2022.04.11为什么过去10年的美国生活是独一无二的愚蠢？

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IDEAS
WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID
It’s not just a phase.

By Jonathan Haidt
Illustrations by Nicolás Ortega
illustration with 1679 engraving of the tower of babel with pixellated clouds and pieces disintegrating digitally
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: "Turris Babel," Coenraet Decker, 1679.
APRIL 11, 2022
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What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said:

Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.

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The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

From the December 2001 issue: David Brooks on Red and Blue America

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?

The Rise of the Modern Tower
there is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance.

The early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?

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The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.

In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans. “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” he wrote in a letter to investors. Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.

Things Fall Apart
historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.

In their early incarnations, platforms such as Myspace and Facebook were relatively harmless. They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and links to the mostly static pages of their friends and favorite bands. In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvements—from the Postal Service through the telephone to email and texting—that helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties.

But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.

From the December 2019 issue: The dark psychology of social networks

Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.

Babel is not a story about tribalism. It’s a story about the fragmentation of everything.
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.

Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.

illustration with an 1820 painting of outdoor feast with people in historical dress fleeing a giant flaming Facebook logo in a colonnaded courtyard
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Belshazzar’s Feast, John Martin, 1820.
By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

From the October 2018 issue: America is living James Madison’s nightmare

The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare. Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”

But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?

Read: The Ukraine crisis briefly put America’s culture war in perspective

It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).

Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.

From the April 2021 issue: The internet doesn’t have to be awful

When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children. History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country. The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.

The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.

Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said:

The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.
Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.

I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.

The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.

Politics After Babel
“politics is the art of the possible,” the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much may be possible.

Of course, the American culture war and the decline of cross-party cooperation predates social media’s arrival. The mid-20th century was a time of unusually low polarization in Congress, which began reverting back to historical levels in the 1970s and ’80s. The ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the 1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a more combative party. For example, House Speaker Newt Gingrich discouraged new Republican members of Congress from moving their families to Washington, D.C., where they were likely to form social ties with Democrats and their families.

So cross-party relationships were already strained before 2009. But the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the enemy with sufficient vigor. On the right, the term RINO (Republican in Name Only) was superseded in 2015 by the more contemptuous term cuckservative, popularized on Twitter by Trump supporters. On the left, social media launched callout culture in the years after 2012, with transformative effects on university life and later on politics and culture throughout the English-speaking world.

From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind

What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.

Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds, not just in politics but in business, the arts, academia, and elsewhere. Sexual harassers could have been called out in anonymous blog posts before Twitter, but it’s hard to imagine that the #MeToo movement would have been nearly so successful without the viral enhancement that the major platforms offered. However, the warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.

First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens. Research by the political scientists Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Petersen found that a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so. They admit that in their online discussions they often curse, make fun of their opponents, and get blocked by other users or reported for inappropriate comments. Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums, Bor and Petersen found, because nonjerks are easily turned off from online discussions of politics. Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.

illustration with detail from 19th-century painting of hand holding dart with an email "send" logo in place of its flights
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Venus and Cupid, Pierre-Maximilien Delafontaine, by 1860.
Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: “Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.

From the October 2021 issue: Anne Applebaum on how mob justice is trampling democratic discourse

Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes. A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on strikes. Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.


Structural Stupidity
since the tower fell, debates of all kinds have grown more and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs. Even before the advent of social media, search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theories, such as that the Earth is flat and that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attacks. But social media made things much worse.

From the September 2018 issue: The cognitive biases tricking your brain

The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.

In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse.
In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals. English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury. Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking. Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.


Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history, linking together the world’s best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon.

But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent?

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.


But when an institution punishes internal dissent, it shoots darts into its own brain.

The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values. The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors. According to the political scientist Karen Stenner, whose work the “Hidden Tribes” study drew upon, they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.

Only within the devoted conservatives’ narratives do Donald Trump’s speeches make sense, from his campaign’s ominous opening diatribe about Mexican “rapists” to his warning on January 6, 2021: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.” Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives, for example in driving out local election officials who failed to “stop the steal.” The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality. We now have a Republican Party that describes a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol as “legitimate political discourse,” supported—or at least not contradicted—by an array of right-wing think tanks and media organizations.


The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress. “Pizzagate,” QAnon, the belief that vaccines contain microchips, the conviction that Donald Trump won reelection—it’s hard to imagine any of these ideas or belief systems reaching the levels that they have without Facebook and Twitter.

illustration with 17th-century painting of woman looking in mirror that is shattered around the thumbs-up "like" symbol
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Vanity, Nicolas Régnier, c. 1626.
The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win. The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled: When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.


Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress toward realizing the noble promise of its founding. This story easily supports liberal patriotism, and it was the animating narrative of Barack Obama’s presidency. It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s cultural and intellectual institutions.

But when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders. Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.

The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.


You can see the stupefaction process most clearly when a person on the left merely points to research that questions or contradicts a favored belief among progressive activists. Someone on Twitter will find a way to associate the dissenter with racism, and others will pile on. For example, in the first week of protests after the killing of George Floyd, some of which included violence, the progressive policy analyst David Shor, then employed by Civis Analytics, tweeted a link to a study showing that violent protests back in the 1960s led to electoral setbacks for the Democrats in nearby counties. Shor was clearly trying to be helpful, but in the ensuing outrage he was accused of “anti-Blackness” and was soon dismissed from his job. (Civis Analytics has denied that the tweet led to Shor’s firing.)

The Shor case became famous, but anyone on Twitter had already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don’t question your own side’s beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists’ more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization. This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to “go woke” in rapid succession that year and the next, beginning with a wave of controversies and resignations at The New York Times and other newspapers, and continuing on to social-justice pronouncements by groups of doctors and medical associations (one publication by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, for instance, advised medical professionals to refer to neighborhoods and communities as “oppressed” or “systematically divested” instead of “vulnerable” or “poor”), and the hurried transformation of curricula at New York City’s most expensive private schools.


Tragically, we see stupefaction playing out on both sides in the COVID wars. The right has been so committed to minimizing the risks of COVID that it has turned the disease into one that preferentially kills Republicans. The progressive left is so committed to maximizing the dangers of COVID that it often embraces an equally maximalist, one-size-fits-all strategy for vaccines, masks, and social distancing—even as they pertain to children. Such policies are not as deadly as spreading fears and lies about vaccines, but many of them have been devastating for the mental health and education of children, who desperately need to play with one another and go to school; we have little clear evidence that school closures and masks for young children reduce deaths from COVID. Most notably for the story I’m telling here, progressive parents who argued against school closures were frequently savaged on social media and met with the ubiquitous leftist accusations of racism and white supremacy. Others in blue cities learned to keep quiet.

American politics is getting ever more ridiculous and dysfunctional not because Americans are getting less intelligent. The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.

It’s Going to Get Much Worse
in a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry. But back then, in 2018, there was an upper limit to the amount of shit available, because all of it had to be created by a person (other than some low-quality stuff produced by bots).


Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence. In a year or two, when the program is upgraded to GPT-4, it will become far more capable. In a 2020 essay titled “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)

American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too. In a haunting 2018 essay titled “The Digital Maginot Line,” DiResta described the state of affairs bluntly. “We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality,” she wrote. The Soviets used to have to send over agents or cultivate Americans willing to do their bidding. But social media made it cheap and easy for Russia’s Internet Research Agency to invent fake events or distort real ones to stoke rage on both the left and the right, often over race. Later research showed that an intensive campaign began on Twitter in 2013 but soon spread to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among other platforms. One of the major goals was to polarize the American public and spread distrust—to split us apart at the exact weak point that Madison had identified.

If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse.
We now know that it’s not just the Russians attacking American democracy. Before the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, China had mostly focused on domestic platforms such as WeChat. But now China is discovering how much it can do with Twitter and Facebook, for so little money, in its escalating conflict with the U.S. Given China’s own advances in AI, we can expect it to become more skillful over the next few years at further dividing America and further uniting China.

In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together. In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.

Democracy After Babel
we can never return to the way things were in the pre-digital age. The norms, institutions, and forms of political participation that developed during the long era of mass communication are not going to work well now that technology has made everything so much faster and more multidirectional, and when bypassing professional gatekeepers is so easy. And yet American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.

What changes are needed? Redesigning democracy for the digital age is far beyond my abilities, but I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.


Harden Democratic Institutions
Political polarization is likely to increase for the foreseeable future. Thus, whatever else we do, we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.

For instance, the legislative branch was designed to require compromise, yet Congress, social media, and partisan cable news channels have co-evolved such that any legislator who reaches across the aisle may face outrage within hours from the extreme wing of her party, damaging her fundraising prospects and raising her risk of being primaried in the next election cycle.

Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting. A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska, and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a closed Republican primary but is not in an open one.


A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way. Research on procedural justice shows that when people perceive that a process is fair, they are more likely to accept the legitimacy of a decision that goes against their interests. Just think of the damage already done to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy by the Senate’s Republican leadership when it blocked consideration of Merrick Garland for a seat that opened up nine months before the 2016 election, and then rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. A widely discussed reform would end this political gamesmanship by having justices serve staggered 18-year terms so that each president makes one appointment every two years.

Reform Social Media
A democracy cannot survive if its public squares are places where people fear speaking up and where no stable consensus can be reached. Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.

illustration with 1861 engraving of the arch-heretics from Dante's "Inferno" with two people looking at glowing smartphone screen surrounded by people climbing out of tombs with fires smoking and city wall in background
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: The Arch Heretics, Gustave Doré, c. 1861.
But it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”

Those who oppose regulation of social media generally focus on the legitimate concern that government-mandated content restrictions will, in practice, devolve into censorship. But the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before 2009. The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to police all content. For example, she has suggested modifying the “Share” function on Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post. Reforms like this are not censorship; they are viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral, and they work equally well in all languages. They don’t stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true.

Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.

Read: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem

Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.

In any case, the growing evidence that social media is damaging democracy is sufficient to warrant greater oversight by a regulatory body, such as the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.

Prepare the Next Generation
The members of Gen Z––those born in and after 1997––bear none of the blame for the mess we are in, but they are going to inherit it, and the preliminary signs are that older generations have prevented them from learning how to handle it.

Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat. A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the “art of association” that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed “a serious threat to liberal societies.” A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and would suffer from a “coarsening of social interaction” that would “create a world of more conflict and violence.”


From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?

And while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms. Correlational and experimental studies back up the connection to depression and anxiety, as do reports from young people themselves, and from Facebook’s own research, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.


Read: Why I cover campus controversies

The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty. Congress should update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.

More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision. Every state should follow the lead of Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas and pass a version of the Free-Range Parenting Law that helps assure parents that they will not be investigated for neglect if their 8- or 9-year-old children are spotted playing in a park. With such laws in place, schools, educators, and public-health authorities should then encourage parents to let their kids walk to school and play in groups outside, just as more kids used to do.


Hope After Babel
the story i have told is bleak, and there is little evidence to suggest that America will return to some semblance of normalcy and stability in the next five or 10 years. Which side is going to become conciliatory? What is the likelihood that Congress will enact major reforms that strengthen democratic institutions or detoxify social media?

Yet when we look away from our dysfunctional federal government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly, things seem more hopeful. Most Americans in the More in Common report are members of the “exhausted majority,” which is tired of the fighting and is willing to listen to the other side and compromise. Most Americans now see that social media is having a negative impact on the country, and are becoming more aware of its damaging effects on children.

Will we do anything about it?

When Tocqueville toured the United States in the 1830s, he was impressed by the American habit of forming voluntary associations to fix local problems, rather than waiting for kings or nobles to act, as Europeans would do. That habit is still with us today. In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.


What would it be like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? We know. It is a time of confusion and loss. But it is also a time to reflect, listen, and build.




理念
为什么过去10年的美国生活是独一无二的愚蠢？
这不仅仅是一个阶段。

作者：Jonathan Haidt
插图：尼古拉斯-奥特加
插图：1679年的巴别塔雕刻，云朵和碎片以数字方式解体的像素化。
插图：尼古拉斯-奥特加。来源。"Turris Babel"，Coenraet Decker，1679年。
2022年4月11日

在巴别被摧毁后的日子里，生活在巴别会是什么样子？创世记》中告诉我们，诺亚的后裔在示拿地建造了一座大城市。他们建造了一座 "顶天立地 "的塔，为自己 "扬名"。上帝被人类的狂妄所冒犯，说

你看，他们是一个民族，他们都有一种语言；这只是他们要做的事情的开始；现在他们要做的事情没有一件是不可能的。来吧，让我们下去，在那里混淆他们的语言，使他们不明白彼此的言语。
文中没有说上帝摧毁了塔，但在许多流行的故事中，他确实摧毁了塔，所以让我们在脑海中记住这个戏剧性的画面：人们在废墟中徘徊，无法沟通，注定要相互不理解。

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巴别塔的故事是我找到的关于2010年代美国所发生的事情以及我们现在居住的这个支离破碎的国家的最好隐喻。有些事情出了可怕的问题，非常突然。我们迷失了方向，无法说同样的语言，也无法认识同样的真理。我们彼此之间和与过去的关系被切断了。

相当长一段时间以来，很明显，红色的美国和蓝色的美国正变得像两个不同的国家，声称拥有相同的领土，对宪法、经济和美国历史有两个不同的版本。但《巴别》不是一个关于部落主义的故事；它是一个关于一切碎片化的故事。它是关于所有看似坚固的东西的破碎，曾经是一个社区的人们的分散。它不仅隐喻了红蓝之间正在发生的事情，而且隐喻了左派和右派内部，以及大学、公司、专业协会、博物馆，甚至家庭内部正在发生的事情。

摘自2001年12月号。大卫-布鲁克斯谈美国的红与蓝

巴别尔是一个比喻，说明某些形式的社交媒体对几乎所有对国家的未来--以及对我们这个民族--最重要的团体和机构所做的事情。这一切是如何发生的？它又预示着美国的生活会怎样？

