Posts Tagged ‘society’
“They are alone together”*…
Andrew Trousdale and Erik J. Langer bridge the years between Robert Putnam‘s Bowling Alone and Jonathan Haidt‘s The Anxious Generation with a brief history of the trade-off between convenience and connection in America. From Zach Rauch’s introduction…
The Anxious Generation is best understood as a three-act tragedy. Act I begins in the mid-20th century, when new social and entertainment technologies (e.g., air conditioning and television) set in motion a long, gradual collapse of local community. Act II begins in the 1980s, as the loss of local community weakened social trust and helped erode the play-based childhood. Act III begins in the early 2010s, with the arrival of the phone-based childhood that filled the vacuum left behind.
This post, written by Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson, goes deep into Act I. Andrew is a psychology researcher and human-computer interaction designer who is co-running a project on the psychological tradeoffs of progress. Erik is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, writes the Substack Colligo, and is completing the MIT Press book Augmented Human Intelligence: Being Human in an Age of AI, due in 2026. Together, they show how the isolation we experience today did not begin with smartphones but began decades earlier, as Americans, often for good and understandable reasons, traded connection for convenience, and place-based relationships for privacy and control.
Tracing these trade-offs across the twentieth century, Andrew and Erik help explain the problem of loneliness we face today, and offer some guidance for how we can turn it around and reconnect with our neighbors. Robert Putnam, who read a recent draft, described it as “easily the best, most comprehensive, and most persuasive piece on the contemporary social capital conundrum I’ve yet read.”…
Trousdale and Langer trace the social, cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that have played out from the the late 1940s to today. It is, at once, familiar and shocking. They conclude…
When we asked Robert Putnam what gives him hope, he pointed to history. In The Upswing, he reminds us that Americans faced a similar crisis before. The Gilded Age brought economic inequality, industrialization, and the rise of anonymous urban life. Small-town bonds gave way to tenements and factory floors. Trust collapsed. By the 1890s, social capital had reached historic lows — roughly where it stands today.
The Progressive reformers found this new world unacceptable, but they didn’t try to turn back the clock. Cities and factories were here to stay. Instead, they adapted, creating new forms of connection suited to their changed reality, from settlement houses for anonymous neighborhoods to women’s clubs that built networks of mutual aid. They didn’t reject modernity; they metabolized it, showing up day after day to create new institutions and communities suited to the industrialized world.
Decades ago Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that we haven’t been conquered by technology — we’ve surrendered to it because we like the stimulation and cheap amusement. More recently, Nicholas Carr concludes in Superbloom that we’re complicit in our loneliness because we embrace these superficial, mediated forms of connection. Like Postman and Carr, the Progressive Era reformers understood where they had agency when technology upended their world. It isn’t in demanding that others fix systems we willingly participate in, nor is it in outright rejecting technologies that deliver real benefits — it’s in changing how we ourselves live with and make use of the tools that surround us.
There are already signs that people are willing to do this. In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.
Unplugging isn’t enough on its own. The time and energy we reclaim has to go toward building social connections: hosting the dinner party despite the hassle, staying for coffee after church when you’d rather go home, sitting through the awkward silence, offering or asking for help.
Ultimately, we can’t expect deep social connection in a culture that prioritizes individual ease and convenience. Nor is community something technology can deliver for us. What’s required is a change of culture, grounded in a basic fact of human nature: that authentic connection requires action and effort, and that this action and effort is part of what makes connection fulfilling in the first place.
We can form new rituals and institutions that allow us to adapt to technology, ultimately changing it to our liking. But it starts with the tools we use and the choices we make each day. If we all prioritize the individual comforts and conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to, no one else will restore the community we say we miss. No one else can. If we want deeper relationships and better communities than we have, we’re going to have to put more of our time, effort, and attention into the people around us.
History shows that we can adapt, building communities suited to changing times. The question is: Will we stay in and scroll? Or will we go out and choose one another?…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Scrolling Alone.”
