“My Brain Finally Broke” with Jia Tolentino
00:21:
(Gia Tolentino)
Why is there this mass de-skilling experiment at a time when with the skills we have, we're already not doing very well, like living in contemporary reality.
00:32:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like we are already kind of psychologically unequipped to live in this contemporary reality.
00:37:
(Gia Tolentino)
And our response to it is like further de-skill ourselves by handing over ideas.
00:41:
(Gia Tolentino)
basic kind of questions of comprehension of reality to chat GPT.
00:47:
(Gia Tolentino)
It just seems like, yeah, on a very pragmatic level, all of this aside, it's like on a selfish level, I can't de-skill myself any more than I already am because I'm already not doing well.
01:04:
(Chris Hayes)
Hello and welcome.
01:04:
(Chris Hayes)
Why is this happening?
01:05:
(Chris Hayes)
With me, your host, Chris Hayes.
01:13:
(Chris Hayes)
In the last, I would say like week, I've had three interactions with unreal portions of the internet that have really kind of shaken me.
01:23:
(Chris Hayes)
The first was a TikTok video fed to me by the algorithm of homeless people in Chicago pitching tents on buses.
01:31:
(Chris Hayes)
And it was not, it was like photorealistic.
01:34:
(Chris Hayes)
Like it looked like a local news package.
01:37:
(Chris Hayes)
And at first I was like, what?
01:38:
(Chris Hayes)
And then as I watched, I was like, this is not like the physics don't actually work here.
01:41:
(Chris Hayes)
Like none of this works, but it took me, I had to watch it.
01:45:
(Chris Hayes)
Then I watched it again to be like, oh, this is an AI generated image that looks a lot like a local news package that doesn't look rendered and surreal.
01:55:
(Chris Hayes)
It looks crisp and like it would actually look like the tents had cinder blocks at the corners to like weigh down the place that the posts would have gone into the soil.
02:04:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah.
02:05:
(Chris Hayes)
And I was like, well, that's weird.
02:07:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, this doesn't exist.
02:08:
(Chris Hayes)
Someone is trying to make it as if it is does exist to get engagement, I guess.
02:12:
(Chris Hayes)
Then I had another video I saw that was like this crazy incident happening on a plane.
02:19:
(Chris Hayes)
And it was just it looked real photorealistic as a person like holding their phone and they're like to sort of see other other people on the on the plane gasping and someone's getting thrown out.
02:31:
(Chris Hayes)
And it's like this big scene.
02:32:
(Chris Hayes)
But there's something off about it.
02:34:
(Chris Hayes)
And then it turned out it was generated by some content farm that like makes these scenes on purpose to go get engagement.
02:41:
(Chris Hayes)
And then the third thing that happened to me was that someone that I love in my family, we were just talking.
02:47:
(Chris Hayes)
He's like, oh, did you see Nikola Jokic's press conference after they lost that game?
02:51:
(Chris Hayes)
The Denver Nuggets MVP and star and center who's Serbian.
02:56:
(Chris Hayes)
And I was like, oh, no.
02:57:
(Chris Hayes)
And he played it for me.
02:58:
(Chris Hayes)
And it was it was very funny.
02:59:
(Chris Hayes)
It's it looked exactly like Jokic.
03:01:
(Chris Hayes)
It sounded exactly like Jokic.
03:03:
(Chris Hayes)
I know what Jokic sounds like.
03:05:
(Chris Hayes)
But it was clearly AI generated and it's him kind of starting off talking normally, but then starting to like slag all his teammates.
03:13:
(Chris Hayes)
Right.
03:13:
(Chris Hayes)
And I had to be to this person like, no, that's that's AI.
03:17:
(Chris Hayes)
But I understand why you don't.
03:19:
(Chris Hayes)
And I just think the line is getting very thin very quickly between what is real and what's not.
03:27:
(Chris Hayes)
And then at the same time, what is real is.
03:30:
(Chris Hayes)
the images we see of parts of the world, particularly the images that come out of Gaza come to mind the most sort of acutely feel surreal, like are horrific and hyper real in a way that feels almost like it can't actually be of this earth.
03:45:
(Chris Hayes)
And the distinction between the two is getting harder and harder.
03:48:
(Chris Hayes)
And this
03:50:
(Chris Hayes)
Brain-breaking aspect of the modern internet was a subject of an essay that has really stuck with me that was published like a little more than a month ago by Gia Tolentino and The New Yorker called My Brain Finally Broke.
04:01:
(Chris Hayes)
Much of what we see now is fake.
04:03:
(Chris Hayes)
The reality we face is full of horrors.
04:05:
(Chris Hayes)
More and more of the world is slipping beyond my comprehension.
04:08:
(Chris Hayes)
And as someone who just wrote a book about the attention age and about the information environment we live in, this really resonated with me.
04:15:
(Chris Hayes)
And I thought...
04:16:
(Chris Hayes)
as things have only gotten more insane, it would be a good time to talk to Gia.
04:21:
(Chris Hayes)
So Gia, welcome to the program.
04:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
Thank you for having me to talk about my favorite subject, the incomprehensibility of the world.
04:32:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
04:33:
(Gia Tolentino)
And my broken brain.
04:33:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
04:34:
(Gia Tolentino)
It's not gotten better.
04:35:
(Chris Hayes)
Have you had any moments like that recently of the, is this real?