现代大厦的崛起
历史有一个方向，那就是在更大范围内的合作。我们在生物进化中看到了这种趋势，在一系列的 "重大转变 "中，多细胞生物首先出现，然后发展出新的共生关系。我们在文化进化中也看到了这一点，正如罗伯特-赖特在他1999年的书《非零》中所解释的那样。人类命运的逻辑。赖特表明，历史涉及一系列的过渡，由不断上升的人口密度和新技术（文字、道路、印刷术）驱动，为互利的贸易和学习创造了新的可能性。零和冲突--例如随着印刷术在欧洲传播异端思想而产生的宗教战争--最好被认为是暂时的挫折，有时甚至是进步的组成部分。(他认为，这些宗教战争使向现代民族国家的过渡成为可能，使公民更加了解情况。） 比尔-克林顿总统赞扬了《非零》对持续的技术进步所带来的更多合作的未来的乐观描述。

20世纪90年代的早期互联网，包括聊天室、留言板和电子邮件，都是非零论的例证，2003年前后推出的第一波社交媒体平台也是如此。Myspace、Friendster和Facebook使人们可以很容易地与朋友和陌生人联系起来，谈论共同的兴趣，而且是免费的，其规模是以前无法想象的。到2008年，Facebook已经成为主导平台，月度用户超过1亿，今天已经达到约30亿。在新世纪的第一个十年，人们普遍认为社交媒体是民主的福音。哪个独裁者能把他的意志强加给一个相互联系的公民？哪个政权能建造一堵墙将互联网拒之门外？

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ED YONG
可以说，技术民主乐观主义的高潮是2011年，这一年以阿拉伯之春开始，以全球占领运动结束。也是在这一年，谷歌翻译开始在几乎所有的智能手机上使用，所以你可以说2011年是人类重建巴别塔的一年。我们比以往任何时候都更接近成为 "一个民族"，我们有效地克服了语言分裂的诅咒。对于技术民主的乐观主义者来说，这似乎只是人类能够做到的开始。

2012年2月，当他准备将Facebook上市时，马克-扎克伯格回顾了那个不寻常的时代并提出了他的计划。"他在给投资者的信中写道："今天，我们的社会已经达到了另一个转折点。Facebook希望 "重新连接人们传播和消费信息的方式"。通过赋予他们 "分享的力量"，它将帮助他们 "再次改变我们的许多核心机构和行业"。

在此后的10年里，扎克伯格完全做到了他所说的那样。他确实重新连接了我们传播和消费信息的方式；他确实改造了我们的机构，他把我们推到了临界点。但结果并未如他所料。

世事难料
从历史上看，各种文明都依靠共同的血缘、神灵和敌人来抵御它们在成长过程中分裂的趋势。但是，是什么将美国和印度这样的大型多元化世俗民主国家，或者说，现代英国和法国这样的国家凝聚在一起？

社会科学家们发现，至少有三种主要力量将成功的民主国家联合起来：社会资本（具有高度信任的广泛社会网络）、强大的机构和共同的故事。社交媒体削弱了所有这三种力量。为了了解情况，我们必须了解社交媒体是如何随时间变化的，特别是在2009年之后的几年里。

在早期，Myspace和Facebook等平台是相对无害的。它们允许用户创建页面，在上面发布照片、家庭动态，以及与他们的朋友和最喜欢的乐队的大部分静态页面的链接。这样一来，早期的社交媒体可以被看作是技术改进的漫长进程中的另一步--从邮政服务到电话，再到电子邮件和短信--帮助人们实现保持社会联系的永恒目标。

但渐渐地，社交媒体用户变得更愿意与陌生人和公司分享他们生活的私密细节。正如我与托比亚斯-罗斯-斯托克韦尔在2019年《大西洋》杂志的一篇文章中写道，他们变得更善于表演和管理个人品牌--这些活动可能会给别人留下深刻印象，但却不能像私人电话交谈那样加深友谊。

来自2019年12月号的文章。社交网络的黑暗心理学

一旦社交媒体平台将用户训练成花更多时间表演，花更少时间联系，就为2009年开始的重大转变提供了舞台：病毒性动态的加剧。

巴别》不是一个关于部落主义的故事。它是一个关于一切碎片化的故事。
在2009年之前，Facebook为用户提供了一个简单的时间表--由他们的朋友和关系产生的永不停息的内容流，最新的帖子在顶部，最旧的在底部。这在数量上往往是压倒性的，但它准确地反映了其他人所发布的内容。这种情况在2009年开始发生变化，当时Facebook为用户提供了一种通过点击按钮公开 "喜欢 "帖子的方式。同年，Twitter推出了更强大的功能："转发 "按钮，允许用户公开支持一个帖子，同时也与他们所有的追随者分享。Facebook很快就复制了这一创新，推出了自己的 "分享 "按钮，并在2012年向智能手机用户开放。"Like "和 "Share "按钮迅速成为大多数其他平台的标准功能。

在其 "喜欢 "按钮开始产生关于什么最能 "吸引 "其用户的数据后不久，Facebook开发了算法，为每个用户提供最有可能产生 "喜欢 "或其他互动的内容，最终也包括 "分享"。后来的研究表明，引发情绪的帖子--尤其是对外部群体的愤怒--最有可能被分享。

插图：1820年的一幅户外盛宴画，画中的人穿着历史悠久的服装，在柱廊式庭院中逃离一个巨大的燃烧的Facebook标志。
插图：Nicolás Ortega。来源。伯沙撒的盛宴》，约翰-马丁，1820年。
到2013年，社交媒体已经成为一个新的游戏，其动态与2008年不同。如果你技巧高超或运气好，你可能会创造一个帖子，让你 "病毒式传播"，让你在几天内 "网络出名"。如果你失误了，你可能会发现自己被埋没在仇恨的评论中。你的帖子是根据成千上万的陌生人的点击率而成名或蒙羞的，而你又为这个游戏贡献了成千上万的点击率。

这个新游戏鼓励不诚实和暴民的动态。用户不仅被他们的真实偏好所引导，而且被他们过去的奖惩经验所引导，以及他们对他人对每个新行动的反应的预测。推特的一名工程师曾负责开发 "转发 "按钮，后来他透露，他对自己的贡献感到遗憾，因为这使推特成为一个更肮脏的地方。当他看到Twitter的暴民通过使用这个新工具而形成时，他心想："我们可能刚刚给一个4岁的孩子递上了一把上了膛的武器。"

作为一个研究情感、道德和政治的社会心理学家，我也看到了这种情况。新调整的平台几乎完美地设计出了我们最道貌岸然和最不善于反思的自我。愤怒的数量是令人震惊的。

这正是詹姆斯-麦迪逊在起草美国宪法时试图保护我们免受的这种抽搐和爆炸性的愤怒情绪的蔓延。宪法的制定者是优秀的社会心理学家。他们知道，民主有一个致命的弱点，因为它依赖于人民的集体判断，而民主社区会受到 "不羁的激情的动荡和软弱 "的影响。因此，设计一个可持续的共和国的关键是建立机制，让事情慢下来，冷却激情，要求妥协，并让领导人在一定程度上免受当下的狂热影响，同时仍然让他们定期在选举日对人民负责。

