The Extinction of Experience: Christine Rosen on the Impact of Technology on Society

do we spend too much time looking into our screens and too little looking into human eyes Christine Rosen on uncommon knowledge [Music] now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute a senior editor at the new Atlantis a regular contributor to commentary magazine and a co-host of the daily commentary podcast she holds a doctorate in history from Emory Christine rosen's most recent book published this Autumn the extinction of experience Being Human in a disembodied World Christine welcome thanks for having me Christine your argument let's lay out the basics of the argument from the extinction of experience I'm quoting here our understanding of experience has become disordered in ways large and small more and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them what do we lose when we no longer talk about the human condition but rather the user experience what do we lose well I think we lose an important part of our humanity and an understanding not only of ourselves as individuals but of our role in communities in families um in culture and the title although it sounds a little bit portentious Extinction of experience actually comes from a naturalist Robert Michael pile who worried about children growing up in a world where they didn't actually experience nature they didn't get muddy they didn't run around in Forest they had no interaction with with wildlife and then when they grew up if if a species for example went extinct would they care because they wouldn't even know what they were missing and that essay really stayed with me because I I started realizing looking around and this includes myself so I'm I'm inditing myself here too that I was having experiences throughout my daily life and watching others have experiences via a screen so I was having look down experiences not look up experiences and it was transforming the way we all interacted whether you can you I'm sorry but could you tell that story that you tell in the book about there was a rainbow you're in New York yeah oh here actually here sorry go ahead so no I I had seen um a performance at the Kennedy Center and it had been pouring rain and we all went up to the lovely roof terce and um this gorgeous rainbow over the pomac river and I was admiring it every single person pulled out a phone and was taking pictures and I completely understood that impulse because it's a really beautiful rainbow but they weren't just first stopping and experiencing the rainbow with the people they'd come to the show with and they were all immediately sending the pictures and and that moment which for you know it's fleeting right a rainbow is a very fleeting and beautiful um spontaneous thing they didn't pause to savor it and I wondered if that meant anything I think some people would argue no who cares and now they have a permanent memory in the digital cloud of of this thing which they instantly could share with millions of their friends and and followers but I think we do miss something when we don't pause to sa those moments because it it makes us slow down makes us think about what we can appreciate doesn't have to be a rainbow it can be almost anything and it's getting harder and harder to do that because the default now is always to have the phone always to have the screen always to have something to occupy our minds and occupy our attention Okay again from the extinction of experience this this struck me as especially fascinating the philosopher Robert nosik asked a simple question if we could create a machine that would offer us the illusion of a life of constant pleasure while also erasing from our memory any inkling that we were hooked up to such a machine would we choose to plug in the Assumption has always been that most people will choose no we want to do certain now you're quoting nosic we want to do certain things and not just have the illusion of doing them nosic argued and then Christine Rosen adds I'm not so sure and why do you add I'm not so sure well I think this this was a this really struck me because um nox's experiment assumed a certain number of things about what people valued in their in their embodied human form meaning if you give someone an opportunity to do something in simulated form they might want to try it but they would still want to have that experience ideally in an embodied human form for it to be quote unquote real and I say quote unquote because I think a lot of our sense of reality has shifted dramatically because of the way we can mediate experience and update to that experiment was really worrisome because they they tweaked it a little bit but one of the things that the people who updated nok's original experiment was no's original experiment is what the 80s yes it I it was in the ' 80s early ' 80s um was to say well what if we gave you a pill um and you know basically made it easy you have to step into a machine and remove yourself physically from reality maybe it would just be you take a pill and this very matrix-- like right if you've seen the movie The Matrix this is the idea would you plug in if you didn't once you were plugged in you didn't realize you were plugged in and more people you know several Generations on said well I guess I would consider that I would consider living in a virtual reality rather than experiencing an embodied reality and that is the option for a lot of us throughout our daily lives now we can we can forget that we have physical bodies we can live online we can live in Virtual Worlds have conversations with people all over the world and never leave our homes so is that bad well if you look at rates of loneliness and how much time particularly young people spend physically alone not with other people I think there are some concerns and some drawbacks to that tradeoff but to nok's point I think it's worrisome that people will now now understand their own reality differently if they're they don't tie it to being in a physical body and a lot of folks in Silicon Valley would argue yeah that's great we're going to extend life we're going to upload your Consciousness when you die we're going to live forever there are all these sort of schemes that argue you shouldn't be limited by your physical body but if you're conservative which which I am I think our