04:39:
(Chris Hayes)
Oh, it's not real.
04:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
Well, I...
04:45:
(Gia Tolentino)
I don't even know, really.
04:47:
(Gia Tolentino)
I mean, I will say, when I was writing this piece, I was further into the valley of the, you know, homeless people pitching a tent on top of city buses in Chicago.
04:57:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, I have since...
04:59:
(Gia Tolentino)
I was like, okay, let me try to see less fake things.
05:01:
(Gia Tolentino)
But it's still...
05:02:
(Gia Tolentino)
The fake things that I see right now, I think I wrote in the piece that my like it's mostly my like it's mostly just Instagram and it's like AI images of celebrities, just AI people that look, you know, and it's mostly semi benign things like it's like fake beauty influencers or whatever.
05:21:
(Gia Tolentino)
But, you know, I thought the images coming out of the protests in L.A.,
05:26:
(Gia Tolentino)
you know, they're real.
05:29:
(Gia Tolentino)
The real sort of watermarked, you know, newswire images coming out of them.
05:34:
(Gia Tolentino)
I have the like, wait, is this fake news?
05:37:
(Gia Tolentino)
Totally.
05:38:
(Gia Tolentino)
But they are real.
05:39:
(Gia Tolentino)
But yeah, it's like you were saying, the things that are fake look extremely real.
05:45:
(Gia Tolentino)
The things that are real are...
05:49:
(Gia Tolentino)
are almost unbelievable.
05:50:
(Gia Tolentino)
And then the result is this slurry in our mind that causes this kind of, like when I was writing about it, it felt like a permission structure to detach from the material reality of the world.
06:02:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like it all adds up to, you know, you see the sort of the literally starving children in Gaza
06:08:
(Gia Tolentino)
But there have been viral AI images of starving children in Gaza on Facebook for a year now.
06:15:
(Gia Tolentino)
That are not real.
06:18:
(Gia Tolentino)
That are not real.
06:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
That are engagement farming.
06:21:
(Gia Tolentino)
Just like there are images, you know, there's the whole sort of AI slop category of people.
06:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
engagement farming images on facebook where it's like emaciated children next to like birthday cakes hooked up to ventilators like on a beach and it's like like because it's my birthday or whatever and then a lot you know and it's like these very like some of the children some of the children have eight legs you know and it's it's and it's but you know and then alongside of those are image are images of
06:48:
(Gia Tolentino)
AI generated images of starving children purportedly in Gaza.
06:52:
(Gia Tolentino)
And then there are real ones.
06:54:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it all just kind of, it felt when I was writing it, it was like, I realized that I, it was unnerving to me to feel like there was a permission structure to detach from reality when, you know, the entire world
07:04:
(Gia Tolentino)
felt purpose of my existence is to cleave to it harder.
07:07:
(Gia Tolentino)
But there was something about this year where I started to feel like, uh-oh, you know, like I'm not only having the response of like, wait, is this, I'm feeling a slackening of my reflex of like, wait, is this true or false?
07:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like sometimes I don't even ask, which is terrifying.
07:22:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like sometimes I'm just like, well, I'm not going to look at that any longer, you know, and that's terrifying to me.
07:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
And then sometimes just to not know is, yeah.
07:31:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
07:31:
(Chris Hayes)
The not knowing to me, like one of the things that I've been struggling with, and I think it's like a, it's sort of a generation and age thing, which is that I was, obviously there's been fake stuff on the internet forever.
07:44:
(Chris Hayes)
And I've always been like the people one generation older than me had a harder time telling it apart.
07:52:
(Chris Hayes)
And I always knew what was fake and what was real.
07:54:
(Chris Hayes)
Because you do, it's one of the skills you build being on the internet.
07:59:
(Chris Hayes)
And feeling my own ability to make that distinction, like, I don't know if it's age and younger people are better at it, but I don't think they are.
08:08:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, that's the thing is that I think if you look at the data and you look what people are posting and stuff like they're not any better.
08:14:
(Chris Hayes)
And in fact, it's partly that the technology is just getting better and journalism is shrinking enough such that
08:23:
(Chris Hayes)
the way that I used to orient myself to is this real or not, it's gotten harder and harder to orient myself.
08:31:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah, and there's also, right, I mean, it's like everything you wrote about in your book.
08:34:
(Gia Tolentino)
It's like none of the dynamics are new, none of the vectors are new, but there is kind of meaningfully new, there are meaningfully new aspects to the technology.
08:43:
(Gia Tolentino)
And the fact that like with images and with words and with video, there was this thing, like 404 Media does really good reporting on the sort of,
08:52:
(Gia Tolentino)
this realm.
08:54:
(Gia Tolentino)
The slop realm.
08:55:
(Gia Tolentino)
The slop realm.
08:55:
(Gia Tolentino)
And there are scammers that can deepfake in real time.
08:59:
(Gia Tolentino)
They can change their age, race, gender, and they can pose and speak in real time through these filters.
09:06:
(Gia Tolentino)
I remember two years ago being like, well, AI doesn't interest me.
09:09:
(Gia Tolentino)
And now it's not just inescapable, but it is palpably, rapidly, whether we like it or not, whether we consciously engage it or not, it is reshaping the entire texture of lived reality for many, many people.
