In short
Cal Newport argues that “curated conversation platforms” (Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads, Facebook) are fundamentally harmful and that the most reasonable response for most people is to quit social media for good. He claims the harms are connected as a “slope of terribleness” that starts with distraction, leads to demoderation (tribal dehumanization), and can end in disassociation (nihilism or rage), sometimes contributing to political violence.
Guest backgrounds
No guest is introduced. The episode is hosted by Cal Newport, with discussion involving Jesse (likely a co-host/producer) and listener questions.
Key claims
- Algorithms optimized for engagement drive addictive use via dopamine-linked motivation loops.
- Algorithmic curation creates echo-chamber effects and intensifies tribal “us vs them” dynamics.
- Disassociation can enable nihilistic violence; the FBI term “nihilistic violent extremist” is cited.
- There is no “safe” version of these platforms because conversation plus algorithmic curation is the core design.
- Even if you avoid the worst outcomes, resisting the slope costs mental energy and reduces flourishing.
Notable examples
- Newport’s newsletter post after Charlie Kirk’s assassination drew ~200 email replies and ~100 comments, which he says motivated quitting.
- Derek Thompson (Atlantic) is quoted about socially isolated men and “a vote for destruction.”
- Mentions mass violence and “nihilistic” shooters; also references platforms like Gab/Rumble/Kick/Discord as “below ground.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VODefining Curated Conversation Platforms
2:50 to 4:39
Cal defines what curated conversation platforms entail and why they matter.
“Today's episode, The Case for Quitting Social Media.”
Identifying Common Harms of Social Media
4:39 to 7:50
Cal outlines the key harms associated with curated conversation platforms and their implications.
“All right, so let's talk about these curated conversation platforms.”
Public Perceptions of Social Media Harms
7:50 to 9:18
Exploration of how individuals perceive the harms of social media and their rationalizations for continued use.
“Well, this is because if you ask people how these harms affect them, they're going to give an answer that looks something like this.”
The Slope of Terribleness Model
9:18 to 13:18
Cal introduces the 'slope of terribleness' as a model to understand the progression of harms from social media use.
“And I think that response goes a long way to explaining why we're sort of stuck, why more people aren't making major changes about the role of these technologies in their lives.”
Understanding Distraction and Its Impact
13:18 to 14:00
Discussion on how distraction from curated platforms affects brain chemistry and behavior.
“But actually, this slope of terribleness and the tendency to slide down it is actually fundamental to how these technologies function.”
The Impact of Algorithmically Curated Content
14:00 to 16:45
Explore how algorithms influence our motivation and engagement with content.
“weighted data points in a multidimensional space, but it figures out what type of content is engaging for you because that's how they make their money.”
Echo Chambers and Tribal Community Circuits
16:45 to 19:07
Understand the effects of echo chambers and tribalism on our perspectives.
“The way these algorithms actually work, and I don't want to be too technical, but basically they have these huge multi-dimensional points.”
Demoderation: The Slippery Slope
19:07 to 21:29
Learn about demoderation and its consequences on social interaction and mental health.
“Those tribal community circuits are incredibly powerful because throughout most of our modern history as a homo sapien, so let's go back two to three hundred thousand years, this is how we survived.”
The Unavoidable Nature of Technology's Impact
21:29 to 23:50
Discuss why the negative effects of social media are built into its design.
“Think about the push to dehumanize that other group.”
Finding Alternatives to Social Media
23:50 to 27:50
Consider ways to engage and connect without relying on curated platforms.
“Does that look like a mountain climber holding on, Jesse?”
Show all 22 chapters
The Slope of Terribleness
28:01 to 29:15
Cal discusses the negative impacts of curated conversation platforms.
“To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with curated conversation platforms.”
Upcoming Discussions
29:15 to 29:40
Cal introduces upcoming topics and listener questions about social media.
“There's a lot more coming in this episode.”
Reactions to Social Media Discussion
29:57 to 34:19
Cal and Jesse discuss public reactions and personal experiences with social media.
“People are like, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's bad.”
Addressing Youth and Social Media
34:19 to 36:26
Cal talks about the challenges parents face with their children's social media use.
“you are dangerous for saying social media in any way is bad, to I completely agree with you, but I need a push to actually take action on it.”
Navigating YouTube Content Creation
36:26 to 42:00
Cal provides insights on creating content for YouTube and the potential pitfalls.
“I think you skipped a word and said middle-aged son.”
Navigating YouTube's Algorithm: The Challenge of Capture
42:00 to 46:20
Learn about the challenges of using YouTube for independent media creation and the risks of algorithmic capture.
“So here's how I would think about YouTube.”
The Social Media Takeover of Web 2.0
46:20 to 53:25
Explore how social media companies transformed the Web 2.0 landscape and the implications of their dominance.
“Is the like, come on, what we need is to learn how to like use whatever it is, you know, responsibly.”
Case Study: A Musician's Journey with Social Media
53:25 to 56:00
Hear a musician's experience with social media, its impact on creativity, and the trade-off between relevance and artistic integrity.
“can do with it and one that happens to create a slope of terribleness that we all hate so no i I don't think social media is fundamental.”
The Shifting Landscape of Social Media
56:00 to 1:02:20
Explore how the nature of social media has transformed from community interaction to algorithm-driven content.
“of a shallow content rather than the kind, deep, thoughtful, artistic work that nourishes the soul.”
Regulatory Responses to Social Media Issues
1:02:20 to 1:10:01
Discuss the government's role and regulatory approaches towards social media platforms and their impact on users.
“Well, there is some news about this that I want to get into about some recent news about Congress taking on some of these issues of social media.”
The Legal Responsibility of Media vs. Social Media
1:10:01 to 1:13:26
Explore the differences in liability between traditional media and social media platforms.
“If they say something to defame someone, they can be sued, right?”
Cultural Change Towards Social Media Use
1:13:27 to 1:16:16
Discuss the need for a cultural shift in how society views social media engagement.
“The most important thing we could do, though, is cultural.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02Two days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I sent a short essay to my newsletter. I wrote it in about 15 minutes, but it was about as raw or as pointed as I ever get. The essay started like this. Those of us who study online culture like to use the phrase, Twitter is not real life. But as we saw yet again this week, when the digital discourses fostered on services like Twitter or Blue Sky or TikTok do intersect with the real world, whether they originate from the left or the right, the results are often horrific. This should tell us all we need to know about these platforms. They are toxic and dehumanizing.
0:40They are responsible as much as any other force for the unraveling of civil society that seems to be accelerating. All right, then later in the essay, I reached the following conclusion. After troubling national events, there's often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond Well, here's one option to consider. Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news or spread ideas or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things, someone who serves real people in the real world. And in the over two decades or so that I've been writing that newsletter, I don't think I've ever received as large or as positive of a response as I did for that post.
1:23I'm at something like 200 email replies and counting and nearly 100 comments. The vast majority of this feedback is saying the same thing. Thank you. This was the final push I needed to finally quit these apps. Now, this got me thinking. Our biggest problem with social media right now is not convincing people that it's bad. People know this. People don't love these platforms. They don't defend them the way they used to. But they're stuck in a sort of purgatory where they know it's bad, but they're not sure exactly why or whether it's something that maybe could be fixed or maybe something that's worse for other people than it is for them.
1:59So they stay where they are. They stay in the status quo, waiting for someone to push them into a different pattern. Well, today I want to provide that push. I'm going to put on my technocritic professor hat and provide a precise and detailed explanation of how exactly the worst of these platforms impact us and why these problems are fundamental to these technologies and not something that we can easily fix. I want to give you the ironclad case for why the most reasonable response for most people is to do what I recommend in my essay, to quit for good. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.
2:50Today's episode, The Case for Quitting Social Media.
2:59All right, so we need to start our conversation here by defining some terms. The phrase social media can mean a lot of things, and then that creates confusion because you might have one thing in mind and someone else has something else. So let's get really specific. Today, I'm going to be referring to a specific class of social apps that I call curated conversation platforms. So these are platforms in which you have a lot of people joining in conversation, be it through text, images, or video, using curation algorithms based on optimizing engagement to help select what each individual user sees.
3:37So some obvious examples of curated conversation platforms include Twitter and Blue Sky and Threads and Facebook. Those are classic. There's other things that people call social media that don't fit into this particular category. So probably like Pinterest doesn't fall into there. It's not a conversation platform so much as you're looking at things that people posted. Snapchat doesn't fall into here. It's a conversation platform, but it's not algorithmically curated. It's you talking to groups of other people. WhatsApp wouldn't fall into here either. Again, it's not algorithmically curated as conversation, but not a massive platform.