bodies teach us some humility and lessons that we should uh attend to even if we do have these tools you know so this is so interesting I don't I don't recall any passage in your book in which you're explicitly theological but what you but this is the old Gnostic heresy isn't it yes that we're we're Spirits trapped inside this body and and if only we could free ourselves from the physical right and that's not Judaism and chist Orthodox Christianity both insist that the human being is both physical and spiritual that we of all of of the creatures are are both that there's something extremely profound about that am I right about that that's correct and in fact I I wrestled with a I had a draft of a chapter about faith it became a little too complicated paper perhaps actually that was the that's been one of the main requests for when it when it comes out in paperback but I it was really difficult it became very theological but I found it extremely useful in guiding um even the secular argument about what it means to be physically embodied human beings because there are certain things that we cannot control about our own bodies and coming to terms with that is part of becoming a whole person right right okay so what is what is the you mentioned a moment ago the rising rates of loneliness what are your beyond that what are your fears okay so some young people are taking a little longer to get married and have dates and so forth H tell me something I don't know I I worry about the lack of face-to-face communication that to me that that was sort of the the motivating chapter in the books first chapter in the book I guess the second chapter officially but I was noticing in my own life um and in my children's lives that people were taking for granted that having an interaction with another human being means being physically present and looking them in the eye and trying to read their signals and there is a huge amount that we know but we don't know why we know it as human beings we're evolutionarily uh to this point because we learned how to read each other's faces so if you cross your arms and glare you might just be pondering something or you might be angry at me but I know I can probably tell now you can tell somehow instinctively immediately but we're raising generations of of young people now who actually don't read the signals that well I think the lockdowns during covid where a lot of people had to mediate through screens suddenly brought this to um the attention of a lot of parents when kids were trying to do school online and things like that but this is a problem for everyone adults included it's much easier and less risky not to deal with people in embodied form and I and again this is It's hard to I can't cite data about this but I can tell you I've talked to lots of people who work in public facing roles whether that's in diplomacy in business in education and they all say the same thing younger Generations are having to be taught these skills that earlier Generations took for granted so those of us who grew up without these Technologies I'm Gen X so I'm the perfect hybrid I didn't have it as a kid I had a great Gen X childhood where I drank out of a hose and you know rode my bike around and was never tracked by my parents but I had to adapt to the Technologies when I became an adult kids these days start out with these things and they they live their worlds on a daily basis through the technology and they don't practice other skills those soft human skills learning to look at each other and interact with each other and negotiate with each other without that sort of mediation and those are important too and so part of the book is a plea to remember that when we when we Embrace technology for some of these human interactions There's an opportunity cost we do lose something now it might be worth it but it's not always something is gained but something is also lost all right so I just want to push this a little bit further because I'd like to I'm trying to figure out how far you're willing to go you're being very and in fact you say at one point in the book this is this book is a modest argument or modest I can't remember quite with the phrasing but and you're charming and modest and reasonable and so forth I'm try most of the time I'm trying to see if you're going to say this is responsible for the polarization and screaming matches that we saw in the last election or I'm trying to see if I can get you to say that you're angry about the effects or do you not want to go there well I'm I'm very worried about the effects on the broader culture and it's not just because we don't know how to interact with each other like decent human beings it's that we're really impatient as a culture because we have become habituated to a life where we just have to tap or swipe or you know push a button and get what we want on demand this is sold to us as our right now if you if you read the advertisements that come out of Silicon Valley and while there's nothing wrong with convenience I think we when we start to apply it to other areas of life where it's difficult to master and and uh improve life through convenience like say politics which is actually about negotiation and compromise and difficult long-term questions where you have to come up with policy uh responses to problems that you won't ever reap the benefits or rewards from the policy you're creating that's where I worry because I think it's very easy to just demonize and uh get get into a very comfortable position being a moral grandstander if you're a politician for example get a lot of positive feedback from people on your side for doing that and there really is no there's no uh uh risk involved um but our politics suffers so I do think we're bringing into uh Congress in particular a lot of people who are there to be performative who are there who are really speaking not to their constituents but to their followers and that is a very different thing in a democracy we do not our government you've all live in didn't he say that his phrase is that they're using platform platform not an institution exactly right so the institution is supposed to form them and teach them how to behave but instead said if you use it as a platform institutional uh history knowledge there's no need to respect that you're performing um but I