09:21:
(Gia Tolentino)
And
09:22:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I think there is something to the fact that like, I mean, I still don't really understand this fully.
09:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
I'm still like, because my brain is so broken, I'm thinking through this out loud, but it's like, there is now like an unprecedented possibility to have no human hand, almost no human hand in, you know, that like chat GPT generates the prompts that are then used
09:42:
(Gia Tolentino)
to prompt the AI video makers, right?
09:44:
(Gia Tolentino)
And so there's a human hand, but it's so far back.
09:47:
(Gia Tolentino)
And like that human hand in generating the prompts that then generate the video, like probably came from like this ecosystem of like web seminars, teaching people in, you know, Southeast Asia to just, you know, farm more.
10:03:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it's the...
10:04:
(Gia Tolentino)
any sort of human touch on it is so far removed from the actual thing in a way that is world historically new that I think this bounces back onto the realm of the real where these things such as like ice raids, you know, all over Los Angeles, all over New York, in the subways, at clubs and restaurants, like the very real human hands and all of that that cause the actual structural reality of our world.
10:30:
(Gia Tolentino)
It's almost like we lose...
10:32:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, we lose our sense of the fact that actually much of the world, there are human hands on it.
10:38:
(Gia Tolentino)
There are like real material chains of people making decisions that can be broken where the sort of endless realm of the machine can't really be stopped in any way.
10:48:
(Chris Hayes)
because the to me the line so there's two things happening here I think like IRL we used to call IRL back in the day quaintly right in real life and online are there's not really a distinction anymore partly because the way that we understand and live IRL is through our phones so yeah and so because of that
11:07:
(Chris Hayes)
What I'm hearing you say is there's like a weird displacement that happens where it's like it all feels like content or everything feels like a thing that started in the phone.
11:17:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah.
11:17:
(Chris Hayes)
Like as opposed to a thing in the world where the phone is the device that's transmuting a reality in the world, that it all just popped up from in there.
11:25:
(Chris Hayes)
And I do think that's partly the experience of the algorithmic feed where you're just going through.
11:30:
(Chris Hayes)
It's like AI slop, celebrity influencer.
11:34:
(Chris Hayes)
Ice raid in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where a desperate employer is pleading with armed agents who are in masks to let her employee go.
11:43:
(Chris Hayes)
And that's all just in the exact same cycle of in the content carousel.
11:50:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I also think, you know, this, I started to feel like, like 2016, I was like, okay, the internet got Trump elected, you know, like the worst parts of the internet.
12:02:
(Gia Tolentino)
And then in 2021, it was like January 6th, I was like, okay, this, like, I have like high watermarks in my head of like when the phone enlarged to eat the world, kind of.
12:11:
(Gia Tolentino)
And like the election in 2016 was one of them, January 6th, I felt like I was like, oh,
12:17:
(Gia Tolentino)
you know, a conspiracy theory jumped out of the phone and stormed the Capitol.
12:22:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, like that felt really, you know, that felt like, oh, like something.
12:26:
(Gia Tolentino)
And this year, you know, there's some quality to it, like the Hootie PC small group thing, right?
12:32:
(Chris Hayes)
Like it's like the, we're like- The Pete Hegseth signal chat that accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.
12:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yes, yes.
12:41:
(Gia Tolentino)
And, and like, you know, Trump, Trump tweeting like a, an obviously photoshopped photo of Kilmar Albrega Garcia's like fake, you know, and it's like, he's tweeting it and it's obviously fake and it's justifying like all of these, like it's the, the, I think what I called in the piece is sort of like cognitive tendrils of phone based insanity are, feel like the thing that are, it's like increasingly driving policy in so many ways.
13:04:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, yeah.
13:05:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah.
13:06:
(Chris Hayes)
And that that idea that it right, that the phone that the world sort of comes from and goes into the phone.
13:13:
(Chris Hayes)
And that also that like, yes, that the most powerful person in the world is also just as addled and pickled.
13:19:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, Elon Musk being another example like that.
13:23:
(Chris Hayes)
This is actually shaping the reality of the people that actually do have the force in the real life.
13:27:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, you saw this, you know, we talked about you and I are speaking in the second week of June.
13:33:
(Chris Hayes)
There's protests in California.
13:36:
(Chris Hayes)
over ice raids.
13:37:
(Chris Hayes)
The president has called, has federalized the National Guard over the objections of the governor, which hasn't been done since LBJ did it to George Wallace in Alabama to integrate the University of Alabama.
13:47:
(Chris Hayes)
There are 700 Marines that are deployed there, all for
13:51:
(Chris Hayes)
What basically was about five Waymos that got lit on fire in a one block radius of downtown L.A. And there were like two stores, I think, that got their windows smashed and people stole some stuff.
14:01:
(Chris Hayes)
That's like the sum total, like far less or fewer arrests than, say, the parade after the L.A. Kings won the NHL title.
14:09:
(Chris Hayes)
Like this is like this is a true drop in the bucket.
14:13:
(Chris Hayes)
But the reality is.
14:15:
(Chris Hayes)
And here we have to say that this is actually anterior to the phone, like on Fox News, good old-fashioned cable news, the medium I spend a lot of my time in.
14:23:
(Chris Hayes)
The reality is...
14:25:
(Chris Hayes)
full RoboCop, like Verhoeven film, dystopian LA on fire.