来自2018年10月号。美国正活在詹姆斯-麦迪逊的噩梦中

从2009年到2012年，增强病毒性的科技公司把我们带入了麦迪逊的噩梦深处。许多作者引用了他在《联邦党人第10号》中关于人类与生俱来的 "派别 "倾向的评论，他指的是我们将自己分成团队或政党的倾向，这些团队或政党因 "相互敌视 "而发怒，以至于他们 "更倾向于相互争吵和压迫，而不是为他们的共同利益合作"。

但那篇文章继续谈到了一个较少被引用但同样重要的见解，即关于民主对琐事的脆弱性。麦迪逊指出，人们是如此容易产生派系主义，以至于 "在没有实质性场合出现的情况下，最轻浮和虚幻的区别就足以点燃他们不友好的激情，激起他们最激烈的冲突。"

社交媒体既放大了无意义的东西，又将其作为武器。现在，我们在推特上为众议员亚历山大-奥卡西奥-科特兹(Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)在年度Met Gala上的富人税礼服，以及梅拉尼娅-特朗普在9/11纪念活动上的礼服（其缝线看起来有点像摩天大楼）发生争吵，我们的民主是否更加健康？参议员特德-克鲁兹在推特上批评大鸟接种COVID疫苗的行为如何？

请看。乌克兰危机短暂地将美国的文化战争纳入视野

重要的不仅仅是时间和稀缺注意力的浪费，还有对信任的不断削弱。专制国家可以通过宣传或利用恐惧来激发它所希望的行为，但民主国家则取决于对规则、规范和机构的合法性的广泛内部接受。对任何特定的个人或组织的盲目和不可逆转的信任是不值得的。但是，当公民对民选领导人、卫生当局、法院、警察、大学和选举的公正性失去信任时，那么每一个决定都会变得有争议；每一次选举都会变成一场生死攸关的斗争，从另一方手中拯救国家。最近的爱德曼信任晴雨表（衡量公民对政府、企业、媒体和非政府组织信任度的国际指标）显示，稳定和有能力的专制国家（中国和阿拉伯联合酋长国）位居榜首，而美国、英国、西班牙和韩国等有争议的民主国家的得分接近末位（尽管高于俄罗斯）。

最近的学术研究表明，社交媒体确实对政府、新闻媒体以及一般人和机构的信任有侵蚀作用。由社会科学家Philipp Lorenz-Spreen和Lisa Oswald领导的一份工作文件对这些研究进行了最全面的审查，得出的结论是："数字媒体的使用和信任之间的大部分报告似乎对民主不利。" 文献是复杂的--一些研究显示了好处，特别是在欠发达的民主国家，但审查发现，总的来说，社交媒体放大了政治两极化；煽动了民粹主义，特别是右翼民粹主义；并与错误信息的传播有关。

摘自2021年4月号。互联网不一定是可怕的

当人们对机构失去信任时，他们就会对这些机构所讲述的故事失去信任。受托教育儿童的机构尤其如此。历史课程经常引起政治争议，但脸书和推特使家长有可能每天为他们孩子的历史课上的新片段感到愤怒--还有数学课和文学作品的选择，以及全国各地任何新的教学转变。教师和行政人员的动机受到质疑，过度的法律或课程改革有时也会随之而来，使教育变得愚钝，并进一步降低对它的信任。一个结果是，在后巴比伦时代受教育的年轻人不太可能达成一个关于我们是谁的连贯故事，也不太可能与那些在不同学校上学或在不同年代受教育的人分享任何这样的故事。

前中央情报局分析员马丁-古里在其2014年出版的《公众的反叛》一书中预测了这些分裂的影响。古里的分析集中在信息的指数级增长所带来的权威颠覆效应上，从20世纪90年代的互联网开始。在近十年前的写作中，Gurri已经可以看到社交媒体的力量是一种普遍的溶剂，在它所到达的地方打破纽带并削弱机构。他指出，分布式网络 "可以抗议和推翻，但永远不会治理"。他描述了2011年许多抗议运动的虚无主义，这些运动主要在网上组织，像 "占领华尔街 "一样，要求破坏现有的机构，但没有提供一个替代的未来愿景或一个可以实现它的组织。

Gurri不是精英或中央集权的粉丝，但他注意到前数字时代的一个建设性特征：单一的 "大众观众"，都在消费同样的内容，就像他们都在对着同一面巨大的镜子看自己社会的倒影。在对Vox的评论中，他回顾了后巴比伦时代的第一次散居，他说。

数字革命打碎了那面镜子，现在公众居住在那些破碎的玻璃碎片中。因此，公众不是一个东西；它是高度碎片化的，而且基本上是相互敌对的。它主要是人们互相谩骂，生活在这样或那样的泡沫中。
马克-扎克伯格可能不希望看到这些。但是，通过在急于求成的情况下重新连接一切--对人类心理的天真概念，对机构的复杂性知之甚少，对强加给社会的外部成本毫不关心--Facebook、Twitter、YouTube和其他一些大型平台在不知不觉中溶解了信任的砂浆、对机构的信念和共同的故事，这些都将一个庞大而多样的世俗民主国家维系在一起。

我认为我们可以把塔的倒塌追溯到2011年（古里的 "虚无主义 "抗议活动的焦点年）和2015年之间，这一年的标志是左派的 "伟大觉醒 "和右派的唐纳德-特朗普的上台。特朗普并没有摧毁这座塔，他只是利用了它的坠落。他是第一个掌握后巴贝尔时代新动力的政治家，在这个时代，愤怒是病毒式传播的关键，舞台表演压倒了能力，推特可以压倒全国所有的报纸，而故事不能在几个相邻的片段中分享（或至少是信任），所以真理不能实现广泛的坚持。

包括我在内的许多分析家认为，特朗普不可能赢得大选，他们依靠的是巴别前的直觉，即诸如Access Hollywood录音带（特朗普在其中吹嘘自己实施了性侵犯）这样的丑闻对总统竞选是致命的。但在巴别之后，没有什么东西真正意味着什么--至少不是以一种持久和人们广泛认同的方式。

巴别之后的政治
"德国政治家奥托-冯-俾斯麦在1867年说："政治是可能的艺术。在后巴别时代的民主中，可能的事情不多。

当然，美国的文化战争和跨党派合作的衰落早于社交媒体的到来。20世纪中期是国会两极分化异常低的时期，在20世纪70年代和80年代开始恢复到历史水平。两党之间的意识形态距离在20世纪90年代开始加速扩大。福克斯新闻和1994年的 "共和党革命 "使共和党变成了一个更具战斗性的政党。例如，众议院议长纽特-金里奇(Newt Gingrich)不鼓励新的共和党国会议员将他们的家人搬到华盛顿特区，在那里他们很可能与民主党人及其家人形成社会关系。

