Weekly Grounding #77
Special edition on social life and alienation
Weekly Groundings are back today after a brief hiatus to make room for two Excavations of writing on Handful of Earth. In case you missed these guides to the flagship content published to date, you can find them here and here. This week’s Grounding is a Special Edition on social life and alienation (see previous Special Edition Weekly Groundings here, here, here, and here). I hope you enjoy it.
For those of you who are new here, Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“The Anti-Social Century”
chronicles the decline of American social life in a fascinating long-form piece at The Atlantic: “Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021.” This trend holds across a wide range of demographic groups, but has been particularly pronounced for the black community, those without a high-school degree, single men, and young people. 
Thompson focuses on three technologies—the car, the TV, and the mobile phone—behind this radical decrease in face-to-face interaction: “If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.”
Thompson concludes with reflections on the Amish, who do not reject all technologies outright, but, instead, refrain from using those technologies which imperil their values: “If the Amish approach to technology is radical in its application, it recognizes something plain and true: Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment. But dopamine is a chemical, not a virtue. And what’s easy is not always what’s best for us. We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than instant gratification? And if technology is hurting our community, what can we do to heal it?”
“Phone Books”
contrasts phone books with the internet at : Phone book “[u]sers — though it is a bit anachronistic to call them that — could turn to the yellow pages, and especially the white pages, and experience something that felt like objectivity, facticity. Not only did the phone book list every person and business indiscriminately (unless you demanded to be unlisted); it didn’t attempt to represent within itself how it was supposed to feel to read it or, for the most part, how anyone felt about anything listed in it. It was resolutely non-interactive. Its interface was not ‘user-friendly.’”“Now almost all the information we see is experienced as subjective, algorithmically tailored to take advantage of what the information provider knows about user or their situation. Information is not so much flatly factual but dynamic, capable of being altered or being represented differently depending on who is looking for it. This is sold as giving specific people the specific sorts of information that will most help them, but in practice it isolates users and cuts them off from common ground, from a common orientation toward what is available. The tailored information works to make them more vulnerable than informed, or worse, it makes them misperceive their vulnerability as a their being especially well-informed, so well-informed that they don’t have to understand where the information came from, what validates it, and why it was provided specifically for them.”
Horning continues: “The phone book could be understood as a shared resource, common to the community and producing a kind of common subject position for all its users; internet information produces an isolated subject who can’t reliably conceive of what other people know, of what sorts of options and idea they have access to, what sorts of commercial categories outline the breadth of their world. AI-generated answers are meant to take this to the logical end point where the information manufactured has no definite connection to empirical reality but is instead made to seem maximally plausible to the user requesting it. (Perhaps at some point, in some metaverse hell, AI models will generate spurious answers and then generate the sensory environments that seem to conform to them.) More than anything, the idea of phone books makes me nostalgic for an era before social media, before personalized surveillance, before algorithmic control.”
“The Superiority of Greek Social Life”
At
, describes the social life in her hometown of Thessaloniki, Greece: “I…love the youthfulness and casualness of my city’s social culture. Nobody ever rushes you, the waiter, or your friend. Coffees turn into beer, and beer turns into cocktails, which turn into shots, which turn into filo pastry filled with cream patisserie and dustings of cinnamon and powdered sugar.”“You start your night with a friend, and by the morning, you have hopped around three different groups of people who haven’t talked to you since high school or who just met you, but it is never weird that you are following them to the next bar. At the New Year’s party I went to, the age groups were 21-31 apart from one lady in her 70s with white hair but for a flair of red at the back. She lived on the top floor of my friends’ building and joined the party because why not. That’s Thessaloniki for you.”
Tsantekidou compares this social scene to her experience living in the UK: “Is this scenario impossible in London? Yes, 100%. Apart from the fact that many pubs in central London close at 11:00 p.m., there is a dearth of social spaces that accommodate both chill chit-chat and dancing. You either go to a pub to chat or a club to get audio assaulted…In London, you must arrange to catch up with friends weeks in advance. A coffee means a coffee, not ‘let’s meet and see where it takes us’. When the hour is done, so is your friend, off to their next appointment.”