14:31:
(Chris Hayes)
And that is not just scrolling online and not just on the television sets in the White House.
14:38:
(Chris Hayes)
It is how the president of the United States, I think, genuinely understands the reality.
14:43:
(Chris Hayes)
Like when he talks about LA, he says, we saved it from burning.
14:47:
(Chris Hayes)
And maybe that's a cynical lie.
14:49:
(Chris Hayes)
It might be.
14:51:
(Chris Hayes)
But also, I think he probably thinks that's right because the place that he's getting his information is the distorted, refracted reality of what is the most dramatic image and the most attentionally grabbing.
15:03:
(Gia Tolentino)
This is a really bad analogy for this.
15:06:
(Gia Tolentino)
But like in six years ago, I wrote about this thing called Instagram face for the New Yorker, which was where like women would digitally alter their faces to look more whatever perfect.
15:17:
(Gia Tolentino)
And then they would go to plastic surgeons to get the alterations to match the digital face.
15:22:
(Gia Tolentino)
And then they would further digitally alter the physically perfected face and then go.
15:26:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it was just this back and forth till everyone.
15:28:
(Gia Tolentino)
I remember that essay.
15:29:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it's why everyone looks the same now.
15:31:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like it's why everyone was like and but there's something about what you're talking about where Trump perceives Robocop reality in L.A. and then he has the ability to produce it adversarially.
15:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
Right.
15:41:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yes.
15:41:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like the sort of like he he can create that.
15:44:
(Gia Tolentino)
He can he can bring the National Guard.
15:46:
(Chris Hayes)
He's his own plastic surgeon.
15:47:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah, like he can he can send in the people to trample protesters underfoot on horseback and then people will, you know, like and then he can produce the response.
15:56:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it's yeah.
15:57:
(Chris Hayes)
And he and he it's what he wants, you know, that and the idea that what we will get like the you know, the images we're seeing of the protests, for instance, or the images I saw, you know, I just referenced it before about this sort of desperate employer in Great Barrington, Massachusetts pleading with these ICE agents or federal agents.
16:12:
(Chris Hayes)
I don't know which they could have been from the constellation of agencies and DHS.
16:17:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, to let this person go, who's been a gardener working for over years, who is not a criminal and not suspected of anything is just there working.
16:24:
(Chris Hayes)
And the uncanny of like the visual grammar of that that moment through the phone is also so much of a structuring grammar of how we under visual grammar for how we understand the world.
16:41:
(Chris Hayes)
That to go back to the point we started with, if you put something in that shaky vertical video, I'm like immediately inclined to believe it.
16:51:
(Chris Hayes)
Even if it's fake.
16:53:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah.
16:53:
(Chris Hayes)
So like there are these visual cues of authenticity that were produced by the shaky camera of the handheld witness.
17:02:
(Chris Hayes)
Like I just grabbed my phone.
17:04:
(Chris Hayes)
That signal authenticity so reliably or had until now.
17:10:
(Chris Hayes)
Right.
17:10:
(Chris Hayes)
That it's very hard to overcome my visceral desire to believe what I'm seeing if you just put it into that framework.
17:18:
(Gia Tolentino)
But that video was real, right?
17:20:
(Chris Hayes)
That video was real.
17:20:
(Chris Hayes)
That video was real.
17:22:
(Chris Hayes)
But but but this is treacherous territory.
17:24:
(Chris Hayes)
I run like a news program, you know, like we're constantly doing this.
17:28:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, is this real?
17:28:
(Chris Hayes)
Is this not?
17:29:
(Chris Hayes)
And we have luckily we have resources and we have a staff and we could take time and like burrow down.
17:34:
(Chris Hayes)
But average citizens don't like what is being asked of people now on this front to me seems totally impossible for people.
17:47:
(Chris Hayes)
a person who doesn't do this professionally like I do to begin to sort through.
17:52:
(Gia Tolentino)
Right, right.
17:53:
(Gia Tolentino)
You would just simply detach.
17:55:
(Gia Tolentino)
You would simply like be like, oh, I have to text my children and go back to work.
17:59:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, like you wouldn't like that's the thing that I have found so scary about this year.
18:03:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like the spidey, the instinctive sense of real or fake that we have people in our field have from combing through real or fake for so long, or in my case, being like vaguely young enough to sort of feel like I understood the
18:16:
(Gia Tolentino)
the latest vagaries of the internet.
18:17:
(Gia Tolentino)
I'm like, I'm just perhaps like aging out of, you know, of, but, but you're right.
18:21:
(Gia Tolentino)
I don't think younger people, I think younger people perhaps have even a less like, like, like, I think the fact checking impulse might seem kind of old fashioned, you know?
18:29:
(Gia Tolentino)
It's like, like you, you, you would perceive the entire world as sort of surreal, not just surreal, but almost like at an arm's
18:37:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like that it's all just like a flat plane of indistinguishably like untouchable madness, you know?
18:44:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I think that plenty of people do experience it like that.
18:49:
(Chris Hayes)
And you think that has a politically, I think, you know, there's a politically enervating effect to that, right?
18:54:
(Chris Hayes)
Massively.
18:55:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah, you think that's happening.
18:57:
(Chris Hayes)
Or you're feeling it yourself?
18:58:
(Gia Tolentino)
Well, you know, you know what I was thinking recently?