因此，跨党派关系在2009年之前就已经很紧张了。但此后社交媒体的病毒性增强，使人们看到与敌人交心，甚至未能以足够的力度攻击敌人的做法更加危险。在右翼，RINO（Republican in Name Only）一词在2015年被特朗普的支持者在推特上流行的更轻蔑的术语cuckservative所取代。在左边，社交媒体在2012年之后的几年里推出了呼声文化，对大学生活以及后来整个英语世界的政治和文化产生了变革性影响。

来自2015年9月号。美国人思想的溺爱

2010年代发生了什么变化？让我们重温一下那位推特工程师的比喻：把一把上了膛的枪交给一个4岁的孩子。一条刻薄的推特不会杀人；它是一种试图公开羞辱或惩罚某人，同时宣传自己的美德、才华或部落的忠诚。它与其说是子弹，不如说是飞镖，会造成痛苦，但不会造成死亡。即便如此，从2009年到2012年，Facebook和Twitter在全球范围内发放了大约10亿支飞镖枪。从那时起，我们一直在互相射击。

社交媒体让一些以前没有什么话语权的人有了话语权，它让人们更容易让有权势的人对他们的错误行为负责，不仅是在政治上，而且在商业、艺术、学术和其他方面。在推特之前，性骚扰者可以通过匿名的博客文章被叫出来，但很难想象，如果没有主要平台提供的病毒式强化，#MeToo运动会几乎如此成功。然而，社交媒体扭曲的 "问责制 "也在三个方面带来了不公正和政治功能的失调。

首先，社交媒体的飞镖枪给了巨魔和挑衅者更多的权力，而让好公民沉默。政治学家Alexander Bor和Michael Bang Petersen的研究发现，社交媒体平台上的一小部分人高度关注获得地位，并愿意用攻击性来实现这一目的。他们承认，在他们的在线讨论中，他们经常骂人，取笑他们的对手，并被其他用户屏蔽或因不当言论而被举报。在八项研究中，鲍尔和彼得森发现，上网并没有使大多数人变得更有攻击性或敌意；相反，它使少数具有攻击性的人能够攻击更多的受害者。Bor和Petersen发现，即使是少量的混蛋也能在讨论区中占主导地位，因为非混蛋很容易从网上的政治讨论中被拒绝。其他研究发现，妇女和黑人受到的骚扰不成比例，所以数字公共广场对他们的声音不太欢迎。

插图，19世纪绘画的细节，手握飞镖，用电子邮件的 "发送 "标志代替其飞行。
插图：Nicolás Ortega。来源。维纳斯和丘比特，皮埃尔-马克西米利安-德拉方丹，1860年之前。
第二，社交媒体的飞镖枪给了政治极端分子更多的权力和声音，而减少了温和大多数人的权力和声音。由支持民主的团体More in Common进行的 "隐藏部落 "研究，在2017年和2018年调查了8000名美国人，并确定了七个拥有共同信仰和行为的群体。最靠右的一个群体被称为 "忠实的保守派"，占美国人口的6%。最靠左的群体，即 "进步的积极分子"，占人口的8%。进步活动家是迄今为止社交媒体上最多产的群体。70%的人在过去一年中分享过政治内容。紧随其后的是忠实的保守派，占56%。

这两个极端群体在令人惊讶的方面是相似的。他们是七个群体中最白、最富有的群体，这表明美国正被两个不代表更广泛社会的精英子集之间的斗争所撕裂。更重要的是，他们是在道德和政治态度上表现出最大同质性的两个群体。该研究的作者推测，这种意见的统一性很可能是社交媒体上思想监督的结果。"那些对反对派群体的观点表示同情的人可能会遭遇来自他们自己群体的反击"。换句话说，政治极端分子不只是向他们的敌人投掷飞镖；他们把大量的弹药用在自己团队中的异议者或细微的思想者身上。这样一来，社交媒体使基于妥协的政治体系陷入停滞。

来自2021年10月号的文章。安妮-阿普尔鲍姆谈暴民正义是如何践踏民主言论的

最后，通过给每个人一把飞镖枪，社交媒体让每个人都能在没有正当程序的情况下主持正义。像Twitter这样的平台演变成了狂野的西部，对义务兵没有任何责任。一次成功的攻击会引来一连串的喜欢和后续的打击。强化病毒的平台因此促进了对小的或想象中的违法行为的大规模集体惩罚，造成了现实世界的后果，包括无辜的人失去工作和被羞辱到自杀。当我们的公共场所被不受正当程序约束的暴民动态所支配时，我们得到的不是正义和包容；我们得到的是一个无视背景、比例、怜悯和真相的社会。


结构性的愚昧
自塔楼倒塌以来，各种辩论变得越来越混乱。良好思维的最普遍的障碍是确认性偏见，这指的是人类倾向于只寻找证实我们偏好的信念的证据。即使在社交媒体出现之前，搜索引擎也在为确认性偏见增压，使人们更容易为荒谬的信念和阴谋论找到证据，例如地球是平的，美国政府策划了9/11袭击。但社交媒体让事情变得更加糟糕。

来自2018年9月号的文章。欺骗你大脑的认知偏见

治疗确认性偏见最可靠的方法是与那些不赞同你的信仰的人互动。他们用反证和反驳来对抗你。约翰-斯图亚特-米尔说："只知道自己的一面的人，对那一面知之甚少。"他敦促我们从 "真正相信他们的人 "那里寻找冲突的观点。那些想法不同，并且在与你意见相左时愿意说出来的人让你更聪明，几乎就像他们是你自己大脑的延伸。试图压制或恐吓批评者的人使自己更愚蠢，几乎就像他们在向自己的大脑射飞镖一样。

在20世纪，美国建立了人类历史上最有能力的知识生产机构。在过去的十年里，他们集体变得更加愚蠢。
乔纳森-罗奇（Jonathan Rauch）在他的《知识的宪法》（The Constitution of Knowledge）一书中，描述了西方社会发展 "认识论操作系统 "的历史突破，即一套从有偏见和认知缺陷的个人的互动中产生知识的机构。英国法律发展了对抗制，使有偏见的辩护人可以向公正的陪审团陈述案件的双方。充满谎言的报纸演变成了专业的新闻企业，其规范要求寻找故事的多个侧面，然后进行编辑审查，最后进行事实核查。大学从隐蔽的中世纪机构演变为研究中心，创造了一个结构，在这个结构中，学者们提出了有证据支持的主张，他们知道世界各地的其他学者会通过寻找相反的证据来获得声望。


美国在20世纪的伟大，部分来自于发展了人类历史上最有能力、最有活力和最有成效的知识生产机构网络，将世界上最好的大学、将科学进步转化为改变生活的消费产品的私营公司以及支持科学研究和领导合作使人们登上月球的政府机构连接在一起。

但是，罗奇指出，这种安排 "不是自我维持的；它依赖于一系列有时很微妙的社会环境和理解，而这些需要被理解、肯定和保护"。那么，当一个机构没有得到很好的维护，内部分歧停止时，会发生什么，要么是因为其人民在意识形态上变得统一，要么是因为他们变得害怕提出异议？