“Kids Turn to a Mental-Health Chatbot to Share Their Anxieties”
The Wall Street Journal reports on Troodi, an AI “mental-health chatbot” increasingly popular with parents and their children: “Taylee Johnson, a 14-year-old near Nashville, Tenn., recently began talking to Troodi. She confided her worries about moving to a new neighborhood and leaving her friends behind, and fretting about a coming science test. ‘It sounds like you’ve got a lot on your plate at the moment, Taylee,’ the bot replied. ‘It’s understandable that these changes and responsibilities could cause stress.’ Taylee says Troodi, a mental-health chatbot built into her child-focused Troomi phone, validates her feelings. It’s available to talk any time, even when her parents are asleep. ‘Sometimes I forget she’s not a real person,’ she says.”
As this vignette demonstrates, much of the appeal of these chatbots stems from overworked adults who don’t feel like they have enough time to parent their children. One child “who has been diagnosed with anxiety and lives in a group home—would call them multiple times, day and night, with questions about what to do in different situations. Now that she has been talking to Troodi, she has eased up on her parents.” Rather than address the root causes of issues like adults’ lack of free time and children’s widespread physical and mental health problems, chatbots are proposed as a quick fix. Many therapists are also on board, only taking issue with “general-use chatbots,” but endorsing ones like Troodi that are specifically designed for mental health support. The article states: “These are early days for generative AI in mental-health treatment, and the stakes are high in using it for kids. Successful AI-assisted emotional support could ease the nation’s youth mental-health crisis and therapist shortage.”
“How We Fell Out of Love with Dating Apps”
The Financial Times reports that “the world’s biggest online dating companies are in crisis, as their target customers, particularly women and younger users, increasingly look elsewhere, towards niche apps or real-life meets—or even opt out of romantic relationships altogether. In a recent survey by Forbes, 78 per cent of respondents reported feeling ‘emotionally, mentally or physically exhausted’ by dating apps.” This exhaustion is reflected in the share prices of Match Group (which includes Tinder, Hinge, and dozens of other dating apps) and competitor Bumble:
In order to combat the deteriorating public perception of dating apps, companies believe that “the next big shift in the business of romantic connections will be artificial intelligence.” Though they identify “AI-generated images and videos” as one of the reasons for disillusionment with dating apps, these companies still believe that more—not less—AI is the answer. Dating apps are now vying to create a new “AI-first dating product.” One chief executive states that ‘“Most products are actually using very little data for their matches right now…I think there’s a lot of really intimate and useful information in people’s chat conversations.’” The report notes that “not everyone is convinced. Tristan, a 24-year-old from London, is worried about being ‘pigeonholed’ by AI: ‘People struggle with understanding text messages already,’ he says. ‘Why would we trust AI to read emotions any better?’”
“Are Social Media Platforms the Next Dying Malls?”
At
, argues that the fate of malls may await social media in the coming years: “[W]e hoped that these artificial gathering places could be robust, vital replacements for the neighborhoods we tore down. But what I’ve learned is that you pay a heavy price for replacing a real community with a fake one. And that brings me to the subject of social media platforms—which increasingly resemble these old, decrepit malls. They are the ultimate fake community centers. This makes them vulnerable, despite all the current visitors and lurkers and noise. My home town mall also once had many visitors and lurkers, and lots of noise. But that wasn’t enough to guarantee survival.”Gioia provides five reasons why social media and malls are similar. They are all quite interesting, but number three (“Malls started to look identical, with the same merchandise, tenants, architecture, and ambiance”) seems particularly important: “In the last three years, social media platforms have started converging—imitating the endless scroll of TikTok. They think this is a brilliant move, because scrolling promotes addictive user behavior. It’s like a drug. But the video content on these platforms is often identical—just like the stores at the mall. The interface is increasingly identical—just like the layout at the mall. Users can move from one platform to another, and have the same experience. And it’s increasingly an artificial, claustrophobic experience. That makes all of these platforms vulnerable. If some new player invents a slightly better algorithm—a cooler video slot machine or a more addictive interface—users will switch loyalties in a heartbeat.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
Thank you for including my essay Vincent :-)
So many indicators of tech-driven social collapse!