also think that means that you're speaking to your followers not to your constituents right Christine as I read your book I thought to myself there is a pre-existing condition that Christine is not going into here fair enough it's outside the scope of this book but it comes to mind and so if I may ask I this is a flyer because these are questions not based on your book but just on the thinking that your book prompted in my head and the notion that kids who are raised on technology the rising rates of L loneliness that that the kids are not just picking up these iPhones the American family has already been under enormous pressure so this Extinction of experience is happening at a moment moment when all kinds of bonds have already been broken and frayed and I I I would if I may i' just like to see your your mom you're a historian you're a journalist you're a writer you will have given this some thought I think but if I may so in here a few statistics less than 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced since 1970 the rate has been about 50% the proportion of American children under 18 living in a two parent home in 1960 88% in 1980 77% today 71% steady decline the outof wedlock birth rate this one is dramatic and here instead of raw figures let me give you the famous 1965 moan report Daniel Patrick Mahan uh was concerned about well I I'll quote it to you the fundamental problem he's talking about a crisis in the black family the urban black family the fundamental problem is that of family structure the black family in the urban ghetto is crumbling so long as the situation persists the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself the outof wedlock birth rate among the black family in American ghettos inner cities when he wrote that report that startled him in 1965 was 25% the out of wedlock birth rate today among whites is 27% among Hispanics 53% and among blacks is 69% so I have just these statistics describe a catastrophe and it is into this catastrophe that these devices are being introduced what caused that catastrophe what caused so to speak the pre-existing condition well it's it's a tough question because there's um and it's the DAR I thought you'd have an answer I do not have a very simple answer to this but I have some some uh ideas which I'll which I'll offer uh and let it be noted for our viewers that I'm I'm I'm attack this is this is this is an ambush this is not in the book it's you're pouncing I'm pouncing yes Republicans pounce Republicans pounce in real time no I think a couple of things have happened I mean look the the feminist movement and the rise of women's education and movement into the workforce was a very destabilizing thing um it was positive in many many many ways um but it did place a new strain on the family um and I think that if you look at Family breakdown particular you you have to look at communities and at the community level and one of the things if you remember Jane Jacobs and others who talked about eyes on the street so even if you're a child in a broken home in an urban setting for example you had people you had adults in your world who were looking out in general for the kids in the neighborhood and that also disappeared fairly rapidly so you had PE because people worked people had to go to work people were not on the street they were going into offices and so had a whole bunch of kids who needed tending to but there weren't adults to do that job and enter first television then game video games and then now you can take it with you everywhere television is is sort of the first the first well it's television television is different from Radio isn't it television some somehow or other television we begin to get this argument taking very or embryonic form and it's with television not radio radio somehow when you're listening there's some part of your brain that's more act anyway that's my theory but well and and PE early technology critics like Neil Postman were worried about the impact of television in the home um but television at least people did for a long time gather around it together as a family right because it was expensive at first so people couldn't afford more than one television but I think for kids in this in these environments um technology became a very cheap useful babysitter and for lots of kids it's actually safer to be in their house uh playing a video game um away from the streets than it is to be you know unattended in the streets so there are a lot of things that I think helped contribute to this crisis but I but I do worry about what we were promised with some of these Technologies too if you think about the early days of the internet it was we're all going to come together we're going to learn so much about people all over the world and this will make us better human beings and some of those promises were fulfilled there's a great vast amounts of information that we now have access to I I'm a historian I had to travel to archives to actually you know read people's letters and now a lot of those things are scanned and you don't you know it's makes it easier to do research but at the end of the day it very quickly became a substitute for a lot of things rather than just something that would a tool if you will and this is where I the smartphone in particular very rapidly and very detrimentally um impacted our private worlds because suddenly you could be with your family all together in the home but you could all be completely apart from each other mentally in terms of where your attention was and you would you're also inviting into the private sphere a lot of influences that perhaps you might not have chosen otherwise they're all there on the phone and you know I don't want to sound like a a fearmonger but it places a new burden on a family that a family situation that as you already described is feeling a great deal of strain so it adds to that burden all so if we could stick with this well this is was fascinating to me because these are 80% of the questions I ask I think I already know the answer but these are real questions I can't figure this out myself a couple of quotations these are both a little long but I think they they they'll pay off the late sociologist James Q Wilson this is Q he gave a very famous talk at at AI in 1997 when the Department of Health and Human Services