19:00:
(Gia Tolentino)
So I was at the ICE protest yesterday, like in Foley Square.
19:04:
(Gia Tolentino)
This is June 11th, the one on June 10th.
19:06:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I was there with my little kid who's almost two.
19:09:
(Gia Tolentino)
And and today I was texting with a friend of mine who is a public defender who had to bring like she has a client who she had to accompany to immigration court.
19:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
And she had her client bring her three year old daughter to
19:21:
(Gia Tolentino)
in the hopes that the presence of a very young child would hold off the detention, the scooping up of her by ICE in her court appearance.
19:31:
(Gia Tolentino)
And all of that, and I was just thinking about this and how we are processing, because it's interesting in New York, the protest response, it has, for a variety of reasons, and I think it's been indicative of the way that I think the court system and the subways both are kind of rendered in the minds of the average New Yorker kind of
19:51:
(Gia Tolentino)
almost invisibly lawless spaces.
19:54:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like there's something like, like ICE has been sweeping subways for a while now here, but there's kind of, there's not the, the protests here have just not been as militant in the same way that they have been in LA.
20:06:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I think they probably will turn into that at some point because the sweeps will get more intense here.
20:11:
(Gia Tolentino)
But I was thinking part of this is because for, since October 7th, 2023, we have been
20:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
There's been this really unprecedented tsunami of images and videos of what is fundamentally U.S. state-sponsored violence, I would say, funded by us.
20:33:
(Gia Tolentino)
And...
20:34:
(Gia Tolentino)
like, unbelievable, like, suffering in front of us.
20:37:
(Chris Hayes)
The worst things you've ever seen.
20:39:
(Chris Hayes)
The worst things I've ever seen.
20:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
The worst things you've ever seen filmed on shaky video.
20:44:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
20:44:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, and there have been plenty of fakes about Gaza, too, but, you know, like, filmed on real shaky video by humans transmitted on platforms directly to our phones.
20:53:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it has had an effect that,
20:57:
(Gia Tolentino)
And like taking that all in as the web fills up, you know, as we fill up to our necks in fake images and fake text also has had a real effect on how I think many people, maybe myself included, have processed what is happening with these ICE kidnappings.
21:16:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, like I think there's been a deadening effect of just like, oh, a horrific thing on my phone.
21:23:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
21:23:
(Gia Tolentino)
A horrific thing on my phone.
21:24:
(Gia Tolentino)
A horrific thing is happening to a family on my phone.
21:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
21:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, and I think that there has been this, I mean, certainly it's had an effect on me in terms of like, you know, watching everything in Gaza happen and watching like very, very few members of Congress even say anything about it really.
21:44:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like that has had a really alarming effect on my understanding of the civic process.
21:50:
(Gia Tolentino)
But yeah, I think that the images have something to do with it too.
21:53:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah, I think you're right.
21:54:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think it's created a very, yes, I think it's had a really pernicious deadening quality on people.
21:59:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think the instinct behind it is the opposite.
22:02:
(Chris Hayes)
It's to produce like empathy.
22:05:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think instead it has produced some empathy, but
22:10:
(Chris Hayes)
But I think largely one of the main effects, and it has, you've seen it in the politics of particularly younger people who are on algorithms like this the most, are the most sympathetic to Gazans and to Palestinians and the most opposed to Israel's conduct there.
22:26:
(Chris Hayes)
That said, I think it has had a kind of deadening effect on people.
22:30:
(Chris Hayes)
It's so much, it's so constant, it's so awful that there's a part that people turn off.
22:36:
(Chris Hayes)
And then the other thing that I constantly wrestle with specifically on this, because I think you're right to pinpoint like this specific barrage of images from Gaza since October 2023 as a kind of key part of this experience of online life and sort of horror and surreality is,
22:54:
(Chris Hayes)
I have to tell myself that in the same way that I look at Fox's depiction of L.A. and I'm like, you, Fox viewer, are being totally misled and snookered about what's happening in L.A.
23:08:
(Chris Hayes)
There are millions of people who think I am being misled and snookered by the images on my phone of Gaza.
23:14:
(Chris Hayes)
Totally.
23:14:
(Chris Hayes)
This is propaganda that this is.
23:16:
(Chris Hayes)
And I have to constantly.
23:20:
(Chris Hayes)
get myself to figure out how to touch back home base because I need to retain skepticism of my own reality in this respect.
23:30:
(Chris Hayes)
And it's like, again, I have talked to people that have been in Gaza who are not making content, who can tell me, yes, it is as horrible as what you've seen.
23:39:
(Chris Hayes)
I have been there.
23:40:
(Chris Hayes)
I just came back.
23:40:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, I have the ability to do that.
23:43:
(Chris Hayes)
I'm a reporter.
23:43:
(Chris Hayes)
I talk to folks.
23:46:
(Chris Hayes)
But most people don't have that.
23:49:
(Chris Hayes)
And so, again, like this sense that you're getting the reality stream to your eyeballs with the danger of the fact it's not actually reality.
23:58:
(Chris Hayes)
And the inability to have the resources to do the thing that I get to do.
24:02:
(Chris Hayes)
And still feel fucked up about it.
24:04:
(Chris Hayes)
And still feel, yes.
24:05:
(Chris Hayes)
And to constantly be doing the checking in.
24:08:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, I do need to do that.