我认为，这就是2010年代中后期美国许多重要机构所发生的情况。他们集体变得更加愚蠢，因为社交媒体向他们的成员灌输了一种长期的恐惧，害怕被抛弃。这种转变在大学、学术协会、创意产业和各级政治组织（国家、州和地方）中最为明显，它是如此普遍，以至于在一夜之间建立了由新政策支持的新行为规范。增强病毒性的社交媒体无所不在，这意味着教授、领导或记者的一句话，即使是出于积极的意图，也可能导致社交媒体上的风暴，引发机构的立即解雇或漫长的调查。我们的主要机构的参与者开始自我审查，达到了不健康的程度，对他们认为缺乏支持或错误的政策和观点--甚至是他们的学生在课堂上提出的观点--进行批评。


但是，当一个机构惩罚内部异议时，它将飞镖射入自己的大脑。

这个令人目瞪口呆的过程在右翼和左翼的表现是不同的，因为他们的积极分子赞同具有不同神圣价值的不同叙述。隐蔽部落 "的研究告诉我们，"忠实的保守派 "在与独裁主义有关的信仰方面得分最高。他们有一个共同的叙事，即美国永远处于外部敌人和内部颠覆者的威胁之下；他们将生活视为爱国者和叛徒之间的战斗。根据政治学家卡伦-斯滕纳（Karen Stenner）的研究，他们在心理上不同于更大的 "传统保守派"（占人口的19%），后者强调秩序、礼节和缓慢而非激进的变化。

只有在忠实的保守派的叙述中，唐纳德-特朗普的演讲才有意义，从他竞选时关于墨西哥 "强奸犯 "的不祥的开场白，到他在2021年1月6日的警告："如果你不像地狱一样战斗，你就不会再有一个国家"。

对叛国罪的传统惩罚是死刑，因此1月6日的战斗口号是："绞死迈克-彭斯"。事实证明，右翼的死亡威胁，许多是由匿名账户发出的，在压制传统保守派方面是有效的，例如，将未能 "阻止偷窃 "的地方选举官员赶走。对持不同意见的共和党国会议员的威胁浪潮同样促使许多剩余的温和派退出或保持沉默，使我们的党更加脱离了保守主义传统、宪法责任和现实。我们现在有一个共和党，把对美国国会大厦的暴力攻击说成是 "合法的政治话语"，并得到一系列右翼智囊团和媒体组织的支持--或者至少是没有反驳。


右派的愚蠢在许多阴谋论中最为明显，这些阴谋论在右翼媒体中传播，现在也进入了国会。"披萨门"、QAnon、相信疫苗含有微芯片、坚信唐纳德-特朗普赢得连任--很难想象，如果没有Facebook和Twitter，这些想法或信仰体系会达到这样的程度。

插图：17世纪妇女照镜子的画作，在竖起大拇指的 "喜欢 "符号周围被打碎了。
插图：Nicolás Ortega。来源。Vanity》，Nicolas Régnier，约1626年。
民主党也受到了结构性愚蠢的严重打击，尽管方式不同。在民主党内，进步派和比较温和的派别之间的斗争是公开和持续的，而且往往是温和派获胜。问题是，左派控制着文化的制高点：大学、新闻机构、好莱坞、艺术博物馆、广告、硅谷的大部分，以及塑造K-12教育的教师工会和教学学院。在许多这些机构中，异议被扼杀了：2010年代初，当每个人都被分发了一把飞镖枪时，许多左倾机构开始向自己的大脑开枪。而不幸的是，这些是为全国大多数人提供信息、指导和娱乐的大脑。


20世纪末的自由主义者有一个共同的信念，社会学家克里斯蒂安-史密斯称之为 "自由主义进步 "的叙事，即美国曾经是可怕的不公正和压迫，但由于活动家和英雄的斗争，已经（并继续）朝着实现其建国时的崇高承诺取得了进展。这个故事很容易支持自由主义的爱国主义，它是巴拉克-奥巴马总统任期内的生动叙述。这也是 "隐藏部落 "研究中的 "传统自由主义者"（占人口的11%）的观点，他们具有强烈的人道主义价值观，年龄大于平均水平，而且主要是领导美国的文化和知识机构的人。

但是，当新的病毒式的社交媒体平台给了每个人一把飞镖枪时，做得最多的是年轻的进步主义活动家，他们把不成比例的飞镖瞄准了这些年长的自由主义领导人。在这种情况下，每个机构的生活都是身份群体之间对零和馅饼的永恒争斗，在上面的人通过压迫下面的人而达到目的。这种新的叙述是僵化的平等主义--侧重于结果的平等，而不是权利或机会的平等。它对个人权利毫不关心。

对不同意这种说法的人的普遍指控不是 "叛徒"；而是 "种族主义者"、"变性人"、"卡伦"，或一些相关的猩红字母，将犯罪者标记为憎恨或伤害边缘化群体的人。对这种罪行感到正确的惩罚不是处决；而是公开羞辱和社会死亡。


当一个左派人士仅仅指出质疑或反驳进步活动家所赞成的信念的研究时，你可以最清楚地看到这种昏聩过程。推特上有人会想办法把持不同意见者与种族主义联系起来，其他人就会堆积起来。例如，在乔治-弗洛伊德被杀后的第一周的抗议活动中，其中包括暴力，当时受雇于Civis Analytics的进步政策分析家大卫-肖尔（David Shor）在推特上发布了一个研究的链接，显示1960年代的暴力抗议活动导致了民主党在附近县市的选举挫折。肖尔显然是想提供帮助，但在随后的愤怒中，他被指责为 "反黑人"，并很快被解雇了。(Civis Analytics否认这条推文导致了肖尔被解雇)。

Shor的案例变得很有名，但在Twitter上的任何人都已经看到了几十个教授基本教训的例子。不要质疑你自己一方的信仰、政策或行动。而当传统的自由主义者保持沉默时，就像2020年夏天许多人所做的那样，进步的活动家更激进的叙事就会成为一个组织的管理叙事。这就是为什么许多认识论机构在那一年和下一年似乎迅速 "觉醒"，从《纽约时报》和其他报纸的争议和辞职浪潮开始，一直到医生团体和医学协会的社会正义声明（美国医学协会和美国医学院协会的一份出版物。例如，美国医学会和美国医学院协会的一份出版物建议医疗专业人员将街区和社区称为 "被压迫 "或 "系统性剥离"，而不是 "弱势 "或 "贫困"），以及纽约市最昂贵的私立学校的课程的匆忙转型。


可悲的是，我们看到在COVID的战争中，双方都在上演着昏聩。右派一直致力于将COVID的风险降到最低，以至于将这种疾病变成了一种优先杀害共和党人的疾病。进步的左派如此致力于将COVID的危险性最大化，以至于它经常拥抱一种同样最大化的、一刀切的疫苗、口罩和社会疏远战略--甚至是与儿童有关的。这种政策并不像散布关于疫苗的恐惧和谎言那样致命，但其中许多政策对儿童的心理健康和教育造成了破坏，因为他们迫切需要相互玩耍和上学；我们几乎没有明确的证据表明学校关闭和幼儿口罩可以减少COVID的死亡。对于我在这里讲述的故事来说，最值得注意的是，那些反对关闭学校的进步家长经常在社交媒体上受到攻击，并遭到无处不在的左派对种族主义和白人至上主义的指责。蓝色城市的其他人学会了保持沉默。