4:10And then there's some platforms where depending on how you use them could fall into this category or not. So I think things like Instagram or YouTube, depending on how you use them, could fall into the category of what we're talking about today or not. So just to be clear about our definitions. Now, I want to focus on curated conversation platforms in particular because I think they lead to uniquely awful harms. I also think they are the social platform most responsible for the rise in violence that we've been seeing recently, be it political or otherwise. All right, so let's talk about these curated conversation platforms.
4:45What are the harms? If you ask people, hey, what's wrong with Twitter, Blue Sky, or Threads? What are the harms that we care about? They'll eventually probably list some combination of the following three things. I'll put these up on the screen for those who are watching instead of just listening. They're probably going to say, okay, distraction. That's a common harm. This is the one I talk about a lot in my books on this show. It's the idea that there's an addictive element to these platforms so that we use them more than is healthy and to the detriment of other things that we seem to be are important in our life.
5:17Another harm people will often mention if you talk about these platforms is demoderation. This is where you begin to lose any sense of moderation around a given issue. It's where you become increasingly strident, see less room for good faith or even basic humanity on the other side of the issue in question. There's a lot of tribalism when it comes to demoderation. You become part of a tribe that's fighting some sort of epic fight. So because of these stakes, there's a lot of sort of furious policing of your own tribe. The third harm we often hear about these things is what I call disassociation.
5:47And this is where things really get scary. This is where you begin to make a complete break from normal associations with human community. You lose connection to normative ethical constraints. This is the state in which violence to others or to yourself becomes a possibility or where you become numbed to seeing such violence being perpetrated against others. There's really two major flavors of dissociation. There's one that's based around overwhelming rage. Well, I am so mad I have to take action regardless of the consequences. The other flavor of disassociation where it leads is nihilistic withdrawal.
6:23The idea that the world is so dark and unredeemable and meaningless that you might as well cause some chaos on the way out. This nihilistic variation of disassociation is one that we've really been feeling the consequences of recently. Earlier this year, the FBI began using a new term when talking about mass violence incidents. They call it nihilistic violent extremist. It's become so common to have violence caused by a sense of nihilism that there's a new term for it that the FBI uses. Part of the issue with nihilistic withdrawal is that if it is online platforms that have driven you to disassociation, you begin to think, oh, all that matters is attention and respect on online platforms.
7:10Here's Derek Thompson writing in an Atlantic piece that he wrote a couple years ago. So for many socially isolated men in particular for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens and empty rooms, a vote for destruction is a politics of last result, a way to leave one's mark on a world where collective progress or collective support of any kind feels impossible. Right. So online disassociation can lead to violence because you're like, why not? And the only thing that really matters is views. And this will get me attention. All right. So these are the harms that people would normally talk about.
7:41If you then say to someone, all right, given these harms of curated conversation platforms, why are you still using them? Why don't more people quit? Well, this is because if you ask people how these harms affect them, they're going to give an answer that looks something like this. And Jesse, we can take this off the screen for now. They'll say something like, I may suffer a bit from distraction. Like most people will cop to that. Yeah, I use these more than is useful, but I could probably get that under control with some better habits or I can break my phone or something like that. Then they'll say typically, yeah, the demoderation thing, that is a problem, not really for me, but for the other tribes.
8:19It's like whatever groups I'm affiliated with, we're just being reasonable. We're reasonably upset and we're kind of right. But the other – I get it. Other people on the other side, they have problems with demoderation. Probably the fix for that is depending on what side of the political spectrum I'm on. Maybe it's something about more aggressive content moderation. So if they don't see the crazy stuff, they won't act so demoderated. Or maybe it's a community notes. Like, well, if we could just correct things that are false, then people would be a little bit more reasonable. But that's kind of a other person problem.
8:47And then disassociation. Well, people would say, yeah, that's scary for sure. Like, look at these nihilistic extremists. That's scary. But that's not even really happening on the platforms I use. Like when I think about whenever I hear about these mass shooters, you always hear about them being on like Rumble or Kick or on some sort of like Groiper server on Discord, these sort of weird semi-dark web type platforms. So maybe we should shut those down, but what does that have to do with me? That's sort of how people respond to these harms. And I think that response goes a long way to explaining why we're sort of stuck, why more people aren't making major changes about the role of these technologies in their lives.
9:29But here's the thing. Is that interpretation of these harms right? I don't think it is. What I want to do here is outline a different way of understanding how these curated conversation platforms hurt you. And it's going to be a way of understanding them that is not going to let you off the hook so easily. All right, I'm going to do some drawing here, so beware. If you're listening, you might want to turn on the YouTube version to see my brilliant art. All right, so what I have up here on the screen is the three harms we talked about. Distraction, demoderation, and disassociation. The right way to think about how we interact with these is to imagine that there is a slope.
10:12So I'm going to start drawing a slope. I'm going to start. I've got to get my artist hat on. Starting with distraction, we start sloping downhill. And then we'll switch over to demoderation. That slope continues. Then finally, we get to disassociation. That slope continues. And I'm going to draw here a sort of dividing line between, you know, label this here. Mainstream. Oh, look at that handwriting, Jesse. Woo! Woo! Mainstream internet on top, dark web below. All right, so let me explain this beautiful picture I just drew. It's pretty colorful, actually. I give myself a lot of credit for that.
10:57It's a slope sloping downhill. It starts in the distraction zone, then the slope goes through the demoderation zone, and then finally the slope goes through the disassociation zone. I've drawn a ground across this slope diagram. So right around the place we go from demoderation to disassociation, the slope goes underground. above ground is like mainstream internet below ground now we're in the world um sort of of the dark web so let me explain my model here when you first start using these type of curated conversation platforms it's pretty easy to fall onto the slope that is into the zone of distraction so you sort of fall into the top of the slope where you're like you know what i'm using this probably too much i'm using this a lot whatever my platform poison of choice is i'm kind of on this more that it's healthy, right?
11:46Like, oh, this is not good. You know me, I'm addicted to my phone. So we're kind of in that territory. Here's the thing though. You start sliding and you're in this distraction zone long enough. Gravity is going to pull you down into the demoderation portion of the slope. And now you're not just using these services too much. You're demoderating. You're losing your ability to see the other side, any sort of good faith. you find yourself in dehumanizing tendencies i just hate those people i can't anyone who supports this person i just can't even imagine that right like they are wrong and wait a second wait a second you're on my team you said the wrong thing there don't you realize we have we're at war here we have to close ranks all that begins to happen and it gets worse and worse as you slide down the slope if you continue down the slope and the pressure is pulling here you'll end up in the disassociation zone where you say you know what uh screw it right the world is unredeemable and once you're down here is where people bounce off of the primary mainstream platforms you begin to bounce off those into like whatever mixture of things like gab or kick or rumble like now you kind of like end up roaming around these barely regulated sort of wild west semi-dark web type services and that's where like the really bad stuff happens this is i call this the slope of terribleness this is actually the right way to understand these harms they're all connected you start with one but gravity's pulling you down towards the next and then towards the next now your question might be can we fix this maybe if we just fix these services there's a way that we can we can maybe put up some roadblocks on the slope of terribleness and prevent this from happening but i want to argue that actually this is not the side effect of some mistakes in the way these services were implemented that can be fixed.
13:34But actually, this slope of terribleness and the tendency to slide down it is actually fundamental to how these technologies function. Let me get a little bit into this. All right, let's start with distraction. You start using a curated conversation platform. Part of the problem is the curation means that the algorithm is looking for engaging material. What actually catches your attention? Whatever that is, it will get pretty good at finding that it represents it as sort of weighted data points in a multidimensional space, but it figures out what type of content is engaging for you because that's how they make their money.
14:07Now, the issue with this is the stuff you're seeing on the phone is very compelling. This will pretty soon begin to overwhelm your short-term motivation centers in your brain. So we have these circuits in our brain that are making predictions. They're looking at activities that are available to you in the moment, and they're making predictions based off past learning, what are the different outcomes going to be of these various short-term activities? And if the brain has learned, oh, there's a really positive outcome that's going to happen for a particular activity, you get a flood of dopamine in that motivation circuit, which activates it and then makes that activity seem irresistible, right?