24:09:
(Chris Hayes)
I do have to remind myself when I see an image, I don't know where this came from.
24:12:
(Chris Hayes)
I don't know who took this.
24:13:
(Chris Hayes)
I don't know the context.
24:14:
(Chris Hayes)
I don't know what happened before this image.
24:16:
(Chris Hayes)
I don't know what came after it.
24:17:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, this is the thing that we, like, drill into producers on the show, right?
24:21:
(Chris Hayes)
Because, like, sometimes...
24:22:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, everyone is like, you know, the viral shark image that's swimming around after every flooding.
24:27:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, Ted Cruz posted it and so and so.
24:29:
(Chris Hayes)
People fall for it every time there's a flood or a tornado.
24:31:
(Chris Hayes)
It's like, no, that's not actually what you think it is.
24:34:
(Chris Hayes)
That I feel defeated by it.
24:38:
(Chris Hayes)
And I have to do I have to work full time to keep me touching reality as my full time job.
24:44:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah, right.
24:46:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I think like.
24:48:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, it all amounts to, like, this can't be real.
24:52:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, I think that sort of horseshoe that we were talking about at the beginning, it's like, it can't be real because it is so unbelievably horrible.
24:59:
(Gia Tolentino)
It just can't be real.
25:00:
(Gia Tolentino)
One's brain flinches away, swipes to the next thing, is like, I can't, this can't be real.
25:07:
(Gia Tolentino)
And then it's like a video of a guy in Antarctica riding a ski-doo.
25:11:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I'm like, this can't be real.
25:12:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, and then it's an image, you know, and then it's like...
25:15:
(Gia Tolentino)
We've talked so much, all of us who have written about the internet, it's like we've talked so much about context collapse, about like individual pieces of information.
25:23:
(Gia Tolentino)
But there's also something to me about, there's kind of context collapse that's happening with like a simple idea like this can't be real.
25:31:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like there's...
25:32:
(Gia Tolentino)
The two different ways to think this, this can't be real because it is obviously fake and this can't be real because it is so horrible that my moral and civic sense cannot allow that this is being produced by the same political system that I am purportedly invested in.
25:48:
(Gia Tolentino)
that those just kind of collapse on one's phone into just like, this can't be real, this can't be real, this can't be real, this can't be real, you know?
25:54:
(Gia Tolentino)
And that really scares me.
25:56:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, I feel like the indistinguishability of like two very separate emotions and ideas that are all just flattening into this can't be real is like, I think maybe more than anything, like that was this alarm.
26:08:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like if I, if I myself, someone that kind of
26:13:
(Gia Tolentino)
I feel like I write a lot about currents of emotion and if I can't even clearly distinguish those two things in my own self, that scared me in the same way that not being able to fact check whether this is a real person in an advertisement for a baseball hat that I might buy.
26:30:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, like it's the deadening effect of like, yeah, it's like, oh, I'm going to buy like swim goggles for for my child to wear to the YMCA.
26:37:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I'm like, is this a real child wearing the swim goggles?
26:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
You don't know.
26:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
You click, you know.
26:41:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it's like, what?
26:44:
(Gia Tolentino)
And there's overall that accumulates into something.
26:46:
(Chris Hayes)
And amidst it all, like there's also the fact that.
26:50:
(Chris Hayes)
like this sort of seriality and the deadening.
26:52:
(Chris Hayes)
There's also like the fact, and I think to like, this has been particularly true in the Gaza context, but it was true in the Ukrainian context before that, like where it does still retain this ability to produce this sort of sense of human closeness, intimacy, and connection.
27:05:
(Chris Hayes)
Like there was a, you know, there was this meme that started during the Ukraine war that was like,
27:12:
(Chris Hayes)
this sort of Italian American song that was in the Godfather wedding scene.
27:16:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, and it's, and it's people like being like things in my Italian grandparents house that just makes sense.
27:25:
(Chris Hayes)
Right.
27:25:
(Chris Hayes)
So it was like this sort of like Italian American, New Jersey meme.
27:28:
(Chris Hayes)
And I saw a young woman from Ukraine.
27:31:
(Chris Hayes)
Like being like things in our bomb shelter that just makes sense.
27:35:
(Chris Hayes)
She's doing the same meme because she's watching the same content, right?
27:38:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, so she's getting fed like Southern Jersey, Italian American memes too.
27:43:
(Chris Hayes)
And she's doing it.
27:44:
(Chris Hayes)
I felt so close to her in that moment.
27:46:
(Chris Hayes)
Like it's so funny to me.
27:47:
(Chris Hayes)
She's in a war zone.
27:48:
(Chris Hayes)
She's a bomb shelter.
27:49:
(Chris Hayes)
There's another guy who's like, who's like a workout nut who lives in Gaza, who does like these incredibly funny posts about like, got my 30,000 steps in today because I had to go get clean water from the,
28:01:
(Chris Hayes)
Right.
28:02:
(Chris Hayes)
And like sort of doing these very funny, sly send ups of like influencer culture because he's also.
28:08:
(Chris Hayes)
Right.
28:10:
(Chris Hayes)
Like the other side of the seriality is like this dude is living in a war zone on his phone is this portal of a world being like, you got to get your protein in.
28:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
Totally.
28:20:
(Chris Hayes)
We're all looking at the same little box feeding us the same insanity.
28:24:
(Chris Hayes)
Right.