美国政治越来越荒唐，越来越不正常，不是因为美国人越来越不聪明。这个问题是结构性的。由于社交媒体加强了病毒性，在我们的许多机构中，不同意见受到惩罚，这意味着不好的想法被提升为官方政策。

情况将变得更加糟糕
在2018年的一次采访中，唐纳德-特朗普的前顾问史蒂夫-班农(Steve Bannon)说，对付媒体的方法是 "用狗屎淹没这个区域"。他描述的是俄罗斯虚假信息项目所开创的 "假话的火喉 "战术，以使美国人感到困惑、迷失方向和愤怒。但那时，在2018年，可用的狗屎数量是有上限的，因为所有的狗屎都必须由人创造（除了一些由机器人生产的低质量的东西）。


然而，现在，人工智能已经接近实现高度可信的虚假信息的无限传播。人工智能程序GPT-3已经非常出色，你可以给它一个主题和一个语气，它将吐出你喜欢的文章，通常具有完美的语法和令人惊讶的连贯性。一两年后，当该程序升级到GPT-4时，它将变得更有能力。斯坦福大学互联网观察站的研究经理Renée DiResta在2020年的一篇题为 "虚假信息的供应很快将是无限的 "的文章中解释说，传播虚假信息--无论是通过文字、图像还是深度伪造的视频--将很快变得难以想象。(她与GPT-3共同撰写了这篇论文）。

美国派别不会是唯一使用人工智能和社交媒体来产生攻击内容的人；我们的对手也会。在2018年一篇题为 "数字马奇诺防线 "的令人不安的文章中，迪雷斯塔直言不讳地描述了这种状况。"她写道："我们正沉浸在一场不断发展、持续的冲突中：一场国家行为者、恐怖分子和意识形态极端分子利用支撑日常生活的社会基础设施来挑拨离间，侵蚀共同的现实。苏联人曾经不得不派遣特工或培养愿意为他们服务的美国人。但社交媒体使俄罗斯的互联网研究机构能够廉价而容易地编造虚假事件或歪曲真实事件，以激起左派和右派的愤怒，通常是在种族方面。后来的研究表明，一场密集的活动于2013年在推特上开始，但很快就蔓延到了脸书、Instagram和YouTube等平台。其主要目标之一是分化美国公众，传播不信任--在麦迪逊确定的薄弱环节将我们分开。

如果我们不尽快做出重大改变，那么我们的机构、我们的政治制度和我们的社会可能会崩溃。
我们现在知道，不仅仅是俄罗斯人在攻击美国的民主。在2019年香港的抗议活动之前，中国主要关注的是微信等国内平台。但现在中国发现，在与美国不断升级的冲突中，它能用推特和脸书做多少事，而且花的钱很少。鉴于中国自己在人工智能方面的进步，我们可以预计，在未来几年里，它在进一步分裂美国和进一步团结中国方面会变得更加娴熟。

在20世纪，美国作为引领世界民主安全的国家的共同身份是一种强大的力量，有助于保持文化和政体的团结。在21世纪，美国的科技公司重新构建了世界，创造了现在看来对民主有腐蚀作用的产品，是共同理解的障碍，是现代塔的破坏者。

巴别之后的民主
我们永远无法回到数字时代之前的状态。在漫长的大众传播时代发展起来的规范、机构和政治参与形式，在技术使一切都变得如此快速和多向的情况下，在绕过专业看门人如此容易的情况下，已经不能很好地发挥作用。然而，美国的民主现在正在可持续发展的范围之外运行。如果我们不尽快做出重大改变，那么我们的机构、我们的政治体系和我们的社会可能会在下一次重大战争、大流行病、金融崩溃或宪法危机中崩溃。

需要哪些改变？为数字时代重新设计民主远远超出了我的能力，但我可以提出三类改革--如果民主要在后巴贝尔时代保持活力，就必须实现这三个目标。我们必须强化民主机构，使其能够承受长期的愤怒和不信任，改革社交媒体，使其对社会的腐蚀性降低，并为下一代在这个新时代的民主公民身份做好准备。


强化民主体制
在可预见的未来，政治两极化可能会加剧。因此，无论我们做什么，我们必须改革关键机构，以便它们能够继续运作，即使愤怒、错误信息和暴力的程度远远超过我们今天的水平。

例如，立法部门被设计为需要妥协，但国会、社交媒体和党派有线电视新闻频道已经共同发展，以至于任何立法者如果跨越过道，可能会在几小时内面临来自其党内极端派别的愤怒，破坏她的筹款前景，提高她在下一个选举周期中被初选的风险。

改革应该减少愤怒的极端分子的巨大影响，使立法者对其所在地区的普通选民有更多的反应。这种改革的一个例子是结束封闭式的政党初选，代之以单一的、无党派的、公开的初选，由排名前几位的候选人进入大选，并采用排序选择投票。这种投票制度的一个版本已经在阿拉斯加实施，它似乎给了参议员丽莎-穆尔科斯基(Lisa Murkowski)更多反对前总统特朗普的余地，而特朗普青睐的候选人在封闭的共和党初选中会对穆尔科斯基构成威胁，但在公开初选中却不会。


强化民主体制的第二个方法是减少任何一个政党对系统进行有利于自己的游戏的权力，例如，划定自己喜欢的选区或选择监督选举的官员。这些工作都应该以无党派的方式进行。关于程序正义的研究表明，当人们认为一个过程是公平的，他们更有可能接受一个违背他们利益的决定的合法性。想想看，参议院的共和党领导层已经对最高法院的合法性造成了损害，他们在2016年大选前9个月阻止考虑梅里克-加兰的席位，然后在2020年匆忙通过对艾米-科尼-巴雷特的任命。一项被广泛讨论的改革将结束这种政治游戏规则，让大法官错开18年的任期，以便每位总统每两年任命一次。

改革社交媒体
如果一个民主国家的公共广场是人们害怕发言的地方，而且无法达成稳定的共识，那么它就无法生存。社交媒体对极左、极右、国内巨魔和外国特工的授权正在创造一个看起来不像是民主，而更像是由最具侵略性的人统治的系统。

插图：1861年但丁《地狱》中的大异教徒的雕刻，两个人看着发光的智能手机屏幕，周围是爬出坟墓的人，背景是冒着火的城墙。
插图：尼古拉斯-奥特加。来源。拱门异端》，古斯塔夫-多雷，约1861年。
但我们有能力减少社交媒体瓦解信任和煽动结构性愚蠢的能力。改革应该限制平台对咄咄逼人的边缘人的放大作用，同时给予 "更多的人"（More in Common）所说的 "疲惫的大多数 "更多的发言权。