14:46This is something we often get wrong about dopamine. I noticed this in the governor of Utah, Spencer Cox's comments in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination. A lot of people think of dopamine as a pleasure chemical of like, oh, once you do something, you get a splash of dopamine and it feels good. No, no, no. It's a motivation chemical. So these short-term motivation circuits have learned through past experience. For example, when I eat that cookie, there's all of these things I feel that are good. And the circuits learn from that. And they say, great, when I see a cookie again, dopamine will activate that circuit because that circuit recognizes the cookie and give me a sense of intense motivation to eat it well algorithmically curated content really plays to those circuits very well and if you're using the phone all the time you build a very strong prediction circuit that when it says a phone is nearby dopamine dopamine dopamine in that circuit saying pick up that phone and look at it we're going to see something that's going to cause a reaction that's interesting be it pleasurable or outrage but it's going to be interesting an interesting reaction that is very very strong and the problem is the phone is always with you so that circuit is just constantly being bathed in dopamine it becomes very very hard you can resist it sometimes but it becomes very hard to consistently resist it so you go back to using those services again and again and again that's just the basic sort of feedback reinforcement loop it would be like trying to quit cigarettes you're like look i don't want to smoke but i'm going to carry in my hand at all times, a pack of cigarettes that's right there.
16:16That's a very hard way to cut back on smoking because those circuits are constantly being bathed in dopamine saying that will give us a reward. You need to smoke it. All right. So just fundamental brain chemistry, you have algorithmically curated content accessible in your hand at all times. You're going to use that more than you want to. So that's how you begin sliding down that distraction slope. As soon as you begin in any sort of regular way, using one of these curated platforms. why does this bring us into demoderation well two things happen with these platforms once you start using them all the time another side effect of the algorithmic curation is the echo chamber effect and we say this sort of loosely like oh don't be in an echo chamber but i'm saying it in a sort of a techno determinist sort of way it is a unavoidable side effect of an algorithmically curated information experience.
17:08The way these algorithms actually work, and I don't want to be too technical, but basically they have these huge multi-dimensional points. So just large vectors of numbers that's described as an embedding of content into, think of it as like a bunch of little descriptions. I have a thousand categories I can use when I'm trying to describe something. And I take a thing and I go through and give it a number in each of these categories. And that combination like describes it really well and what it does is it learns spaces the multi-dimensional spaces in which these preference vectors exist it sort of learns these regions where content here does really well with this person that creates an echo chamber i mean it's not no one's sitting there programming create echo chamber execute or there's an echo chamber knob it is just an unavoidable consequence of using this type of i'm going to observe your engagement and then use that to try to figure out where in the space of possible content things create the most engagement.
18:05So you're going to start seeing a lot of stuff that's similar. So if there's something you lean towards on an issue, you're going to be seeing a lot more of stuff about that side of the issue. And you're going to see stuff that's more and more engaging within that space, which typically would be the stuff that's a little bit more strident. We like that. Okay. The other issue is, so we're hearing kind of the same stuff, algorithmic echo chamber. These are conversation platforms. Remember I mentioned it's important that it's people conversing, not just like you consuming content from experts. That is going to fire up in your mind the tribal community circuits.
18:41Yeah, these are these people that we're talking back and forth. I'm in community, the social circuits come up. So you have echo chambers plus tribal community circuits fired up and these things come together and they create in your mind this virtual tribe that has a very strong cause. That's where demoderation comes from. It's not a lack of willpower on your point. It's not a sort of knob that can be turned in the algorithms that run these social networks. It is an unescapable consequence of how these platforms function. Those tribal community circuits are incredibly powerful because throughout most of our modern history as a homo sapien, so let's go back two to three hundred thousand years, this is how we survived.
19:21Our tribe was everything. The other tribes we had to be very very suspicious of it you are not from my tribe my tribe is what matters if you're not i worry that you are gonna you're gonna kill me or steal our food i do not like you and i need to be there's nothing more compelling than those tribal community circuits you can think of like the entire history of of human civilization you've all harari's good about how we used abstractions to do this is an effort to try to overcome the tribal community circuits that are so deep in our mind. And this is basically the point of the book Sapiens, if you want to sort of go down a rabbit hole here, is that humans' abilities to organize around abstract causes in tribes basically hijacked our tribal circuits and allowed us to expand the scope to which they applied them.
20:08So now they could apply to like our entire country or everyone who shares a religion as what allowed humans to work together in large numbers, which was key to our success. That is Yuval Harari's argument. But the point is, our success came from figuring out how do we actually like hijack overwhelm or otherwise redirect these tribal circuits because they are so strong curated conversation platforms just get back to paleolithic let's go right and that's where that demoderation is so strong and it's not because oh that's a a bug in the system we need to turn that off so i can get the real value out of these platforms it is the value for most people that is what's creating the most engagement that's the thing that's feeding into our to the addiction loop on it.
20:50So it's very difficult to avoid demoderation if you're using these things a lot. All right, but now here's the problem. The more increasingly demoderated you get, and look in the mirror, you know you are. Like whatever issue it is you care about. These tribes are almost, by the way, random what you end up echo chambered in. It's like your slight preferences plus whatever the algorithm pushed you in. Like it could be pretty arbitrary. But just think about right now, whether it's like it's political and you're like on the left and thinking about MAGA people or you're on the right and you're thinking about like the blue hair people or you're like a super health mom who's thinking about, man, these pharmaceutical companies are poisoning my kids because they don't care or whatever the issue is, right?
21:32Think about the push to dehumanize that other group. Like, man, they're just terrible. Look at this stuff I'm reading. I just cannot imagine how they exist. When you are in that mindset, you keep sliding down the slope of terribleness that is what eventually gets you to disassociation because you get to a point where you say the other thing the side i don't like is so terrible and yet nothing is happening about it we're not you know cutting off half the country or whatever it is like they're not seeing that i'm just right and changing their views to align with mine and no one seems to care uh or whatever the issue is and it nihilism either nihilism or rage follows Like, I just, I can't fathom this and it sort of breaks it.
22:15To make matters worse, especially if you're younger, a side effect of a conversation platform is that it's taking the place of actual human interaction. So you're also going to become more actually socially isolated. So huge demoderation plus more of social isolation, whether you're young. This also happens a lot with older people as well who are sort of retired and older in life. Man, that gets you to disassociation. before you know it you're showing up at comma pete comet pizza uh you know someone's got to free the kids from the secret caves underneath or your nihilistic shooter one thing leads to another and it is built in to the technology so we can't fix this you can't this is not there's no version of twitter that doesn't have this because the point is is the two things that drive this is the fact that it's people coming together it's virtual interaction that it's algorithmically curated.
23:08You turn it off, you don't have those services. You can't have a version of those services without conversation and algorithmic curation. That is the service. That's like saying to Pizza Hut, look, we don't want to put you out of business, but is there a way you can exist without selling pizza? That's what we do. This is what these conversational algorithmic platforms do. You have a huge number of people come together onto a platform to have conversation. You have to have algorithmic curation because what else are you going to do you have 500 million people submitting tweets a day you have to curate it and if you're going to curate it you're going to curate it on like what people want to see and you put those forces together you slide down the slope of terribleness so there is no technological fix to this it is a unavoidable side effect of these technologies all right so you're probably saying yes but i'm not going to end up at the bottom of this slope i've used these things most people don't a lot of people use these services but they don't end up on you know rumble or groyper discord servers right and it's true you can resist the pull of gravity but let's think about what that costs i'm going to bring up this picture one more time on here so we have the slope of terribleness here um so yes i'm going to draw a little picture here it is true you can you know So at some point, hold on.
24:29I don't know. Does that look like a mountain climber holding on, Jesse? Yeah. I'm doing something. All right. So you can arrest your fall at some point. But here's the issue. There's two issues with this, right? Number one, imagine over here we have a scale. Think about this as like a scale of flourishing, right? The higher up you're on the scale, the more you're flourishing as a human. I'll label that flourishing. i'll pull that down there so here's the problem yes you stop yourself somewhere on the slope of terribleness but the farther you've gone down the lower you've gone down on the scale of flourishing but maybe you arrest your stop somewhere here in the demoderation area but you've arrested your life in a place that's worse you're flourishing less than if you weren't on the slope at all to make matters worse resisting further slide down this slope requires a lot of mental energy to not be demoderated when you're using the services all the time requires like a real application of will when you're demoderated the not to make that final slide towards disassociation requires a lot of will to be fully disassociated and resist the call to come join other disassociated people who understand your disaffection on these sort of dark web type services that takes a lot of mental energy so yes you can maybe prevent yourself and most people do of course from getting to the bottom of the slope of terribleness but they get stuck in a place where they have reduced flourishing and it's eating up a lot of mental energy that you could otherwise be spending on stuff that matters to you more in your life so why is this worth it to be less happy and to waste huge amounts of mental energy needed to prevent yourself from descending into what is essentially a sort of living hell once you realize the real dynamics at play here it becomes hard to justify why you're still spending time with these curated conversational platforms so you want to stay up to date on the news, subscribe to actual media.