studied some 30,000 American households it found that for whites blacks and Hispanics and for every income level save the very highest children raised in single parent homes were more likely to be suspended from school to have emotional problems and to behave badly another study showed that white children of an unmarried woman were more likely to than those in two parent family to become delinquent even after controlling for income even after controlling for income that's important second quotation sociologist Bradford Wilcox and Robert lman we estimate that the growth in median income of families with children would be 44% higher if the United States enjoyed 1980 levels of married Parenthood today further 37% of the decline in men's employment rates can be linked to the decreasing number of Americans who form and maintain stable married families close quote children need families and we know this this is not a sectarian fact this is a human fact we know it whatever our faith what Democrat Republic everybody knows this so why have we let this happen I mean and these are these are the questions that are real questions I have no why have we let this happen and why did we just go through an election in which neither candidate for president of the United States breathed a word about strengthening the American Family it is madness well it was really it was interesting to me that this is the first election in which religious Faith wasn't mentioned at all except for the fact that kamla Harris didn't attend the Al Smith dinner no one talked no one asked them about their faith no one talked about faith no one talked about religious practices they talked a little bit here and there about the religious vote um depending on on which swing state you're discussing but that is new and I would add to your list of questions um or perhaps a no no I asked the beginning of an answer let me try to give you an answer um one of the other things that's deteriorated as the family structure has deteriorated uh leading to all these uh second order problems is that parents now mistrust their own judgment about a great many things so you you have this rise of a parenting expertise class which changes its advice you know left and right and um you also have parents second guessing their own instincts because they do not have perhaps the um because they're having children later if and fewer in number and so they don't have this again a community of family members and extended uh family whom they can rely on for advice and everything they turn to so-called professionals some of whom have good advice um you should listen to your pediatrician I think that's always a good idea but the but the anxiety over parenting as family size shrunk is so intriguing to me and I I think if you add technology into that mix what you get are a lot of anxious parents thinking we're not doing what we're supposed to do all the experts are doing X Y or z um maybe we can give our kids a Leap Frog learning device because that's a like a computer and we need to know they need to know how to use computers wonder if we could track this you're about a generation and a half maybe two generations younger than I am so as you're just describing the neighborhoods and the eyes on and so forth I'm thinking of the house I lived in when I was a little kid we lived there we moved when I was seven but I can remember that neighborhood MH all the moms stayed home every single one yeah all the fathers went off to work no family on our street had more than one car right which meant that there were arrang Ms made about car pools car pools and who was going to go do the grocery shopping and babysitting was very thin on the ground so you went grocery shopping with your mom and when you went out to play the door got opened and off you went yep and I remember no anxiety on my parents part as long as I stayed didn't go beyond the end of the Block in that direction or the end of the Block in that direction and every mom in every house on that block knew me and would C now there are all kinds of things about that world that we don't want to return in particular there must have been I think back on it now there must have been a lot of highly intelligent capable women who T okay so I'm this is not an argument for returning to 1959 or all right so what was it like for you did you were things different by the time you came along well so I was I'm 51 so I was born in 1973 and uh child I'm just oh such a baby yes thank you um but uh uh we were raised pretty free range we were free range kids um and so we had a lot of freedom I had I knew everyone on my block I knew most of the neighbors there were there was again trust in the neighbors trust in the neighbors but a lot of the moms worked at least part-time maybe a little more um because they had to including my own um so we we had a fair amount of freedom but there was also a sort of thrown together thing most of the babysitting came from relatives I go stay my grandmas if my parents wanted to go out um but the real distinction the huge shift I think from even that childhood a Gen X childhood to Millennial childhood and now for the Gen zers and gen Alpha coming up behind them is that they are more likely and this includes their parents now too they're more likely to know the name of you know a YouTube star or an influencer than they are to know their own neighbors and I think there the isolation that we see among Americans uh we see it in the loneliness data but there's also other ways that I think it comes out the the the enthusiasm for living one's life and online um comes from this too connecting connecting to people in your neighborhood used to be a given and now it's really not so much of community life that used to happen in person whether it was the old you know Robert putham bowling leagues or or any of the other ways in which we measure social cohesion th a lot of those things did move online if you look at how we played games we had one kid whose parents could afford an Atari so we'd all go to his house and play you know take turn is playing pong I mean if you if any of you know pong it's rather a very slow moving game by today's standard but again it was a communal thing we were all physically in the same space that's not how anyone games now now they're talking to each other on their headsets