那些反对监管社交媒体的人通常关注的是，政府规定的内容限制在实践中会演变成审查制度的合理担忧。但是，社交媒体的主要问题不是一些人发布虚假或有毒的东西；而是虚假和引起愤怒的内容现在可以达到2009年以前不可能达到的水平和影响。脸谱网的举报人弗朗西斯-豪根（Frances Haugen）主张对平台的架构进行简单的改变，而不是对所有内容进行大规模的、最终徒劳的监管。例如，她建议修改Facebook的 "分享 "功能，使任何内容被分享两次后，链上的第三个人必须花时间将内容复制并粘贴到新的帖子中。像这样的改革不是审查制度；它们是观点中立和内容中立的，在所有语言中都同样有效。它们不会阻止任何人说任何事情；它们只是减缓了那些平均来说不太可能是真的内容的传播。

也许，能够减少现有平台的毒性的最大的单一变化是将用户验证作为获得社交媒体提供的算法放大的前提条件。

阅读。Facebook有一个超级用户至上的问题

银行和其他行业都有 "了解你的客户 "的规定，这样他们就不能与从犯罪企业洗钱的匿名客户做生意。大型社交媒体平台也应被要求这样做。这并不意味着用户必须用真名发帖；他们仍然可以使用假名。这只是意味着，在一个平台将你的言论传播给数百万人之前，它有义务核实（也许通过第三方或非营利组织）你是一个真实的人，在一个特定的国家，并且年龄足以使用该平台。这一变化将消除目前污染主要平台的数以亿计的机器人和虚假账户中的大部分。它还可能减少死亡威胁、强奸威胁、种族主义的恶劣行为和更普遍的嘲弄行为的频率。研究表明，当人们觉得自己的身份不为人知、无法追踪时，反社会行为在网上变得更加普遍。

在任何情况下，越来越多的证据表明，社交媒体正在破坏民主，这足以让联邦通信委员会或联邦贸易委员会等监管机构加强监督。首要的工作之一应该是迫使平台与学术研究人员分享他们的数据和算法。

为下一代做好准备
Z世代的成员--1997年及以后出生的人--对我们所处的困境不承担任何责任，但他们将继承这种困境，而且初步迹象表明，老一代人已经阻止他们学习如何处理这种困境。

在最近几代人中，童年变得更加严格--自由的、无组织的游戏机会减少；无监督的户外活动时间减少；更多的时间在网上。无论这些变化的其他影响是什么，它们都可能阻碍了许多年轻成年人有效自我管理所需的能力的发展。无人监督的自由游戏是大自然教导年轻哺乳动物成年后所需技能的方式，对人类来说，这包括合作、制定和执行规则、妥协、裁决冲突和接受失败的能力。经济学家史蒂芬-霍维茨（Steven Horwitz）在2015年的一篇精彩文章中认为，自由游戏为儿童准备了 "结社的艺术"，亚历克西斯-德-托克维尔说这是美国民主活力的关键；他还认为，它的丧失对 "自由社会构成严重威胁"。霍维茨警告说，被阻止学习这些社会技能的一代人将习惯性地求助于当局来解决争端，并将遭受 "社会互动的粗糙化"，这将 "创造一个更多冲突和暴力的世界。"


来自2017年9月号的文章。智能手机摧毁了一代人吗？

虽然社交媒体已经侵蚀了整个社会的交往艺术，但它可能会在青少年身上留下最深、最持久的痕迹。2010年代初，美国青少年的焦虑、抑郁和自残率突然开始激增。(原因尚不清楚，但从时间上看，社交媒体是一个重要因素--就在大多数美国青少年成为主要平台的每日用户时，这种激增开始了。华尔街日报》报道，相关性和实验性研究支持与抑郁症和焦虑症的联系，年轻人自己的报告和Facebook自己的研究也支持这种联系。

抑郁症使人们不太可能想接触新的人、想法和经验。焦虑使新事物看起来更具威胁性。随着这些情况的增加，以及通过自由游戏学到的关于细微社会行为的课程被推迟，许多年轻人对不同观点的容忍度和解决争端的能力都在减少。例如，最近在2010年还能容忍各种演讲者的大学社区，随着Z世代开始进入校园，可以说在随后几年开始失去了这种能力。拒绝邀请来访者的尝试增多。学生们不只是说他们不同意来访的演讲者；一些人说，这些演讲是危险的，在情感上是毁灭性的，是一种暴力形式。由于青少年抑郁症和焦虑症的发病率在2020年代持续上升，我们应该预期这些观点会在以后的几代人中继续存在，而且确实会变得更加严重。


阅读。我为什么要报道校园争论

为了减少社交媒体对儿童的破坏性影响，我们可以做出的最重要的改变是推迟进入，直到他们度过青春期。国会应该更新《儿童在线隐私保护法》，该法早在1998年就将所谓的互联网成人年龄（公司可以不经父母同意收集儿童个人信息的年龄）设定为13岁，而对有效执法几乎没有规定。该年龄应至少提高到16岁，并且公司应负责执行该年龄。

更为普遍的是，为了让下一代为后巴贝尔时代的民主做好准备，也许我们能做的最重要的事情就是让他们出去玩。不要再让孩子们失去成为好公民最需要的经验：在有成人监督的混合年龄组的儿童中自由游戏。每个州都应该效仿犹他州、俄克拉荷马州和德克萨斯州的做法，通过一个版本的《自由放养法》，帮助父母保证，如果他们8岁或9岁的孩子被发现在公园里玩耍，他们不会因疏忽而受到调查。有了这样的法律，学校、教育工作者和公共卫生机构就应该鼓励父母让他们的孩子步行去学校，在外面集体玩耍，就像以前更多的孩子那样。


巴别之后的希望
我所讲述的故事是暗淡的，几乎没有证据表明美国将在未来五年或十年内恢复一些正常和稳定的面貌。哪一方会变得和气起来？国会颁布加强民主体制或为社交媒体解毒的重大改革的可能性有多大？

然而，当我们远离我们功能失调的联邦政府，断开与社交媒体的联系，直接与我们的邻居交谈，事情似乎更有希望。More in Common报告中的大多数美国人都是 "精疲力竭的大多数 "的成员，他们厌倦了争斗，愿意倾听对方的意见并作出妥协。大多数美国人现在看到，社交媒体对国家产生了负面影响，并越来越意识到它对儿童的破坏性影响。

我们会对此采取什么措施吗？

当托克维尔在19世纪30年代巡视美国时，他对美国人的习惯印象深刻，即组建自愿协会来解决当地问题，而不是像欧洲人那样等待国王或贵族来采取行动。这种习惯今天仍在我们身边。近年来，美国人已经成立了数百个致力于建立跨越政治分歧的信任和友谊的团体和组织，包括BridgeUSA、Braver Angels（我在其董事会任职）以及BridgeAlliance.us网站上列出的许多其他组织。我们不能指望国会和科技公司来拯救我们。我们必须改变自己和我们的社区。


在巴别毁灭后的日子里，生活在巴别会是什么样子？我们知道。这是一个混乱和损失的时期。但它也是一个反思、倾听和建设的时间。