26:25You want to hear information that you think is otherwise being suppressed? All right. Subscribe to newsletter, subscribe to podcast, do the old fashioned work of here is a real individual. Here is why I think they are a good person to listen to. Here is their credentials. Here's how they convinced me. And I will listen to them writing out a thing once a week and there's no curation and it's not conversation. Great. Do that. The internet can help you here. You don't have to be on the curated conversation platforms you want to be a part of something that's great being on those platforms just tricks you into thinking you're a part of something you're not you imagine often if you're engaged in combat on these platforms you imagine you're at the front of the crowd marching on that that bridge from selma in reality you're in an attention factory punching with your time clock while your billionaire overseers laugh as their net worth goes up due to your efforts you want to be a part of something actually go be a part of something not on a screen.
27:19And maybe you're using it because you're bored. Find better entertainment. Even on your phone, there's better high quality entertainment. Do whatever. It literally almost anything else. I know it presses these buttons. Find other things to press the buttons. You can listen to podcasts, read newsletters, read books, watch movies. You have streaming media. You have literally something like a half a trillion dollars worth of CapEx expense and entertainment available at your fingertips for like$30 a month. Like there's plenty of other things you can do to not be bored that doesn't put you on the slope of terribleness.
27:50All right. So that's the way I see these things. So what we do here, like we always do, is move on to our takeaways section. Yes, we have a little takeaway music here. We do. Let's hear this.
28:13all right so let's get to my takeaways here when it comes to these curated conversation platforms we've been telling ourselves a reassuring story yeah they're not great but most of the worst harms don't impact me and you know there's some nice benefits what's the rush to change but in reality these harms are all connected to a common slope of terribleness you use them and you'll start sliding down this slope it'll make your life worse as you move further you'll likely stop yourself eventually before you get to the hellish bottom but this resistance requires energy mental energy you could be spending on things that matter or people you love this trade-off is not worth it I want to end this deep dive by reading from the conclusion of the essay that I published on my newsletter a couple weeks ago.
28:59Here's how I ended that essay. To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with curated conversation platforms. We tried them. They became dark and awful. It's time to move on. Enough is enough. All right, so there we have it. There's a lot more coming in this episode. I'm going to talk to Jesse about his reactions to this deep dive. And then we have a collection of questions from my listeners about exactly this issue of social media in their life. So we'll get into how people are grappling with this. So stay tuned. But first, we just need to take a quick break to talk about one of the show's sponsors.
29:40All right. So what do you think? Slope of terribleness? Is that going to catch on? I like the colors. I'm a great artist is what I think the – what it is there. I mean, what I was trying to do there, Jesse, is, you know, this is what I noticed in the reaction to my emails, the email I sent out. People are like, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's bad. But they needed a push. And it's one of these things where just people knowing, like, I think this thing is bad doesn't always lead to action. They need to know why is it bad. And in this case, this is what I think is going on. This is why it's bad. It's because you're constantly being pulled down this slope.
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30:13And it's like hard to – it feels bad. The farther you go, the worse your life is. and to stop from going to hell, you have to expend all of this energy. And the question is like, well, why? What about Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest? How do they factor in? Yeah, so what I was saying earlier where it depends on how you use these things, the things that made the slope inevitable was it's conversational and it's algorithmic curation. So that's why I didn't include, Pinterest is probably not there because it's not really conversational. Like you were looking at a board that someone else made, but you don't feel like you're, So it doesn't activate those community circuits necessarily.
30:50YouTube or Instagram, I think it depends on how you use it. So Instagram, and I guess LinkedIn would be similar. One way that you use it, it tends to have a higher concentration of a sort of like expert community. Like, oh, Instagram is where I go because there's like a comedian. I want to see their funny videos and like a really fit guy. And I want to see fitness advice or like authors. I know a lot of authors on there. Like, yeah, I like, I like their writing. I want to see, you know, like clips from Brian Holiday or whatever. because I like his writing. So there's more of that non-interactive element to the lot of way people use Instagram.
31:23So you can get the compelling aspect, which is a problem, but without that, we're all kind of conversing about things or giving our takes. It can arrest that slope way earlier. Now, some people, if you're using Reels and like getting to certain corners of Instagram, it can have that problem. YouTube is sort of the same thing. Like a lot of people use it as I listen to podcasts on there. There are certain creators I like and I use it like a cable channel. like hey i want to see like the the latest cal newport podcast or something again there's no interactive conversation but if you're like on youtube streams and you're in the comments like there's ways to use it where you can get some of the slope of terribleness effects but it's really like the the offenders that drive people all the way down the slope into the place where like nihilism or rage-based violence comes out the pure algorithmic conversation platforms i don't know i think those those are probably the worst offenders you've kind of been mentioning this theme for multiple years did you used to get a ton of hate mail about it yeah i mean it's weird how this how this changed right like it used to be because i've been on this beat for a long time uh what's going on why do we all feel like we have to use social media i don't think early on i was saying it's going to lead to violence that's kind of that things got worse but i'd never bought this idea that these were ubiquitous technologies that we all have to use because i was a big early internet booster.
32:41I liked the early internet. I liked the internet as a concept. I didn't like the idea that three companies were going to take over the internet and to use the internet meant we had to use an app by like from one of like a small number of companies to, you know, enrich a very small number of people that was sort of like anti-internet. So a lot of early internet people were very suspicious of social media. I used to get yelled at. People say, no, no, no. They'll defend social media. Like, no, these things are bad. I mean, it's bad to not use it. These things are great it's you know whatever it is it's how you're going to meet new people and new ideas it's where activism exists it's going to bring democracy to the middle east and then as things got worse i really usually around 2016 17 people stopped defending them like well yeah there's some problems here but i still get some benefits but you know if you don't use them good for you right and now i think with the political violence that's again clearly being driven by these now people are like no i don't i have let's let's go let's get i have no i'm i agree like these are bad but they're stuck and i think the reason why they're stuck is this analysis of like there's all of these harms most of them don't affect me they can probably be fixed but the things that affect me are more minor and like so i i'm in no hurry to leave i probably should because when you see these as isolated harms and i'm only affected by the distraction harm not these you're like yeah or whatever.
34:03I'm distracted by a lot of things. But when you see them connected as a slope, you're like, no, no, no, no, that distraction is pulling you down a slope, and it's going to keep pulling you down there, and it's going to get worse and worse until you have to expend a huge amount of energy to try to stop your descent. So it's interesting how it's moved from you are dangerous for saying social media in any way is bad, to I completely agree with you, but I need a push to actually take action on it. So I've been talking about this for a long time, but what I've been focusing on has really shifted. I mean, my early Facebook articles were just me responding to people, what they thought were like airtight arguments for why you had to use Facebook.
34:42I had these early essays where I would just go through their arguments and be like, I don't think that's true or like, that's not, there's other ways to do that. I mean, it was basically, you know, a lot of, I don't think you need to use Facebook and people like you are crazy. And I would say, explain why i need to use it and they're like well this or that or this and i would just very calmly be like i mean that's not a great argument you know i that doesn't make me want to it's weird it's this what i'm clicking and relationship status and there's these like buttons like this is weird you need a better argument than this so that's how i started pictures of dogs pictures of dogs poking a lot of poking going on early facebook i was like i'm a girl we're poking each other on a computer screen come on people you gotta use these things because it's it's uh i mean it took like six minutes for people to be like all hiring and business happens on social media and there's no other way that people will ever discover you hire you or you'll ever find a client again it took like six minutes before people were convinced if you do not have videos on instagram there is no way your dental practice can succeed like we got there so quickly i was like well how do we ever have commerce before before we had social media all right so i want to hear what you uh the audience has to think as well so jesse we pulled some questions here from the audience about this topic yeah let's hear what uh you my listeners wanted to know or are wondering about this all right first questions from sarah my middle-aged son has a smartphone i told him we'd be using access controls on it until he goes to high school I know the obvious sites and apps to block, but I worry that I'm missing some of the more fringe options that young men seem to get lost on.
