximalist, one-size-fits-all strategy for vaccines, masks, and social distancing—even as they pertain to children. Such policies are not as deadly as spreading fears and lies about vaccines, but many of them have been devastating for the mental health and education of children, who desperately need to play with one another and go to school; we have little clear evidence that school closures and masks for young children reduce deaths from COVID. Most notably for the story I’m telling here, progressive parents who argued against school closures were frequently savaged on social media and met with the ubiquitous leftist accusations of racism and white supremacy. Others in blue cities learned to keep quiet.

American politics is getting ever more ridiculous and dysfunctional not because Americans are getting less intelligent. The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.

It’s Going to Get Much Worse
in a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry. But back then, in 2018, there was an upper limit to the amount of shit available, because all of it had to be created by a person (other than some low-quality stuff produced by bots).


Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence. In a year or two, when the program is upgraded to GPT-4, it will become far more capable. In a 2020 essay titled “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)

American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too. In a haunting 2018 essay titled “The Digital Maginot Line,” DiResta described the state of affairs bluntly. “We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality,” she wrote. The Soviets used to have to send over agents or cultivate Americans willing to do their bidding. But social media made it cheap and easy for Russia’s Internet Research Agency to invent fake events or distort real ones to stoke rage on both the left and the right, often over race. Later research showed that an intensive campaign began on Twitter in 2013 but soon spread to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among other platforms. One of the major goals was to polarize the American public and spread distrust—to split us apart at the exact weak point that Madison had identified.

If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse.
We now know that it’s not just the Russians attacking American democracy. Before the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, China had mostly focused on domestic platforms such as WeChat. But now China is discovering how much it can do with Twitter and Facebook, for so little money, in its escalating conflict with the U.S. Given China’s own advances in AI, we can expect it to become more skillful over the next few years at further dividing America and further uniting China.

In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together. In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.

Democracy After Babel
we can never return to the way things were in the pre-digital age. The norms, institutions, and forms of political participation that developed during the long era of mass communication are not going to work well now that technology has made everything so much faster and more multidirectional, and when bypassing professional gatekeepers is so easy. And yet American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.

What changes are needed? Redesigning democracy for the digital age is far beyond my abilities, but I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

Harden Democratic Institutions
Political polarization is likely to increase for the foreseeable future. Thus, whatever else we do, we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.

For instance, the legislative branch was designed to require compromise, yet Congress, social media, and partisan cable news channels have co-evolved such that any legislator who reaches across the aisle may face outrage within hours from the extreme wing of her party, damaging her fundraising prospects and raising her risk of being primaried in the next election cycle.

Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting. A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska, and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a closed Republican primary but is not in an open one.

A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way. Research on procedural justice shows that when people perceive that a process is fair, they are more likely to accept the legitimacy of a decision that goes against their interests. Just think of the damage already done to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy by the Senate’s Republican leadership when it blocked consideration of Merrick Garland for a seat that opened up nine months before the 2016 election, and then rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. A widely discussed reform would end this political gamesmanship by having justices serve staggered 18-year terms so that each president makes one appointment every two years.

Reform Social Media
A democracy cannot survive if its public squares are places where people fear speaking up and where no stable consensus can be reached. Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.

illustration with 1861 engraving of the arch-heretics from Dante's "Inferno" with two people looking at glowing smartphone screen surrounded by people climbing out of tombs with fires smoking and city wall in background
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: The Arch Heretics, Gustave Doré, c. 1861.
But it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”

Those who oppose regulation of social media generally focus on the legitimate concern that government-mandated content restrictions will, in practice, devolve into censorship. But the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before 2009. The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to police all content. For example, she has suggested modifying the “Share” function on Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post. Reforms like this are not censorship; they are viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral, and they work equally well in all languages. They don’t stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true.

Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.

Read: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem

Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.


In any case, the growing evidence that social media is damaging democracy is sufficient to warrant greater oversight by a regulatory body, such as the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.

Prepare the Next Generation
The members of Gen Z––those born in and after 1997––bear none of the blame for the mess we are in, but they are going to inherit it, and the preliminary signs are that older generations have prevented them from learning how to handle it.

Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat. A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the “art of association” that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed “a serious threat to liberal societies.” A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and would suffer from a “coarsening of social interaction” that would “create a world of more conflict and violence.”


From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?

And while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms. Correlational and experimental studies back up the connection to depression and anxiety, as do reports from young people themselves, and from Facebook’s own research, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.


Read: Why I cover campus controversies

The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty. Congress should update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.

More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision. Every state should follow the lead of Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas and pass a version of the Free-Range Parenting Law that helps assure parents that they will not be investigated for neglect if their 8- or 9-year-old children are spotted playing in a park. With such laws in place, schools, educators, and public-health authorities should then encourage parents to let their kids walk to school and play in groups outside, just as more kids used to do.

Hope After Babel
the story i have told is bleak, and there is little evidence to suggest that America will return to some semblance of normalcy and stability in the next five or 10 years. Which side is going to become conciliatory? What is the likelihood that Congress will enact major reforms that strengthen democratic institutions or detoxify social media?

Yet when we look away from our dysfunctional federal government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly, things seem more hopeful. Most Americans in the More in Common report are members of the “exhausted majority,” which is tired of the fighting and is willing to listen to the other side and compromise. Most Americans now see that social media is having a negative impact on the country, and are becoming more aware of its damaging effects on children.

Will we do anything about it?

When Tocqueville toured the United States in the 1830s, he was impressed by the American habit of forming voluntary associations to fix local problems, rather than waiting for kings or nobles to act, as Europeans would do. That habit is still with us today. In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.

What would it be like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? We know. It is a time of confusion and loss. But it is also a time to reflect, listen, and build.

This article appears in the May 2022 print edition with the headline “After Babel.”

Read more of Jonathan Haidt’s writing in The Atlantic on social media and society:

The Dark Psychology of Social Networks
How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus
Facebook’s Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, which originated as a September 2015 Atlantic story.