28:25:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah, it's nuts.
28:27:
(Chris Hayes)
But that ability, that ability to me is like the thing that I want to preserve or that I cherish about it.
28:32:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, I think the reason I first fell in love with the Internet is like when you do feel like you have moments of human connection across geographical distance, which is really precious.
28:42:
(Chris Hayes)
And like both of those, like the gym influencer guy and the girl in the bomb shelter, like
28:49:
(Chris Hayes)
It did give me empathy or insight for a sliver of a moment into the human experience that they were going through in a way that like a news report on the BBC wouldn't have, you know, like it just did.
29:01:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think there is inside of all this madness and surreality there.
29:06:
(Chris Hayes)
It does retain that ability.
29:09:
(Gia Tolentino)
It retains that ability person-to-person, but I think we're kind of experiencing that there's quite a hard line between that person-to-person, you know, democratized, we are fundamentally the same people watching the same things in my house that just make sense video—
29:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
And then, but it doesn't, the person, like if anything, like you think about, you know, especially let's say like in November, December, 2023 and early 2024, there were all these videos of children being like, like, you know, delivering these,
29:44:
(Gia Tolentino)
heartbreaking pleas for their life.
29:47:
(Gia Tolentino)
And them thinking quite reasonably, I think, surely if they see us, if they see that we're here in our school, that we just want to not be bombed, and that we just want to eat and live, surely if these people will see us on their phones, and it will do something.
30:04:
(Gia Tolentino)
And people watch those.
30:05:
(Gia Tolentino)
And there was like an enormous, you know, like I feel like, you know, the videos that I'm talking about, like there were like the one specifically the earliest one where it was like they're literally children pleading for their life on camera.
30:15:
(Gia Tolentino)
And they thought they hoped that it would do something.
30:18:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it didn't.
30:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
It enormously.
30:20:
(Gia Tolentino)
I think there were many people that were moved by that video that that it's lodged in their brains in the same way.
30:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
Did it do anything wrong?
30:29:
(Gia Tolentino)
to decrease or end the amount, the billions of dollars that we're going, you know, no.
30:34:
(Gia Tolentino)
And, and so it's like those things have to, like, it almost makes it worse in a lot of ways because our hearts are cracked open and the system is as whatever as it always was.
30:44:
(Gia Tolentino)
And, and I think that's part of what is giving everyone that feeling of madness, like where it's like there's connection and then where do we
30:51:
(Gia Tolentino)
put in GoFundMes to bribe Egyptian border guards.
30:54:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, what else do we do, you know?
30:56:
(Chris Hayes)
But I also think that what you're identifying, I know exactly the videos you're talking about,
31:02:
(Chris Hayes)
Again, to go back to that sort of Fox News example, it's like there also is just this enormous, vast cultural distance between the people who have been experiencing those videos nonstop since October and those who haven't.
31:14:
(Chris Hayes)
Absolutely.
31:14:
(Chris Hayes)
And it's almost unbridgeable.
31:16:
(Chris Hayes)
It's totally unbridgeable.
31:18:
(Chris Hayes)
So the U.S. senators have not been, you know, people that are in my life who I love, who have very good politics, even on this specific issue or politics I agree with, I should say.
31:28:
(Chris Hayes)
and are empathetic people.
31:30:
(Chris Hayes)
I know people like that who aren't, who haven't been experiencing it the same way.
31:34:
(Chris Hayes)
Like that specific experience is so distinct in the same way that like, you know, the distance between how people who are just getting, and again, it's not the same because I think it's like the reality is different, but what is the same is that there's an unbridgeable distance between people watching Fox 16 hours a day about what they think is happening in Los Angeles.
31:52:
(Chris Hayes)
And us, yeah.
31:53:
(Gia Tolentino)
And us, like, it's just like-
31:55:
(Gia Tolentino)
Well, I think, yeah, this was also, I don't think it was, like, maybe it was 2020 when I started to think, like, there was a point within the last five years where I was like, there is no chance that I could convince anyone that
32:11:
(Gia Tolentino)
That's something I am seeing on my phone is real.
32:14:
(Gia Tolentino)
That if what they see on their phone is a different mix of fake and real things.
32:21:
(Chris Hayes)
They have a different mixture of fake and real than I do.
32:23:
(Gia Tolentino)
They have a different equation.
32:25:
(Gia Tolentino)
But you know, I was like, there's no...
32:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
There was a time, you know, like I'm I'm from Texas.
32:30:
(Gia Tolentino)
I grew up around actually exclusively around people who believe things that are like antithetical to the things that I believe.
32:36:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like I I feel pretty skilled in the or I did feel pretty equipped to bridge those gaps or have conversations.
32:46:
(Gia Tolentino)
And bridge like a totally different reality, totally different set of priorities.
32:50:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like a friend of mine in Houston who might be like, well, what about the kitty litter in schools for the trans cats or whatever?
32:56:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I'm like, ah, you know, and I would like have an ability to say like, okay, let's walk.
33:01:
(Gia Tolentino)
But there came a point in the last five years where I was like, actually...
33:05:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like the language itself, like there's an unbridgeable divide.
33:09:
(Gia Tolentino)
I could not convince someone that is even five shades more liberal than left than I am that like something I'm seeing on my phone is something they need to pay attention to.