36:25Is there some up-to-date list somewhere on what I should be blocking? You know what's sad? I think you skipped a word and said middle-aged son. But you know what? That would also be a relevant question. My middle-aged son is on social media too much. I mean that's kind of part of the problem. Middle school age. But I could see an older mom being like, yeah, my middle-aged son is in the basement. And he's like the captain of his, I don't know video games well, his Mario League. What's the one where they command gun, whatever, Call of Duty? He's just on Call of Duty and doing social media all the time.
37:02All right, so middle school age son. This actually is a good question, right? Is when you got to the bottom of that slope of terribleness, where the transition into violence happens is where you then sort of ski slope off the bottom into these much less regulated platforms. that just don't care. They're usually funded by things like gambling advertisements and whatever. They're funded in sort of shady ways and they get closed down a lot and then other ones open up, right? And this is kind of a problem. It's like, okay, if I'm running the blocks, like here's the sites you can't use, how am I supposed to know about the latest sites where disaffected young men are finding themselves?
37:41I have a couple points here. One, I don't know. So your model for phone moderation with your kids is not actually the model that I would typically recommend. So just to cover what I would typically recommend would be no phone in middle school, no smartphone. You can have a dumb phone. Logistics, sure. Not yours, but you can take it if you need to take the bus or something and you need it in case of emergencies. But the model I would normally push is no smartphone until high school. That smartphone is going to be really locked down until 16, and then we'll take a lot of that off, and that's when you can begin.
38:14And you've gone through puberty. You've established your social identity. You've established your social circles. You're just older. And now we're going to start giving you sort of more free reign. All right. So during that period where you have a smartphone, but it's highly restricted, how do you find these sort of sites that are at the bottom of the slope of terribleness? If you understand the slope of terribleness, I think it changes the way you think about this because no one starts at those sites at the bottom, right? No one is like, oh, I don't, I got a smartphone. I can't wait to get on Gab.
38:45I can't wait to go to some weird Discord server where Nick Fuentes is going to be talking about Groeper movement, something like that. You get there by sliding down the slope of terribleness. You start with distraction. You're the 12-year-old who's talking about all these memes you know about. You're kind of clued into fun internet culture, and then that drags you into demoderation. You get into these influence communities, and now you begin to get really caught up in some particular issue or not. And because you're young, you're like, yeah, man, I social groups is everything. I need my group.
39:16I need to fit in. I found my group. This is firing up all of my developing like sort of like early puberty brain networks. This is my group. And then you get disassociated eventually because you're like, I'm so worked up now that like I now, you know, I'm isolated because I'm on here all the time and I'm so worked up about this. I feel like disassociating. And that's when you hear someone in one of the mainstream communities say, hey, hey, hey, hey, the real conversation about this is over here. Like they're the man when you can fill in so many other things for what that means. They're going to censor us, but this is where the real conversation is.
39:48And then that's when you make your way over to the really dark places. So if you are blocking the mainstream curated conversation platforms for your 14-year-old, they're not going to enter the slope. So you don't have to worry as much about these sort of weird – those are weird, weird places. If you wander there fresh, it's like Harry Potter and Nocturne Alley. How do you like that reference, Jesse? I like it. He's like, this is no good. This is no good. The witches have on the weird hats and they're selling the bad spells and Malfoy's doing meth. Like, I got to get out of this alley. It feels like that.
40:28It's like, oh, stranger danger, uncomfortable. It's a weird place. It's not Disneyland. But you got to get there down the slope. So anyways, what I'm trying to say there is if you are preventing until your kid is ready for it, access to the curated conversation platforms, they're not going to probably make their way to the weird things. You have to kind of – the slope has to pull you there. It's not a place where people like to go. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Eric. I have several different jobs, but the one I'm struggling with big time is my job of making YouTube videos.
40:58Two questions. Should I be doing this at all? i'm thinking about your disqualifications and so good they can't ignore you and if it is okay how to organize the deep work required to come up with an idea and script filming it and then editing and publishing it all right so yeah youtube because again we said youtube is in this sort of interesting liminal space right so question number one should you be making youtube videos at all uh as all of my youtube watchers know i think it's a terrible thing to do i guess it depends on i guess it depends on the channel uh if you were doing like maybe if your channel was about you have like a football field with one of those like long-term measuring things that you use to see with the roller so you can see like knockoff yardage to see how far someone throws a ball.
41:43And what you were doing was you were punting puppies from the end zone and seeing who could punt the puppy farther. Yeah, you probably shouldn't be doing that YouTube thing. But if you're doing something useful on YouTube like a deep dive on Harry Potter's Nocturne Alley, I have a lot of questions. Then maybe it's okay. So here's how I would think about YouTube. Video alone is not bad. I think video, independent media in video versus audio, I think independent media itself is something that is valuable. And there's three main forms of independent media. There's writing. We'll see this in things like blogs or newsletters.
42:22There's audio, which you see primarily in podcasts. And there's video. Now, YouTube is the easiest platform to use to sort of make your video seen. And I don't think it by itself is a problem. But what you need to be aware of, if you're creating independent video on YouTube, you have to be very wary of capture. So there is an algorithm lurking on YouTube. It's lurking in the recommendations. And you see this as a creator in those view numbers and those subscriber numbers. And it really – the thing you have to be so careful about is capture, which says I am going to just explore the slope of how do I make those numbers higher and higher and higher.
43:04And then you end up in algorithm land. Now, again, YouTube tends not to be as dangerous for people as these other platforms. It can be, but it tends not to be. But that can put you into – now you're chasing the algorithm. It puts you in this sort of weird sort of engagement farming type of land. and you don't like what you're creating. You don't even feel that strongly about. And it could be sort of hollowed out. I mean, this is what like Mr. Beast did is he just straight up followed what makes more people watch. And then he kept ratcheting that up and ratcheting that up. And where he ended up as the highest subscribed YouTube channel on YouTube is these like multi-million dollar videos where every seven seconds is aimed at, like there's no block of more than seven seconds where there's not something compelling being promised to you or that promise being delivered on.
43:50Like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Visually amazing. Stakes are high, right? So, like, you know, I don't know. It's not terrible. But it's kind of weird where you end up if you follow the algorithm. Or you end up, like, a lot of people, like, in political waters. Like, okay, I'm going to get more stride in on this issue because more people view it. You know? I'm going from I'm Mr. Health Advice to, like, if you look at a vaccine, your child's hair is going to fall out. Because you get more and more, like, attention for it. So you've got to be careful about capture. But if you're producing something you're proud of and you want it to do well, but you're not willing to completely follow the algorithm, then I think it's okay.
44:29In terms of how you actually schedule doing YouTube creation, Jesse will attest to it. I mean it's just time-consuming, right? Don't underestimate. The principle that's at play here is the principle from slow productivity of work at a natural pace. It takes a long time to do this. Don't pretend like it doesn't. just because a youtube video is quick to watch don't delude yourself like yeah i'm going to put aside an hour before work and then after work on friday and that's how i'm going to run my youtube channel you have to think of it like i'm building a chair it take a lot of time i get this wood i gotta plane it and shape it and glue this wait for that to glue i'll clamp this there's a lot of skills involved to come back to it it's going to require a lot of time for me to do so So that's the other thing to keep in mind.
45:12To do this well requires a lot of time. It's not, you know, you're not going to just stumble onto a camera and everyone rushes to watch you. It is brutal. I mean, you'll attest to that, Jesse. It's like impossible to get people to watch things. It's, you know, and you really got to do a good job. So, no, I'm not mad at you for making YouTube videos. Don't get algorithmically captured. And be realistic about how hard it is. It is a major, major commitment. And if you don't have that time, don't pretend like you can squeeze it in. I always tell my kids, don't, you don't want to become a YouTuber.