but they're alone in their own home you know in different places so we we've just shifted how we socialize and a lot of that is now mediated so setting aside the privacy issues of the amount of data being collected on our private activities when we do that which is a whole another debate I think it it's also led to a very fragmented sense of community for a lot of young people and this is why when they are thrown into their first jobs or or go to college for the first time they struggle like how do I make friends how do I find my my group it's not true of all kids but I think we've seen enough of a generation raised with these technologies that they will acknowledge the struggle I see it in in young employees I work with and and in my kid with my kids friends so so James Q Wilson one more time I'm sorry I'll bring you right back into your book in James Q Wilson trumps me J I heard that speech by the way oh you were there for that wonderful wait a minute you were only 13 by 97 James Q Wilson I think this is from the same speech uh throughout the Western world political and intellectual Elites have abandoned interest in or acquired a deep hostility to the force that has given meaning to Western life to a degree this was understandable we have done more than end religious Warfare he's talking about religion we have tried hard to end religion itself thereby subjecting much of mankind into a new form of warfare the Hopeless struggle of lonely Souls against impulses they can neither understand nor control now the speech was about the breakdown of the American family and he put religion right at the center of it so I I these two things that just baffle me why doesn't this we all feel it nobody's as articulate is very few people are as articulate as you but we all we see isolation we are all nervous about what is happening with our kids and grandchildren picking up I don't understand why this doesn't make its way into politics and you raised this point which I hadn't occurred to me but again religion is now no longer even spoken of when so why not we've we've lost the ability to even speak in the language of virtue because what we're what we're circling around here is virtue character formation that's what gives people a sense of purpose a sense of meaning a sense of understanding where they belong in the world that they live in and I think what you see and technology has offered the promise of that in digital form to a lot of people oh you you your daily life is isolating and and alienating you know find Community online you can game with your friends you can do all these things but I think we've experimented with the with the alternative with technology long enough to say that the simulation is not the same thing qualitatively it's different it doesn't actually uh inculcate the kinds of Virtues that we want it in inculcates habits of mind that actually undermine virtue because they reward impatience a sense of the now um there's no respect for for historical Norms there's no respect for SL how things can take time to really develop um talk to anyone who online dates they will tell you this like the the time and space it takes to really get to know another human being has disappeared because now we have to do it through an app now of course not every every body it's a choice but it becomes the norm it became the norm very quickly and that's where I think technology is a very useful and powerful thing in a lot of ways but when we invite it into our most intimate relationships and it starts to teach us habits of mind that develop certain character traits then we are using it to inculcate very different things from virtue so we know that a little kid the first things not the first things because it takes a lifetime in some ways to learn them but when children are children in teaching virtue basic character and so forth you need to learn two things above all impulse control and how to get along with other people and you will learn neither of those in the digital world right I've got the argument yes there is not an app for either of those things and I think both of those things are also what is lacking in our polit our politics is fueled by impulse control and an inability to get along and compromise uh because those are not rewarded in our culture these days all right now Christine there's a Counterattack this is Mark andrees and it's his concept by the way I have to I stipulate that Mark andrion is actually a friend of mine out there in val it passed legal vetting so uh I'm sure in fact he will be flattered to hear you take I'm not sure he'll be flattered by how I characterize his argument but let's hope so so he writes about reality privilege and I'm quoting you quoting this is in your book you take him on in the book yes a small small percent of people live in a real world environment that is Rich even overflowing with glorious substance beautiful settings plentiful stimulation and many Fascinating People to talk to to work with and to date and not dating you're already a mother but everything else is a fellow at AI okay everyone else continues Mark Andre and the vast majority of humanity lacks reality privilege their online world is or will be immeasurably rich and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote unquote Real World close quote your real life may be rich enough to satisfy you but there are a lot of people whose lives would be better online the answer to the problem is not less digital not more real experience but more digital supplanting real experience with richer better more beautiful more pleasant digital experience and Christine Rosen says so now you'll see the rage uh come forth um this this bothers me to my core for a number of reasons first of all I'm sure Mark andreon is a very nice person who has a very lovely life and good for him he's earned it but the argument a very nice person I'm sure he is you stipulate I confirm it okay good but the AR the argument that what we owe each other is a is for the people whose lives are terrible the only thing we can do for them is to give them this simulated world where they can slap on VR goggles that people whose companies andreon will re great benefits from having invested in will give them everything they want that is an unfree that is not a choice and that is not that that is a dystopian science