In the spirit of the call for forward-looking determination, pair with “The Displacement of Purpose” from Peter Adam Boeckel (“If AI automates production, then humanity must automate compassion. Only then will progress remember what it was for.”)
[Image above: source]
* Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (in which he also observed: “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”)
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As we get together, we might spare a thought for Aldus Manutius; he died on this date in 1515. A printer and humanist, he founded the Aldine Press. In the books he published, he introduced a standardized system of punctuation and use of the semicolon. He designed many fonts, and created italic type (which he named for Italy).
And apropos the piece featured above, we might note that on this date in 1965 “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the first major hit for the Righteous Brothers, simultaneously reached #1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts in the US as well as the UK singles chart. The song was produced by Phil Spector (who had discovered the duo at a San Francisco show) for his own label, Philles Records. All the songs previously produced by Spector for Philles featured African-American singers; the Righteous Brothers were his first white vocal act– they had a vocal style, blue-eyed soul, that suited Spector.
“Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth”*…
It’s all about leverage… perhaps nowhere more painfully than in the philanthropic sector: so many problems; so little bandwidth!
Dick Tofel (a media advisor who was founding general manager and first employee of ProPublica, and its president from 2013 until 2021) weighs in with a “modest proposal.” It’s largely aimed at his field (public media, writ large), an altogether worthy focus; but the general principal is surely much broadly applicable…
I read a fascinating history over the recent holidays and it made me wonder about whether we ought to be fundamentally rethinking institutional philanthropy in this challenging moment. Because that philanthropy provides critical support to so much of nonprofit journalism, I think the question is worth exploring here this week.
The book is The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America [here] by John Fabian Witt [here], a professor at Yale Law School. It charts the history of the American Fund for Public Service, a progressive foundation (to use our contemporary lingo) that operated in the 1920s and ‘30s, and produced some remarkable results with fairly limited resources (roughly $36 million over its entire run in current dollars).
The American Fund was rocked by conflicts between what we would now call progressives and literal Communists, and it made a few foolish grants, including some funding for Stalin-era Soviet agriculture, but it also accomplished an astonishing number of big things. It provided critical support for the NAACP, from its early anti-lynching campaign to launching the litigation program that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, and including the earlier first moves toward salary equalization for public school teachers and desegregation of public graduate schools in the South; funded lifelines for Sidney Hillman’s industrial unionization drive that eventually produced the CIO, and for A. Philip Randolph’s pathbreaking Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; and supported the defenses of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scopes “monkey trial” and the Scottsboro Boys.
In all, as Witt concludes, “People and movements touched by the American Fund did more for twentieth-century American liberalism than all the money of the era’s much larger and more famous foundations.”
Here’s what got me to thinking: Over well more than a decade, the American Fund spent only $67,000 (about $1.25 million today), or 3.5% of its total spending, on its own operations—the rest went to gifts and grants. This was possible because the Fund hired essentially no staff, with its work being done by its many impressive directors, including Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, James Weldon Johnson, leader of the NAACP, Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate (he got almost 900,000 votes in 1932), Freda Kirchwey of The Nation and attorney Morris Ernst. Among the giants they consulted were W.E.B. du Bois, Felix Frankfurter and Reinhold Niebuhr.
And here’s what it made me wonder: Especially in this moment of overwhelming needs across the social sector, as the federal government withdraws from so many crucial activities it had undertaken and supported for a half century, should institutional foundations recast themselves in the model of the American Fund, dispensing with their large staffs and instead restocking their boards with leaders who could directly disperse their largess?
Before you object that that’s simply impractical, you need to reckon with the fact that this is actually the operating model of most of what we call “major donors,” wealthy individuals, occasionally with family foundations, some of them making very large grants. Mackenzie Scott is the overwhelmingly largest funder of this sort, but in our own field such funders have included those who sparked Voice of San Diego, ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, the Marshall Project, CalMatters, Mississippi Today, the Flatwater Free Press, Baltimore Banner, Tulsa Flyer and others. The track record for initiatives spurred by institutional foundation funding is, well, a bit less stellar.