45:44I was like, it's a, that's a full-time job. It's like, that's a hard job. That's a hard, it's hard to make money. It really is brutal. It's like stressful. You have nothing else to fall back on. There's so many easier ways to make the amount of money that like most full-time YouTubers make, but they have this idea that it's easy and that everyone's making millions of dollars. I'm like six people are making millions of dollars and it's not going to be. But like you said, if you're not using it to make money you can take the slow productivity approach and yeah occasionally put out videos yeah yeah i mean i like independent media but yeah if you think you're gonna become the next mr beast it's a problem all right who else we got another question yep next up is mark i can't help feeling like it's too late to put the social media genie back in the bottle it's fundamental how do we share information on the internet don't we need to focus instead on how to use it better Yeah, I get this question a lot when I give talks about social media, especially to young people or to parents of young people.
46:42Is the like, come on, what we need is to learn how to like use whatever it is, you know, responsibly. I don't buy it here. And here's what I think the fundamental mix up is. The social media companies completely hijacked the Web 2.0 revolution. So the Web 2.0, for those who don't follow like internet trajectories, Web 2.0 was about the World Wide Web making it easier for information to both be published and consumed, right? But mainly making it easier to publish information. So instead of having to go and manually edit a website or to have a sort of complicated database driven, like I'm going to pull out the Amazon listing and put it on the screen.
47:29But basically it was like it was hard if you weren't had a serious website or a serious web developer. It was hard to update or put information on the web. And the web 2.0 was like a collection of different advancements. Typically it was a lot of stuff that was actually advancements in the JavaScript language that ran in the new version of HTML. That made it easier for like things like I can type something into a form and it shows up and everyone can see it. So blogs were like one of the first early web 2.0 things. where it's like, yeah, you can publish information on the web without having to code, without having to hire a web developer.
48:01We got things like blogs and these kind of early social network type things like Friendsters where different people could post things. We had places where you could build websites online using an online interface without code. So that was the Web 2 revolution was basically the Web 1.0 said, here is a place to post information that anyone can consume it. It's a common protocol. all you need is a browser and anything that's been posted you can you can you can uh you can consume web 2 is like now anyone can produce stuff to be consumed as well great revolution super important uh one of the more important revolutions the last hundred years then the social media companies came along and said oh people publishing information is interesting because that could be a lot of information if you have a lot of people publishing stuff you can create amounts of information that you would never be able to hire people to come anywhere near there.
48:57If you want to hire people to create content like newspaper writers or whatever, it's expensive. And it's like pretty limited how much stuff you've produced. And this was these models were going on. You had like Nick Denton and Gawker and people saying like, hey, can we hire like 20 people and have them write 10 blog articles a day? And then we can try to monetize it. But the social media companies say that's amateur hour. You're hiring like 10 people at Gawker to publish 20 things a day and you have 200 things published a day that you're selling ads on. Why don't we get 200 ,000 people for free to write information for us?
49:28Like this is the real secret of Web2. So they took over Web2 by building these beautiful websites, right? Facebook's triumph early on was in part because they, Mark, and the original programmers he worked with really understood these cutting-edge new Web2 type of capabilities. They understood the new technology, things like AJAX, which was allowed for asynchrony in JavaScript. So you could have a static website and pull information to put without having to reload the whole webpage. They were on top of that technology. Early Facebook websites was like beautiful Web2 products. Now it's like very, very easy for you to publish stuff for people to see.
50:09They took over Web2. Forget blogs. Forget like interactive creative websites. Just come to our gardens, our social media gardens, and it's easy there to publish your own material. Then they figured out another thing, which was people get bored publishing their own material because what happens is – and anyone who had a blog in like 2005 knows this. Well, what happened is you would publish stuff and no one cared. It was the equivalent of like putting stuff on the bulletin board at the coffee shop. No one's going to read your essay. So people would get bored. Yeah, I published stuff. No one came.
50:44So I'm going to go play a video game, right? Like people didn't care. So the second innovation the social media companies had was we'll offer you attention. We'll have this social compact like Facebook. I write about this in Deep Work. Facebook was like, we'll have this sort of collectivist type of social compact that everyone will post nonsense, but everyone will look at the people they know is nonsense. In fact, we'll bring it to you because we organize it on these walls and you friend people and we can tell you like, hey, so-and-so just said something. And then you go over and do this performative thing where you're like, give a thumbs up or like you leave a comment.
51:18Like, that's great. And later they don't like, but I like that or whatever. And now what you're offering people is it's easy to publish content and you'll feel like people are paying attention to you. And boy, that is powerful. People love that. And that's how social media took over Web 2. Anyone can publish and will make you all feel like you're important. And so everyone started doing it. And now you have massive amounts of content that you can monetize with advertisements, right? I'm not going to hire 20 writers. I have 200 million people publishing all day long because their friends will like on it, and we can put ads in the middle of all that.
51:52So that was how social media took over Web2, and then social media had its own revolution where after everyone was using these services, they said we're no longer going to use this model of people are going to pay attention to you. So now we're going to bring an algorithmic curation and say, well, once you have this app here, we're just going to pull from the billion people who are using this. We'll pull stuff that's going to press your buttons. And now what we're selling you is like, eh, it's not your friend liking something. You're kind of bored with that. But we'll just give you something every time you open this that's really interesting.
52:21Once we already captured you, we'll switch you over to algorithmic engagement because now you'll use it 10 to 20x more per day than when you were just looking for likes because you only look for likes after you publish something. That took over all of Web 2. but that not fundamental to the internet that's a very specific successful but very specific business model people publish for free and in exchange algorithms show you the most compelling stuff that other people published it is a very specific business model that is not synonymous with the internet if you shut down the five major social media companies tomorrow the internet would still be there and a lot of other cool things could emerge web2 technology still exists apps and sites where you can you can gather with like-minded people you can publish information you can receive information you can find niche experts or communities you can find cool tools all of that is still there the underlying protocols that allow anyone who can access any of the networks and networks that makes the internet can talk to anyone else and read anything else that's accessible from this network all of that is still there this is just one thing you can do with it and one that happens to create a slope of terribleness that we all hate so no i I don't think social media is fundamental.
53:30I think the internet is. So I'm not, I don't buy. We have to just accept this particular use of it. The other thing I would argue is, okay, let's say you did believe that you needed to use social media to be successful in the world. These are low friction consumer facing products. They are very simple to learn. They're made to be something you can pick up immediately. You can learn how, you know, TikTok takes like nine seconds to learn how it works. I did this for the New Yorker last year. I signed up for TikTok and documented like what the process is. So it's not something you need to teach people about.
54:03And in terms of like, oh, let's teach you how to use this well. Good luck. You're not going to compete with the slope of terribleness. You're just not going to compete. It's just more compelling. You can say, don't use this too much. Good luck. Reward circuits, dopamine saturation. You are going to use it too much. You can say, you know, don't like be too strident, you know, listen to people from the other side. Good luck. you're talking about 100 ,000 year old paleolithic circuits that are being pushed on again and again and again that advice ain't going to stick right so i'm not a believer like we just we have to use it or we need to be practice how to use it or if we just give people literacy they're going to use these things better i mean it's you know good luck all we got a case study here uh case studies where people write in to talk about their experience but using type of stuff we talk about on the show, we found a case study that was about someone's experience leaving social media.
54:56It seemed appropriate. Get some case study music to get in the mood here, Jesse.
55:10All right. Today's case study is from Scott. Scott said, I stumbled upon your excellent work after purchasing Deep Work on a whim and wanted to congratulate you on both defining and providing workable solutions for one of the biggest challenges of our always connected modern age. I was one of the first musicians to use social media to build a large following in the early 2010s as a pianist and founder of a popular music group. For a long time, I was a champion of social media tools. In particular, the way they granted artists the ability to build a worldwide audience while bypassing record labels and other traditional industry gatekeepers.
55:47I even got a book deal out of it. Fast forward to now, and it's clear to me that social media has actually had a net deleterious effect on the arts. Just as we see in knowledge work, engagement-based algorithms prioritize the cheap dopamine hit of a shallow content rather than the kind, deep, thoughtful, artistic work that nourishes the soul. Some of the true masters of their craft today are reduced to performing inane TikTok dance challenges or parroting trendy ideological talking points instead of creating the brilliant work that they are uniquely suited to create i could go on and on but i'm certain i'm preaching to the choir here i deleted my own personal socials with the exception of substack in 2021 and i think it has greatly improved my creative output at the expense of my own cultural relevance i think that is the trade it is i think that it is the trade-off that artists and academics and everyone else will have to be incentivized to accept if we were to reverse what the last decade or so of mccluan's global village on steroids has rot all right so i think that's a great case study for this musician social media was everything a great case for it worldwide audience get past the gatekeepers go straight you know get music straight to people great kevin kelly arguments thousand true fans then he's like it got worse and the net effect was a negative he quit it he's never been never been like prouder of his work one thing i want to point out in there so what's going on here a lot of people repeat something similar and i mentioned this in my last answer but just to emphasize it one more time what social media is has changed a lot of the things that we really liked about social media the access to new people the access to new ideas right that got worse when the companies made what i call the algorithmic turn So again, as I talked about before, the early social media model was not so heavy on algorithmic curation.