fiction novel it was called Ready Player one and I think it's dystopian for a number of reasons it it takes away the idea of moral agency and freedom for the people who you slap the VR headset on and suggesting that it's a Choice that's better for them is condescending in the extreme it's also it also would very quickly lead to a world where there were these huge class disparities in terms of who could live their nice reality privilege life and who would would live the VR life and we do already see glimmers of this in how some of these Technologies are being used so if you don't have great health insurance you might be offered if you have a mental health issue a chatbot to talk to not a human therapist if you have good health insurance you can go talk to another human being and you know have nice Psychotherapy session every we can probably get better sooner so this this two-tier way this idea that some people deserve human contact and human attention and other people should be satisfied with the simulation of it bothers me in the extreme because it's the most vulnerable populations who get that first children the elderly and the sick and the poor those are the people he's talking about whose realities are challenged but Our obligation to each other is to improve their reality not to give them some simulation of reality and that's to say nothing about the um Mental Health crisis and the physical crisis that this would make much worse because if you sit all day with VR goggles on what happens to your actual body we know Rising obesity rates all kinds of health issues in this country much of which comes from the fact that we're very sedentary and our bodies are meant to move so I I take issue with nearly every part of what he says there because I think it's a very pessimistic way to see the future of humanity and I don't think it's what he would want for his own children a lot of people in Silicon Valley won't allow their kids to use the products that they devise for everybody else and I think there's there's a truth there that should be acknowledged so I think that's just way too pessimistic a way forward for Humanity and I would strongly oppose it and I see a new show a new show here we can get you and Mark to sit down and love toate so what should we do again from the extinction of experience a decade ago a book about how technology is changing us would offer solutions for a more balanced relationship with our devices such as take a digital Sabbath one day a week no digital devices avoid multitasking and put those phones away at the dinner table these are no longer enough we need to be more like the Amish in our approach to technology well now what on Earth do you mean so I said this a little tongue and Chek but only a little so I'm not saying give up your zippers and turn off your electric lights um but this the the Amish approach to technology is very um aware in this sense they're not against all technology but what they do when something new arrives is sit down as a community and ask a bunch of very important questions how will this change Family Life what will this do to the private space of the home does this open our community up to values and ideas that would undermine what we think is important and and is this something that we really do need or is it a want and there are many many other questions each each group asked but I think that very um thoughtful way of approaching technology we didn't do that with social media platforms and we're in a bit of a mess now in terms of how how they've uh impacted our kids mental health our politics our culture in lots of ways and I think we're starting to have that discussion a little more now that AI has come onto the scene and that's all for the good there are a lot of there's a lot of fearmongering there's a lot of ignorant discussion about Ai and there's a lot of confusion about what AI even is but I am heartened by the fact that people seem to have learned a bit of a lesson from just uncritically embracing each new thing and this is where I become deeply conservative every new thing is not an improvement if you study history you know this and I think this is one of the things where we have been so bedazz you know just absolutely dazzled by what our Technologies can do for us and the power and sense of control and convenience they offer us that we've forgotten to ask the those important questions about some of these new tools and we must do that if we're going to have a flourishing uh culture and politics and and you know family and and community life so if I we we started with my generation we went to your generation if it's not if I if I may your your twins who are now in college yes they're freshman in college and did you forbid them from how did you raise them so they with regard to devices and and and they ask no you may they and they will bitterly uh complain about it still although they're coming around at 0 to 5 they had no screens because I started studying this stuff more than 20 years ago before I had kids I was I I like I was studying Myspace in the early social media platforms and talking to people who early Facebook employees and researchers and I was very worried about the way they talked about what they were doing because they didn't talk about hey we want to create this thing that makes life more fun it was we want to control human behavior we want to know everything about you and they thought they and their intentions were still good you know profit make make a good profit you know grow do all these entrepreneurial things give people a platform but their absolute fascination with human behavior struck me as something that was worth following and I I think it's proven to be um a real challenge as they try to explain the harm some of their their tools have done for my kids yeah zero to five no screens no TV no computers nothing they were they were I guess they were Amish although they did have zippers um but once they were 5 years old I allowed them to to watch you know children's I think they watched The Lion King was the first thing they ever saw but by that point they were reading and they when they saw something what what interested me is that with their peer group who watched a lot of stuff much earlier um and no judgment like people have to make their own choices with their family I become very