How to de-shittify America
First, bring back "moral sense."
During my occasional bouts of hopelessness, I find myself thinking about Cory Doctorow's theory of technological regression. When big platforms like Google and Facebook make themselves worse in pursuit of greater profits, Doctorow said, they enshittify themselves.
I think that's what America did. We defenestrated the law, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, respect for knowledge and know-how, and deference to competence and hard work and sound leadership, not to mention valuing public service and the common good.
It took a decade, but we finally did it.
The enshittification of America.
The consequences are all around us. Commerce is now largely a scam. Leaders are liars. Courts are rogue. Corporations are lawless. Political insanity is normal. The work ethic is meaningless. Merit is a joke. Equality and justice are upside down, backwards and prolapsed.
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It's too easy to blame Donald Trump. A con man can't fool anyone who isn't greedy and looking to get something for nothing. A republic cannot be brought to ruin if the people have integrity. But America's prime directive is me me me. That's the reason we commited "superpower suicide," as Timothy Snyder put it. Greed is how a wealthy and powerful nation twice traded everything good about itself for the empty promises of a life-long con man.
Bill Moyers once asked Barbara Tuchman what happened to the America of Washington, Adams and Jefferson. It was four decades ago, but her answer is shockingly relevant. We lost our "moral sense," the historian said, "of knowing the difference between right and wrong, and of being governed by it." She pointed to Germany as an example of a nation that "declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians." Ditto for the Ottoman Empire, she said. "The disappearance of a moral sense, of moral rule, led to fierce oppression and massacres and to the decline of power in the end."
Tuchman said civil institutions, especially the media, tend to accept "any damned thing that ... appeals to the mass public, even if it is basically trashy." Television, she said, is the primary means by which social virtue is undermined. With the bar so low, corrupt elites have no fear of being held to any standard. "This is not the way to increase the thinking of the public on truth or serious matters, or to help it recognize the values in life that are creative," she said.
Bill Moyers interviewed Barbara Tuchman in 1988, before the internet was mainstream, before the invention of mobile technology, and before the advent of social media. She died a year later, in 1989, but I wonder what she would have said about today's information environment. Media and tech corporations are monopolies. Rightwing propaganda is ubiquitous. Everyone is addicted to their phones. All of it is so normal as to be invisible.
Perhaps Tuchman would have said what Alan Elrod said recently. In an essay for Liberal Currents, the head of the Pulaski Institution wrote that America is "the prisoner of the smartphone and the infinite mirror world beneath its glass screen" and that "our attention economy incentivizes the profane degradations of fame-seeking and celebrity culture."
Unlike Tuchman's time, it isn't just "the lowest common denominator" that's affected. Signs of addiction to phones and social media are being exhibited up and down the social hierarchy. "From college-aged sports betting addicts to journalists and political operatives to our richest and most powerful businessmen and politicians," they "have been deranged by these habits and enslaved to the distortive effects of trying to get our next hit," he wrote.
In the following interview with me, Alan talks about his own experience with social media. It has unsettled him enough to want to bring broader attention to its ill effects. He explains how de-shittifying online spaces through regulation will require restoring a moral sense.
"Maybe we could use a little scolding," he told me. "People who hold some of the best paid and most revered positions in our culture [are] shilling for DraftKings, Kalshi and Bitcoin.
"I think that’s a moral travesty."
Your piece ends with this: "This is not ultimately an essay about other people. It’s a self-portrait and a warning." There's a story there.
Yeah, I think that it’s hard to spend your time on these platforms and writing about them and not become intensely conscious of your own habits. I think I’m online too much. I can tell when praise or pile-ons are affecting me in ways that frankly unsettle me. It’s a bit like all of us walking around in buildings where everyone could still smoke inside knowing that we’re all breathing in the crisis.
You say we have an addiction problem but also a celebrity problem, and that both problems overlap. That seems to explain a lot about our politics and culture. Is there enough awareness of that?
I don’t think so. Because I think we tend to view celebrity as something where the people who obtain it owe us. So rather than appreciating the burdens of that level of scrutiny or the ways fame itself can become a toxic addiction, we can be pretty flip about the way we consume tabloid and tabloid-style media — of course, on devices to which we are addicted.
The word that keeps coming to mind is "cheap." With phones and social media, we have shattered community, shattered truth, shattered hope in some cases. We have made human relationships much cheaper. And the result is Donald Trump. Thoughts?
I think that’s a fair assessment. I don’t want to deny that social media can be a place for connection, for making new friends and collaborators. But I think it’s also true that when we really connect with someone, we naturally want to take that relationship to more concrete places: texting, calling, going to see those people in person. So I think maybe I’d be more inclined to call it “shallow.” These places don’t let us get to the really deep, rewarding places with others that the richest relationships are built on.
Another word that kept coming to mind as I read your piece was greed. Gambling, celebrity, image, status, me me me. And everyone is doing it. What can you do without seeming like a moral scold?
Well, I think maybe we could use a little scolding. I understand that no one wants to come off as hectoring. But we used to enlist famous athletes and actors to make "Don’t Do Drugs" PSAs. And now we have them shilling for DraftKings, Kalshi, and Bitcoin. I think that’s a moral travesty. We should expect more from the people who hold some of the best paid and most revered positions in our culture.
How do we "detox democracy"? What would that look like?
One idea I like is out of Australia. The Digital Duty of Care legislation proposed there includes a provision that would require social media companies to provide an algorithm opt-out for kids, meaning they can choose to have an online experience that’s only who and what they choose to follow/friend. I think this is something we could adopt. In fact, I think it would be even better to have an algo opt-in, which was part of the original proposal in Australia. And I think this should be required on all social media platforms for users of all ages. This would even address some of the enshittification issue because something the current social web lacks is that sense of self-curation and exploration that used to make online experiences much better.