57:44It was about conversation. It was about it's just interesting enough to talk to interesting people, to follow interesting people, to friend interesting people. But it wasn't so much about algorithms. And it's because the original goal, if you're an early stage social media company, was user growth. User growth is built on experience. like you need to be something that feels like it's super culturally relevant and offers a good experience so people will sign up they wanted those numbers to grow it didn't matter how much you used it they needed you to subscribe they needed like users it was you know it's less less important because they weren't even really selling ads yet that you use it all day long they just wanted everyone to have to use a service like facebook so it used to be at first again let's do the evolution real quick early facebook and social media was people i know i friend people i know we like each other there's no like button but we comment on each other stuff and it like we feel it's interesting and we feel like there's a little bit of attention like i'm publishing something and people care about that feels good we know it's a little fake but whatever then they went towards uh let's get famous people on here and interesting people on here twitter was really big on this as well and then it was like yeah it's not just about your friends you can also follow or friend really interestingly creative people or thinkers or artists and again And that's the stuff you would see.
59:03So like now I see what my friends are up to, but also I see what this like political thinker is saying. And that's like an interesting person. What are they reading? What are their ideas? Like that was pretty interesting. No algorithms, right? Twitter was reverse chronological. Here are all the things that have been tweeted by people that you follow in order of when they tweeted with the most recent thing first. Facebook was a similar thing, right? Like here is your – at first you had to go to other people's walls. You go to their sites and they gave you this feed. But the feed at first was just strict.
59:31Here is reverse chronological. This person, this friend just did something. That friend just did something. And some of these friends could be interesting people. That was sort of the sweet spot era where it was non-algorithmic, but you had a lot of interesting people on there. And it was like a cool hang. It was like a cool hang. I could just follow on Twitter or on Facebook someone who was like an author I admired or a musician or something and kind of see what they were up to. And this was kind of cool. Like what a cool technology. Like this is when people were like pretty happy about this stuff.
1:00:00Then they had the algorithmic turn, the algorithmic turn, which began like around 2012, right around 2012 to 2015. This was the turn. These companies had gone public. They hired the grownups, you know, Zuckerberg brought on Sandberg, et cetera. And they said, look, we have to actually make money and then make money. We have to care about how much these users are using this. Right. and we want them to use it all the time and the iphone is now big right 2012 was this tipping point where we had more than half of the adult population using smartphones in the u.s it's this key tipping point everyone has these phones now we can move this over to apps they now have constant access to these services so now we need to worry about engagement and that began the algorithmic turn we are going to select with algorithms or with the assistance of algorithms what you see so that you get more consistent brain rewards and those short-term reward circuits are going to get more exposures to positive learning and then you're going to look at it more.
1:01:03It's going to be this virtuous loop. That makes us a lot of money. And we've been in the algorithmic turn for the last decade, increasingly pushed towards algorithmically curated content. You need that piece for the slope of terribleness to be there. You don't have that piece, these companies would disappear because you can't make money in 2010 Facebook, right? It's not going to be worth a trillion dollars anymore. but all the terribleness goes away without the algorithmic curation it's like i you know it's it's um it's a cool hang and sometimes there's nothing interesting on there but sometimes someone has published something cool and then i learned i got an early drop of a taylor swift song or something this was great it was like a cool hang i wasn't going to look at it a thousand times a day but it's a cool hang as soon as we made the algorithmic turn that's when social media turn so that's why we hear stories like this we're like man this was great and now it's not what happened curations what happened once we began that shift that's when these that's why we have this feeling of like why do these things make me feel dark because we are at the top of that slope of terribleness we're all happy up there and then at some point we looked up like i'm sliding and that wasn't happening before so it's good to understand i think that these changes that happen all right so now we know what you think about this issue in our third and final segment, we can say, well, what is regulators going to do?
1:02:25What is the government going to do? Well, there is some news about this that I want to get into about some recent news about Congress taking on some of these issues of social media. I want to give you my reaction about this. But first, let's take another brief break to hear from a sponsor. So you heard my thoughts about social media. We heard your thoughts about social media. What are the government going to do about this? Well, I have good news. The House of Representatives is on it. And we know the House of Representatives is really good at technology. Just to remind you of how savvy they are, I want to play you a little bit of audio here from a couple years ago when the House of Representatives brought in the leaders of TikTok to interview them.
1:03:14Here's a clip from that past discussion. Mr. Chud, does TikTok access the home Wi-Fi network? Only if the user turns on the Wi-Fi. I'm sorry. I may not understand. So if I have a TikTok app on my phone and my phone is on my home Wi-Fi network, does TikTok access that network? You will have to access the network to get connections to the Internet, if that's the question. Basically, what I'm saying is we're kind of screwed. U.S. House of Representatives does not know a lot about technology, but they are trying because here's the news that we just heard about. I'll put this on the screen here for people who are watching.
1:03:54A U.S. House panel asked online forum CEOs to testify after Charlie Kirk assassination. So they are trying to do something here. But let's think, I just want to look at this for a second. Who do they have coming in? I'm going to read from the press release here. A U.S. House committee on Wednesday asked the CEOs of online platforms Discord, Stream, and Twitch and Reddit to testify at a hearing following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, citing the radicalization of online forum users. All right. I got some thoughts on this. First of all, as indicated by that TikTok clip, not exactly a bunch of technical wizards.
1:04:32And we're sort of seeing why this is a problem already. Let's kill this, Jesse. There's a lot of ads on here, by the way. That's somehow like metaphor that like the website for this article is so covered in ads, it's kind of unusable. Technology! But we're seeing here the issue. Not just that Congress necessarily doesn't know a lot about these technologies. When you understand things like the slope of terribleness, they're talking to the wrong CEOs. They're talking to the CEOs of companies that are at their services are being picked up by disassociated youth at the bottom of the slope of terribleness.
1:05:09I mean, yes, great. We should talk to the existing companies and have them turn off this behavior. But more ones are going to come. because what you need these sort of i i think of them as like loosely regulated digital conversation spaces these are the end game of falling down the slope of terribleness distraction demoderation the disassociation and then finally when you're disassociated you want to be around other disassociated people and you egg each other on there have been plenty of sites to do this they often get shut down and then other ones come along and because it's not this is not hard technologically to have a place where people can do like voice chat like a discord server that anyone can spool up on their own machine or you have some sort of forum and they shut these down like remember 4chan well that got shut down but then they started 8chan and then that got shut down um and now that's gone there was like the nazi website darestormer and that got shut down and often the way these get shut down eventually is they become such a cesspool it's actually the infrastructure providers like you can i'm not going to do business with you i mean i think what took 8chan down was Cloudflare, which is, you know, you need that to prevent denial of service attacks.
1:06:17Like you need it to keep in general, your website up and running. And they eventually like, I, oh, we don't want to be in business with you. And so with no one to protect them, the site became unusable. Right. So like, it's sure it's good. I mean, existing forum companies keep the pressure on, do not be a cesspool for disaffected youth. You are a, a specific company. You should be responsible for what people are talking about. If you have to be accused of being censorious, be accused of being censorious. Do not let disaffected youth to be on there. But anything can function here. And so I think that's the wrong place to look.
1:06:53The right place to look is what is tumbling people down into these below ground depths of the loosely regulated web. And that's curated conversation platforms. That's where the concern is. And it's almost not even worth bringing in CEOs of these companies, which they do. Let's bring Zuckerberg in. You know, sure, you can bring Musk in. The current administration won't bring him in, but you could, right? You can bring these people in, but what can they say, right? Again, it's like bringing in the head of Domino's and being like, look, pizza's bad. What can you do to help us out here? And they're like, this is our business.