libertarian about this in terms of the choices people make but they would watch something scary and it wouldn't scare them because they were old enough to have like they' read stories had stories read to them that they hadn't seen anything super scary on the screen and so it wasn't that alarming to them in quite the same way which I thought was fascinating they were allowed to start using uh they were big Minecraft Fanatics as they got into middle school so they had rules for that they didn't get smartphones till nth grade they were among the last in their group um I really did hold out and God bless them you know they hated every minute of it but they are able now to really be aware of their use doesn't mean they're perfectly good at controlling it but one of my sons spent a month um uh hiking in in uh uh White Ying with no no phone they had a SAT phone in case a bear attacked but and he came back from that experience and he said wow I waste so much time on my phone and so he admitted that to his mom oh totally of course I was like patting myself on the back he's like don't say it so I didn't I didn't say I told and we'll edit that out no but they but I think that they their awareness of um how much time they spend on it even though they're pretty disciplined and it's very different for boys than girls I think for girls so much more of social life happens on on social media and on the phone and it's a different and uh more difficult struggle my friends who I have a niece but also my friends who have daughters talk to me about this so I was pretty Draconian and even still I am sure that they found stuff on their Discord servers and whatnot where they were all chatting that that you know I I would be horrified to know I kind of uh as they get older they they tell me more things about what they saw when they were 12 or 13 and I'm alarmed but um I think though I I was lucky in that I did a lot of my work from home and I and I also had twins so as my Economist friends say they they would start to play with each other at a certain age so they entertained each other and in that sense I was able to um keep them occupied without a scream but that is not possible for a lot of parents like you can't cook dinner and get stuff done around the house without having some way to keep your kids occupied you said very struck about the Amish the notion that the community makes decision MH so we have a new chief executive about to take office and the 119th Congress is about to take office is that even I have a question here what would you say to Donald Trump about all of this if you could tell him anything at all advise him in any way you wished and the guarantee was that he would actually listen but I'm not sure that's even the right level at which these kinds of decisions should be made yeah not do you want our politicians to do is there something you'd say to Donald Trump or to the leaders of the incoming Congress so as a conservative I tend to think most top- down Federal Solutions are are going to just create more problems but with one exception here and that's um and this is actually broadly bipartisan and you will see legislation co-sponsored by uh Katie Brit of Alabama and John fedman of Pennsylvania these two agree on very little but they came together to sponsor legislation about enforcing an age limit for social media use and that is one area where I think policy has there's a there's enough cultural momentum now and enough understanding of the damage caused when a a nine or a 10-year-old spends hours a day on Instagram looking at stuff that was designed for adults and really quite harmful um and so I think parents have borne this burden for too long because the answer was well you're just a bad parent if you let your kids see this but it is everywhere it is ubiquitous and it is very difficult unless you can get a very committed group of parents all together to commit not to have their kids have a smartphone till 8th or 9th grade and not commit to use the Social Media stuff and that's really a heavy lift when something is damaging to Children this country has generally historically been really good about coming together and saying you know what that's where the government has a role to protect we've done it with alcohol and age limits we've done it with you know driving you have to get a driver's license in order to operate a car all kinds of ways in which this is something we do and it's time to now enforce what's always been on the books but never really enforced against the the technology companies the burden should now be on the technology companies to enforce an age limit and they should be punished if they do not just like we would close down a shop that was selling alcohol to minors and that is is a shift that on both sides of the aisle now in the house and the Senate there's there are different bills but there really is momentum now for this to become the law of the land so in that sense I think Federal legislation would set a a uh standard that then the companies have to meet and what about at the state level I'm thinking of never put these two together before but I'm thinking now of the school choice legislation the latest news is that Texas now has enough legislators that Governor Abbott believes that they'll be able to enact school choice and I'm conscious of reading not in a systematic way I haven't studied it the way you have but I'm conscious of reading that this school that school the other school has announced either no phon no digital devices in the classroom or asking parents to sign digital device bands except on weekends something of this nature it feels as though that's going to be easier in private schools or religious schools than in large public operations so possibly school choice might make it school choice legislation that makes it easier for parents to send their school their kids to schools they want them to attend might dovetail with this greater greater willingness to say no really that's what it comes to isn't it well there's isn't it really adults saying no holding the line somewhat although so much of life now occurs on the phone I mean I I didn't I wasn't able to park today without an app for my phone right I mean so much of life is now funneled through apps that you actually can't escape it even if you want to and in the educational