The costs of the current model are also much larger than you may imagine. The Ford Foundation, in 2024 alone, spent more than $212 million on its own operations, while making $840 million in grants and gifts (about 20% of the total). Nor is Ford an outlier in this respect: the MacArthur Foundation spent almost $68 million on itself, while paying out $356 million (16%) and the Knight Foundation incurred $32 million in expenses to grant and gift $148 million (18%).
I’m not complaining about these “overhead” rates as such—they are not at all unreasonable by contemporary foundation standards. (The 2024 rate for the Rockefeller Foundation, where I once worked, was 38%!) But for just these three major news funders, the aggregate cost comes to more than $300 million in one year alone. (Of course, news is just one of many things these giants fund.) That total spent on running three foundations is more than half of the rescinded federal support of public broadcasting. The difference between the American Fund’s 3.5% and the 18% median rate for Ford, MacArthur and Knight would be $250 million available for additional grants each year from these three funders alone.
I headlined this column a “modest proposal” because I do not expect it to be adopted, nor perhaps to be taken entirely literally. But I do hope it is directionally provocative. As I have said more than once with respect to public broadcasting, revolutionary changes require an extraordinary response. Essentially every objective of the major institutional foundations is under unprecedented pressure. In that setting, doing business in the usual way may no longer make sense. Looking to the American Fund suggests another path might be possible…
Repurposing overhead: “A Modest Proposal for Big Philanthropy in a Tale from the Past,” from @dicktofel.bsky.social.
For a broad history of philanthropy from the 16th century, see here.
[Image above from “Philanthropy on the Defensive,” also worth a read for a conservative take that inches toward some of the same conclusions…]
* Archimedes (brandishing his lever)
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Lest we even imagine that philanthropy can do it all, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that the first Social Security check– for $22.54– was issued to Ida May Fuller.
The Social Security Program had been created in 1935, with qualification for eligibility (covered earnings) beginning in 1937. So Ms. Fuller, a teacher-turned legal-secretary, had been accumulating credit for three years. She lived to 100 years old and collected a total of $22,888.
“Stercus accidit”*…
As we try to understand the rifts afflicting our nation and world, many turn to Marx and his framework of class. But in a provocative essay, Catherine Nichols suggests that it was David Hume (in an 1752 essay that identified the unfettering of wealth from land) who identified the origin of our political divisions…
Describing the political map in terms of Left and Right is an accepted convention all over the world, almost to the point of cliché. Yet it is surprisingly complicated to explain whose interests lie on each side of this spectrum. For example, if the Left supports the interests of workers over the interests of employers, why are Left-leaning regions of the United States and elsewhere in the world among the richest? When Japan and South Korea sought to become economic powerhouses in the later 20th century, they adopted Leftist policies such as strong public education, universal healthcare and increased gender equality – if countries seeking to compete in capitalist arenas adopt broadly Leftist policies, then how do we explain why Leftists are always talking about overthrowing capitalism? And if the Left is somehow both the party of workers’ rights and the party of material wealth, then whose interests are supported by the Right? Given such contradictions, how did these terms become so central to modern politics?
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, where the combatants used the medieval estate groupings to define their battle lines. According to their writings, land-owning aristocrats (the Second Estate) were the party of the Right, while the interests of nearly everyone else (the Third Estate) belonged to the Left. This Third Estate included peasants working for the landowners but also every other kind of business owner and worker. Decades later, Karl Marx offered a different analysis of capitalism: he put owners of both land and businesses together on one side (the bourgeoisie), while grouping workers from fields and factories on the other side (the proletariat) in a single, world-wide class struggle. The trouble with both these ways of parsing Left and Right is that voting patterns never seem to line up with class. Both historic analyses leave us with questions about the contemporary world – and not just the paradox of why so many Left-leaning places are so rich. Why, for example, do working-class conservatives appear to vote against their material interests, year in and year out, across generations?