1:07:26This is pizza. What do you want us to do? That's what we do. We sell pizza. Curated conversation platforms is they use algorithms plus large groups of people in conversation to generate lots of eyeballs that they monetize. Like that's the business, right? So if you really want to step in here, I don't even know what the exact solution is, but there's a couple of things to catch my attention. I'm definitely interested in Australia's model of a nationwide ban on social media writ large, be expansive instead of contractive here for 16 or younger. We could do that. If we know the slope of terribleness is inevitable, let's keep people off it until at the very least their brain has developed more because you know what makes that slope super steep?
1:08:06having an adolescent or prepubescent brain. Do you remember being a teenager? Did anything matter more to your brain than social inclusion, social grouping, what group you're in on and out on, what was going on with your friends, pleasing your community, being a part of a tribe? Those parts of your brain get supercharged doing those years in your life. You combine that brain with algorithmic conversation platforms. I mean, what was like a blue trail becomes a black diamond. You just fall fast. At the very least, yeah, let's keep them off. We do this with lots of other things with kids. Nicotine is very addictive.
1:08:46It's super addictive in like a 12-year-old's brain. So we're like, no, kids can't. They cannot consent to the lifetime addiction they're going to get by using this. They cannot make that decision. They're way more, they're more prone to it. So no, you have to be older to smoke cigarettes. It messes with their brains with alcohol. Let's wait till your brain develops before we're going to allow you to drink alcohol. You're not making good decisions yet, so we don't want you behind the wheel of a car until you've gone through training and you can be older. And sure, for all of these things, you can argue, but no, you're holding people back.
1:09:18You don't let a 15-year-old drive a car. You're restricting their freedom of movement, and you can't restrict the freedom of movement of people in America, but you can for kids. They can't fully consent to these things. Why can't a kid smoke a cigarette? it well because their brain's not ready for it they can do it when they're older why can't they go to an r-rated movie by themselves when they're 15 because we think kids aren't ready for this material or they're not going to make a good decision on their own so no you just can't do it i think we should do something similar for social media maybe section 230 reform it's a complicated issue there's not a simple answer here but section 230 of the internet communication decency act has the effect of basically giving legal cover to social media companies for you are not liable for the material you publish.
1:10:00And this is very different than, say, a newspaper. The New York Times publishes something. They're liable, right? If they say something to defame someone, they can be sued, right? If they incite some sort of action that is highly negative for an individual or company, they can sue them and say, you know, you were wrong. This happens, by the way. This happens all the time, right? The Washington Post had this issue a few years ago. Remember the Covington kids at the mall? It was like a group of kids, you know, all these high schools visit D.C. And so kids from some school were visiting D.C. And they had bought MAGA hats because they were selling MAGA hats, you know, the street vendors or whatever.
1:10:42And there was like some – they got into some incident with someone that was there. I think it was like a Native American doing some sort of protest. and anyways a picture got captured of like one of the covington kids with a maga hat sort of in the face of uh like this native american person and it just fit a pattern the post this was like the washington post at peak sort of you know um peak woke time and there was this like this kid is the kid from uh the omen basically like it's satan spawn and is can you know whatever it's just the worst possible thing and he went and just like went with whatever felt right seeing this photo he went and tracked down this person because they were marginalized blah blah blah blah the problem was that's not really what happened actually like the kids were just taking a photo and this other person was like bothering them and coming over them in the photo and they were trying to like you know they're that person was confronting them and the photo caught them at whatever time and the kids the kid was like well you can't just say that stuff you're liable like this has been a huge issue and the post had to give them millions of dollars.
1:11:46So most people, you have to actually care a little bit. Like I have to try to be accurate, I'm liable, and that's good. Social media companies don't have to. They say we're not responsible for what's published on here. And that's Section 230 more or less giving that protection. So there have been arguments for reforming it, which would basically, no one has those protections. If you want to use free content, like get a lot of people to create content on your platform, have a billion users creating content that you then like algorithmically sort and use to make money, Sure, we don't care where it comes from.
1:12:15You publish it, it causes harm, it's on you. Now, of course, the result of this is the business model for these massive social media curated algorithmic platforms disappears. You might not be able to exist under such a world. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Now, I know it's more complicated than that, but that might be the closest hammer you would have from a regulatory perspective to say, like i think this is a bad thing to have these like massive uh if you have these massive conversation platforms are algorithmically curated you're going to create things like these slope of terribleness it's just really bad for people and you can't control it and if you are responsible for everything that's published then you can't have those type of platforms like no you're responsible if you want people to publish it has to be more moderated and curated and it matters what's on there and you have to have standards and i don't think it's a bad thing.
1:13:07People still come together. They still spread ideas. You're still accessible. You can still express yourself. We don't necessarily have to have like a billion people on the same platform to see the benefit of the internet. So maybe that's it. I put an asterisk there because, look, I'm in digital ethics and academic context. I know it's a very complicated topic, so I'm oversimplifying it there. But that's the type of thing that's worth looking at. The most important thing we could do, though, is cultural. This is why I'm trying to do what I'm doing make social media not cool anymore make it seem like wait a second wait a second you're like a grown man who's like spending a lot of time swiping this piece of glass and like typing in these things like other people like what are you doing like we should see it we should culturally change it when we see people that are like really engaged online in the social media platforms or whatever we should see it as if they wore like a straight up captain kirk costume to work and we're just like um the star fleet knows what's going on like this is your this is weird and you're weird for doing this you have a star fleet pin on at your job at you know kinko's or whatever i'm going to kind of make fun of you a little bit like this is not something a grown man should be doing that's the way we probably need to think about social media there's a cultural fix here change the zeitgeist on it that's why i'm out here saying doing things like the slope of terrible and says like this is not innocent this stuff sucks you don't need to be on here i mean unless you have either a lot of stock in one of these companies or you own some of the land left in hawaii that mark zuckerberg hasn't bought yet and you think you're going to get a good price for it if he gets a little richer like if you're not in those situations come on why are we on these things seeing what we saw a couple weeks ago on all sides the what the role of social media into creating the assassination of a 31-year-old dad.
1:14:57The reaction on all the sides is just terrible, right? The instinct on the far left to like, I don't care about this at all and it's all, you know, and I'm celebrating it or like I have no empathy. The reaction, the right, you know, not just the censorious stuff, the far right, hey, surprise, surprise, far right social media, guess who they're blaming for Charlie Kirk's death? yeah it it rhymes with booze the you know it's always the same people somehow like the jews in israel are involved none of this is good why are we like we we need to marginalize people who are spending a lot of time on these platforms by getting off of ourselves first so i don't know i maybe i'm biased because i've been there for a long time and people yelled at me and i'm happy that people are listening now but sure block it for kids yes phones out of schools yes section two, three, or four, maybe.
1:15:51I'm tempted. I'm interested. I don't know how to come because I'm interested, but mainly there's a cultural fix here. It's time to walk away. It's time to say enough is enough. It's time to treat the people who are still really on there and be like, that doesn't make you some sort of fierce investigator or warrior or protester. It's the guy with the Captain Kirk pin who just showed up at the company photo day. It's a little bit embarrassing. That's where I think we need to get. It'll help our civil society. And I can tell you, life offside of those services, you're not on those slopes at all. It's nice up at the top of the hill.
1:16:20It's sunny up there. There's real people. As the governor of Utah said, you can touch some grass. It's a pretty good thing to do. So there we go. That's my rant for today. Thank you for listening. Be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.
1:16:37Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70 ,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, You got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.
1:17:43Thank you.
From the publisher
We seem to be stuck in a purgatory when it comes to the worst of the social media platforms. We know they’re not great, but it’s hard to muster enough motivation to bother to leave. In today’s episode, motivated by the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Cal puts on his technology critic hat and offers a step-by-step technical explanation for why these platforms are strictly and incessantly making your life worse and why the only reasonable response is to quit them. He then answers listener questions on the topic and reacts to some recent news about the US Congress getting involved.
Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo
Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia
Deep Dive: Is it Finally Time to Leave Social Media? [0:40]
How do I find everything I should be blocking on my kid’s phone? [38:59]
Is it okay that I make YouTube Videos? [43:39]
Shouldn’t we focus on using social media better? [49:13]
CASE STUDY: A musician and social media [58:00]
CAL REACTS: US House panel asks internet CEOs to testify after Charlie Kirk assassination [1:10:42]
Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?reuters.com/world/us/us-house-panel-asks-online-forum-ceos-testify-after-charlie-kirk-assassination-2025-09-17/youtube.com/watch?v=gjVm0K_ETX8
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Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering.
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