But by, let’s say, December of that year, or January of the next year, this TED Talk I had done on quitting social media had jumped from a small number of views to millions of views. Somewhere right around there, there was this inflection point. Pre-Trump election, many people still had the model of technology that Silicon Valley had been pitching, which is this idea that, to quote Bill Maher, these are just gifts being handed down by the nerd gods. Just purely positive.
The election really shook things up, because for just about everyone, on all sides of the political spectrum, it introduced at least one negative narrative about social media. If you’re on the left, there were these sort of narratives about, “Wait a second, Facebook has some involvement in Donald Trump, and the Russians were using it.” If you’re on the right, there were these narratives about censorship, like, “Well, maybe they’re censoring what we’re allowed to post or not post”… [And that] changed the way that people categorize social media in their minds. This went from something like, “The notion of it having flaws is something that doesn’t makes sense to me,” to “Now that I see that it could have flaws, all of the sudden, I’m seeing all these cracks.”
And the other thing that’s happening is that the psychological data on young people is just incredibly distressing. Hospitalizations for self-harm, for example, among young women of Gen Z, so the first generation to grow up with smartphones and social media from their very earliest pre-teen years, it’s like a hockey stick. This isn’t curmudgeonly stuff. This is 13-year-olds who are going to the hospital at unprecedented levels. It’s social media. Nothing else fits the timing. This starts right around the time that about 50% of people that age had access to a smartphone. And I think that’s going to significantly change the way we think about use in these technologies.
It’s just like with smoking, where we started by making it illegal for people under 18. That was the beginning of, “Well, wait a second, if it’s so dangerous for them, why am I doing it so much?”
How do you see this playing out in the political realm? Do you think there will be regulations?
I don’t know if there’s gonna be regulations or not. I’m convinced that within a five-year window, the culture’s gonna shift on young people and smartphones. You’re gonna look at allowing a 13-year-old to have a smartphone the same way that you would look at allowing your 13-year-old to smoke a cigarette. The data is so stark—and a lot of this is really recent—that it’s gonna shift. No responsible parent’s going to want to do it… I think that’s gonna be a cultural shift that’s probably gonna happen, maybe even before regulation is needed.
I’m a skeptic on a lot of privacy legislation, just because I’m a computer scientist who knows it’s very, very hard to even get a sensible definition of what privacy means. So, I personally don’t see the regulatory arena as being what’s gonna save us here. I think what’s gonna save us is this idea that we don’t need the giant walled garden platforms to attract the value of the internet. We would be fine if Facebook went away. A lot of the problems that we’re facing—almost all the problems I write about—are an artifact of trying to consolidate the internet behind the walled gardens of one private company. You go back to the wild, decentralized social internet, and most of the issues that people worry about go away.
Just like we went through the AOL phase before people were comfortable with web browsers. The whole pitch of AOL was, “We’re easier. It’s a walled garden we control. The internet’s scary. You have to download a web browser. The web is weird, you want to be on AOL.” And then people left, like, “Actually, I’m okay with the internet”—only old people were left on AOL. I think we’ll see the same thing with these walled gardens. I don’t need a Facebook account in order to meet interesting people, encounter interesting ideas, and express myself using the internet.