The 18th-century philosopher and political theorist David Hume had answers to these questions, though he was writing decades before the French Revolution. While his essay ‘Of Public Credit’ (1752) was a warning about the dangers of Britain’s increasing reliance on debt financing, his apocalyptic vision of the future turned out to describe some features of our current political map surprisingly well. Hume was writing because he believed that debt financing had the power to upend Europe’s traditional power structure and culture by creating a new source of money divorced from tradition or responsibility: stocks and bonds. Unlike land, anyone with some cash could buy war bonds and get an immediate passive income in the form of interest. This was the thin end of the wedge caused by the debt financing that Hume believed was destroying every part of society. The governments of antiquity, Hume argued, saved money to use in battle and then waged wars in self-defence, or else to expand their territory. But the British had invented a new form of warfare that Hume saw no precedent for, even in the merchant states of Nicollò Machiavelli’s Italy: war for trade, funded with money borrowed from private stockholders…
[Nichols unpacks Hume’s observations (centrally, that three groups with stakes in the status quo, heretability, and the sanctity of “family and family hierarchy”tradition”– landowners, aging parents, and want to preserve old power structures, including the family– and traces their relevance, from Hume’s time to ours…]
… There are many reasons for people aligning Right or Left, which is why analyses of class and material interests fall short of describing the realities of people’s politics. Hume foresaw that these specific groups would resent the economic sea-change of the 18th century – and he was correct. Many people would rather have land and power than money and liberty.
Still, the power of the Right hasn’t doomed the Left – no more than the Spanish Inquisition doomed the rise of the Left in 18th-century England and France. As long as governments want to keep the value of their currencies from falling, someone in their ranks will be using the methods of the Left and inventiveness that brought us everything from our banking system to gay marriage. We don’t need to resurrect communism or focus narrowly on class, following Marx. The experiments are far from over, and we should remember that the Left is generally where money comes from in modern times. We give away too much power when we forget it…
Rethinking Right and Left: “Landholder vs stockholder,” from @catherinenichols.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
As for how it’s going at the moment (and further to Hume and the quote in this post’s title), see: “MAGA’s Betrayal of Small Business,” from @pkrugman.bsky.social.
* “shit happens”– often attributed to David Hume, reflecting his skeptical view that human understanding, particularly of cause-and-effect, is limited to habitual belief from experience, implying that unforeseen, messy outcomes (“shit”) inevitably occur in life despite our reasoning.
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As we sort the Whigs from the Tories, we might recall that it was on this date 1656 that Blaise Pascal (writing under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte) published the first of his Provential Letters (Lettres provinciales), a series of eighteen polemical letters using humor to attack Jesuits for their use of casuistry and their moral laxity. Though the Letters were a popular success, they had little immediate effect on politics or the clergy. But they influenced later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and ultimately persuaded Pope Alexander to condemn “laxity” in the church and order a revision of casuistic texts.
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”*…
… Still, we try. Consider the elections on the horizon in the U.S., the mid-terms later this year and the general in 2028: President Trump, who has mused that “we shouldn’t even have an election” in 2026, recently (again) threatened to impose the Insurrection Act, which many believe could be a step toward suspension on the vote.
But even if the polls go ahead as planned, emerging AI technologies are entangling with our crisis in democracy. Rachel George and Ian Klaus (of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) weigh in on both the dangers and the potential upsides with a useful “map” of the issues. From their executive summary..
- AI poses substantial threats and opportunities for democracy in an important year ahead for global democracy. Despite the threats, AI technologies can also improve representative politics, citizen participation, and governance.