environment that's very true for kids some kids get even in public schools will get an iPad when they enter kindergarten they just given them as part of yes because the tech companies have given it all to the public schools for free and say why don't you use all our great stuff so they can also Hoover up a vast amount of data on your kids all anonymize we're we're reassured which uh but that's another debate but I would say this about that that that's actually a perfect example of conservative principles in action organically communities are saying something's not working here what can we do what sort of solutions can we have you have these bell-to-bell banss that are happening so from the morning the Bel ban of cell phones I think that's great I think though this is and I am no fan of the teachers unions um but this is actually a place where conservatives who care about this liberals who care about this should sit down and talk to the teachers unions and get them on board too because teachers don't like these devices in the classroom either they distract their students they're competing with whatever going to get behind you on this one well here's hoping I I doubt I doubt it because I don't think she really does have the best interest of America's children at heart despite what she's often claiming but but parents and teachers all know that this is this is what would help kids so I think we see those movements we see an a real effort to to make that happen that's from the bottom up that's how I tend to prefer these sort of social reforms happening um but I think if you have legislation in place that says these companies are going to be held accountable when they let underage kids on their platforms that are designed for adults and you have this parents movement and you've got my friend John heid has written an excellent book anxious generation about the mental health impact and Abigail and Abigail shrier has has done wonderful work on this I mean people are listening to this now and so there is momentum and so if you have both of those things happening at the same time I think we will see some that's that's how cultural shifts happen you can't just do it from the top down and if you're working from the bottom up you often will butt heads with rules and regulations that are out of date so okay so last question Christine are you optimistic and I'm not asking a question about your obviously optimistic character your personality but do you think that by the time those twins of yours have given you grandchildren let's put it off in the distance some well they've just started college so we're talking about a decade from now let's say that nor norms and protocols will have been established and will have become accepted of course at the same time on the one hand I'm saying norms and protocols will they have emerged that help control the use of digital devices and ensure that we don't extinguish our own Human Experience of course at the same time that this decade is taking place and these norms and protocols May begin to emerge and just the way you suggested AI is coming at us like a tsunami so are you optimistic or are is there just going to be little pockets of communities like the Amish who just are able to hold the line against this the the the the sort of digital debauchery of the modern world so I would call myself cautiously optimistic for two reasons uh watching jenz move into adulthood has given me some room for optimism um so they do things like they'll all go out to eat and and everyone has to put their phone in the middle of the table and whoever picks up their phone during dinner to check it has to pay the bill so they they kind of lash themselves to the mass of the ship and they're doing it because they know how how intrusive everyone looking at their phone and how fracturing of attention and camaraderie it is to do that so they have to deliberately make that choice and they do make that choice they're exploring more analog things there's this Resurgence and you know kids wanting vinyl records and stuff which I think is sweet but not a not a whole Trend um another thing though they are wildly independent they are independent in terms of their registration as voters and they will move uh one way or the other depending on what they believe but they also resist um being told what to do in a very healthy and skeptical way so if you think about in the employment space where you're going to have a lot more monitoring and surveillance of employees they are a generation that brings into with with their experience growing up with digital technology just a healthy skepticism um which hopefully won't curdle into into cynicism or nihilism where if a boss says here put on this badge and you know you'll get $25 off a month on your health insurance if you let us track what you do outside of the outside of work how many steps you taken I think a lot of gen Z look my generation and Millennials were like okie dokie and off they went being tracked that is not gen Z they are resistant in some ways to that sort of surveillance because they have been watched their whole lives by their parents by media by by you know companies that that are constantly uh trying to sell them stuff so they have a skepticism my concern is that that curdles into cynicism we don't want it to be cynicist want them to actually act on that skepticism and to reform these platforms and to make new things new things that actually reflect their values not that first generation of techno enthusiasm that was uncritical about what what it might do in terms of harm and opportunity costs got it Christine may I ask you to close our conversation by reading a passage from your book yes if we are to reclaim human virtues and save our most deeply rooted human experiences from Extinction we must be willing to place limits on the more extreme transformative projects proposed by our techno enthusiasts not as a means of stifling Innovation but as a commitment to our shared Humanity only then can we live freely as the embodied quirky contradictory resilient creative human beings we are Christine Rosen author of the extinction of experience thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge the Hoover institution and Fox News I'm Peter Robinson [Music]

2025-01-10 07:29

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