- AI influences democracy through multiple entry points, including elections, citizen deliberation, government services, and social cohesion, all of which are influenced by geopolitics and security. All of these domains, mapped in this paper, face threats related to influence, integrity, and bias, yet also present opportunities for targeted interventions.
- The current field of interventions at the intersection of AI and democracy is diverse, fragmented, and boutique. Not all AI interventions with the potential to influence democracy are framed as “democracy work” [e.g., mis-/dis-information and election administration], demonstrating the imperative for democracy advocates to widen the rhetorical aperture and to continue to map, identify, and scale interventions.
- Diverse actors who are relevant to the connections between AI and democracy require tailored expertise and guardrails to maximize benefits and reduce harms. We present four prominent constellations of actors who operate at the AI–democracy intersection: policy-led, technology-enabled; politics-led, technology-enabled; civil society–led, technology-enabled; and technology-led, policy-deployed. Though each brings advantages, policy-led and technology-led interventions tend to have access to resources and innovation capacity in ways that enable more immediate and sizable impacts…
The full report: “AI and Democracy: Mapping the Intersections,” from @carnegieendowment.org.
* H. L. Mencken
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As we fumble with our franchise, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that The 13th Floor Elevators (led by the now-legendary Roky Erikson) released their first single, the now-classic “You’re Gonna Miss Me.”
“Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why”*…
Ash Sanders visits Bombay Beach, a half-ruined former vacation town on the edge of the Salton Sea where absurdist philosophers, artists, and everyday townsfolk have undertaken a postapocalyptic experiment in radical living…
It is easy to miss California’s biggest environmental disaster. Driving north on Highway 111, you wouldn’t expect to find an inland sea. If it’s summer, the thermometer in your car could read 115 degrees. But amid the shimmering heat, there are signs of water. All around you, rows of broccoli, lettuce, and alfalfa stretch in every direction. In the fields, farmworkers bend and straighten. The air is sharp with cow dung. A pall of dust hangs over everything.
You are sixty miles north of the Mexican border at Calexico. If you keep going, the landscape will transition from fields to palm trees. You’re driving out of poverty and into money, away from one of the poorest counties in California and toward towns with golf courses and named for oases. Palm Springs. Rancho Mirage.
The left turn is easy to miss, the brown sign a seeming anachronism. BOMBAY BEACH. Surely there is no town here, you think, let alone a beach. But if you continue, you’ll see hints of life. There are saplings on the side of the road—not much to look at yet but there all the same. In the distance, a squat building hangs on under the punishing sun. THE SKI INN, it says on the ’70s-era marquee. LOWEST BAR IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. Indeed, you are 223 feet below sea level here, in a depression known as the Salton Sink.
For now, drive past the bar and look up. In front of you is a giant black-and-white billboard. Four white women in vintage swimsuits smile as they water-ski side by side. Behind them, a sea stretches into vastness. LAST STOP FOR THE BOMBAY BEACH RESORT, the sign says. The vibe is nostalgic, carefree. But where is the water? You turn around and around. On every side of you, dust. Above you, the flat, hard sky. That’s when you see the other billboard. This one’s more minimalist. Just a few palm trees and some lettering. BOMBAY BEACH, it reads. THE LAST RESORT! You aren’t sure if it’s a welcome or a warning.
You feel as if you’ve stepped back in time, into a place people have forgotten. The town isn’t large—a little over a half-mile square, its dirt roads named with numbers and letters. But it’s big enough to be a lot of things at once. On some streets, you could be forgiven for thinking no one lived here. Old trailer homes sigh on their blocks, their screen doors rusted and hanging. A sign announcing BOMBAY BEACH ESTATES sits next to a huddle of concrete buildings, their doors and windows gone, their abundant graffiti tending toward alien iconography. The scene reads like a developer’s erstwhile dream, and a homeowners association’s worst nightmare.
But the sense of ruin is not uniform. Here and there, the feeling of absence is replaced by a strange sort of presence. On one street, someone has lined up a series of junked vintage cars to face a movie screen. The cars are empty. The vibe: rapture at the drive-in. Down the road, old TVs have been stacked side by side, their screens painted with abstract shapes. On the roof of a nearby house, there sits, inexplicably, a giant sculpted egg. The scene puts you in mind of Whitman. Does it contradict itself? Very well, then: It contradicts itself. The town contains multitudes…
Sanders elaborates, via the tale of her visit to the Bombay Beach Biennale and her accounts of the remarkable people she met and things she saw there, concluding…
… We saw the tollbooth on our way out of town. It was wooden, and the boom gate was the skeleton of a fish—the unofficial mascot of Bombay. There was a sign hanging in the window. STOP, it said. PAY TOLL FOR RE-ENTRY TO THE REAL WORLD. Someone had crossed out REAL and written NIGHTMARE. We stopped and gave a donation to a bored-looking teen, who handed us our reentry pass. “This ticket buys your return to everything you were running from” was printed on it.
As we drove past the Ski Inn, I saw the billboard again. BOMBAY BEACH. THE LAST RESORT! As in: our last chance. As in: our final effort.
Perhaps it was because of all the talking with Tao and Wanda and Mark, but I found myself in a philosophical frame of mind. I thought of Sean Guerrero’s driftwood ship, the Tetanus Tatanka, made of various pieces of the past. That got me thinking of the ship of Theseus. In Greek mythology, it’s said that the people of Athens honored the memory of one of their greatest heroes by preserving his ship for many years. When one board rotted, they replaced it; when the mast listed, they replaced that. The ship hangs on in our collective memory less as an object and more as a philosophical conundrum. If the ship is always changing—always being changed—is it still the same ship?
Suddenly I felt a chill amid the heat. The landscape swerved, became surreal, uncanny. I closed my eyes, and the sea came up to my ankles. I opened them and the sea retreated again. All at once I entered a perpetual present. It is 2025, and there are cormorant nests made of bird bones out on Mullet Island; it is 1965 and the Beach Boys water-ski on a glimmering sea. It is five million years ago and the Colorado River has just gotten going; it is two million years later, and it is pushing over its berm, flooding the Salton Sink. It is hundreds of years ago and the fires of the Cahuilla people dot the edge of a giant lake; it is the turn of the nineteenth century and the first white farmer is planting his stick on the riverbank, saying, “Mine; this water is mine.” There are buffalo back east somewhere, their bodies massed and vital on the plains. Then the settlers kill the buffalo and there are none left. The world, as Irondad suggested, is always ending and always beginning, and we are always trapped and always about to break free.
I knew at once that this dream was not supposed to let anyone off the hook—it was not saying that things would be fine, or that we were not responsible for what we’d done or must do. It was more of a desert vision, a mirage induced by heat that made regular objects appear different. The ship of Theseus has long posed a question of persistent identity, of how and when a thing stops being what it once was. But leaving Bombay, I wondered if it could also be a story about how long it takes something to become something else—a new species or a new kind of society. After how many revisions and mistakes, how many repetitions or re-creations of the past? Convivium is a gathering, but it is also a process. Slowly, and in isolation, a group of desert people fumbles its way into a new body, and a new body politic.
“The Last Resort” (or, if impeded, here) from @thebeliever.net.
For those unable (or just unlikely) to make it to the Salton Sea: “Make the Internet Weird Again,” from Zach Frechette.
* Hunter S. Thompson (who also– and more famously– observed that “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”)
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As we dance with destiny, we might spare a thought for Eugène Dubois; he died on this date in 1940. A paleoanthropologist and geologist, he was the first person ever deliberately to search for fossils of human ancestors. He is best remembered for his discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus (later redesignated Homo erectus), or “Java Man.” Estimated to be between 700,000 and 1,490,000 years old, it was, at the time of its discovery, the oldest hominid fossil ever found, and it remains the type specimen for Homo erectus… an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene.
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