33:17:
(Gia Tolentino)
Which again is like quite alarming given like the profession, you know, that I like I'm in and believe in.
33:23:
(Gia Tolentino)
But yeah, it's like there's the...
33:26:
(Gia Tolentino)
In 2020, I think was when I started to feel the real palpable absence of a shared civic reality.
33:31:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it does feel like, it's even like someone would say something that's very important to them, the way that, you know, the things we're talking about are important to us.
33:42:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I would be like looking at them, you know, like it would feel, they'd be like, oh, but did you read this latest study about like vaccines and seed oils, you know?
33:48:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I would just be like, oh.
33:49:
(Gia Tolentino)
what?
33:50:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, like, what?
33:52:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yes.
33:53:
(Chris Hayes)
No, I know exactly.
33:54:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, a stray sentence from someone in your life that opens a portal into the what kind of
34:02:
(Chris Hayes)
videos they've been served on the algorithm, you know?
34:05:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
34:05:
(Gia Tolentino)
And like, and maybe there's some truth in whatever they say.
34:08:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I would just be like, I would just be like, uh, like, you know, be like a tin can me to the person directly in front of me.
34:14:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it would feel like I was speaking across a mile over like a mile long rope bridge over a chasm.
34:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, I could just be like, well, we're just going to go live in our other, our phones, you know, like, let's just go back to our respective phones, you know?
34:28:
(Chris Hayes)
More of our conversation after this quick break.
35:13:
(Chris Hayes)
To me, you mentioned the fact that, you know, the profession that you're part of.
35:17:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, I think we're both journalists, you know, in different ways, different relationships to it.
35:22:
(Chris Hayes)
But we both came up as writers.
35:24:
(Chris Hayes)
And, you know, you work in a magazine where like famously there's fact checkers and I've worked with New Yorker fact checkers and they're like...
35:30:
(Chris Hayes)
They're hard asses.
35:31:
(Chris Hayes)
They're hard asses, man.
35:32:
(Chris Hayes)
It's like wild.
35:33:
(Chris Hayes)
It's amazing.
35:34:
(Chris Hayes)
It is amazing.
35:35:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, it's like a really great painful massage is how I feel.
35:39:
(Gia Tolentino)
I love it.
35:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
Oh, yeah.
35:40:
(Chris Hayes)
It's like, ah!
35:41:
(Chris Hayes)
So it's getting a knot, you know?
35:43:
(Chris Hayes)
It's agonizing, yeah.
35:45:
(Chris Hayes)
And all of this is, you know, I've ended up in this kind of, I'm curious if you feel this way.
35:50:
(Chris Hayes)
I have ended up in a, and I think it's partly age.
35:52:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, I'm 46 years old, so I think this just comes with the territory of aging.
35:56:
(Chris Hayes)
In this kind of fuddy-duddy, fusty place of like,
35:59:
(Chris Hayes)
A lot of this old-fashioned technique craft stuff about the professional ethos of the thing that we do that I care about, which is like, it's really important to me that I get things right.
36:09:
(Chris Hayes)
It's really important I not show videos that are decontextualized or not right.
36:14:
(Chris Hayes)
Or, you know, it's really important that we are the ones that touch down in reality has become more and more and more important to me in the work that I do professionally.
36:25:
(Chris Hayes)
It's always been important to me, but also...
36:27:
(Chris Hayes)
If I have any hope of anything civically, because like when it comes down to when I do see a viral video or I do see something, what I do start to do is like, oh, was there a local news report about this?
36:37:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, like did some reporter go to the door of that employer in Great Barrington who took this video?
36:45:
(Chris Hayes)
And did they talk to a look?
36:46:
(Chris Hayes)
And it's like, oh, yes, they did.
36:47:
(Chris Hayes)
Oh, OK.
36:49:
(Chris Hayes)
This person exists.
36:50:
(Chris Hayes)
This person is real.
36:50:
(Chris Hayes)
This is not AI.
36:52:
(Chris Hayes)
This like I can now read the reporting.
36:54:
(Chris Hayes)
I could read the journalism.
36:55:
(Chris Hayes)
And that ends up being.
36:58:
(Chris Hayes)
the only anchor left.
37:00:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, that's it.
37:01:
(Gia Tolentino)
I think that matters like on a, like it, it matters on a, like a literal material structural sense that like you need human hands on something.
37:08:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yes.
37:09:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like you need human hands on something to ensure that it remains real and something real is produced by, like, this is just a thing that is true of like anything that you could possibly think of.
37:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like,
37:20:
(Gia Tolentino)
a pillow, a bed, a piece of food, a news report, like it's human hands are really important.
37:25:
(Gia Tolentino)
But I think it's also, it's like insane to even be having this conversation.
37:29:
(Gia Tolentino)
It's like, it's important for people to do that.
37:31:
(Gia Tolentino)
But I think emotionally, that's also true.
37:34:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like I think,
37:36:
(Gia Tolentino)
I don't think anyone really likes the sense that we have that we don't know that the text that we're reading, like no one wants that.
37:43:
(Gia Tolentino)
Everyone wants the experiences that are maximally, that are entirely contained within the realm of like the human, like the literal physical human.
37:52:
(Gia Tolentino)
And-
37:53:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, I was thinking of, did you see that thing where like the, some Chicago paper published an AI list of books, like summer preview books, and they were all, you know, it's like you just can't, you actually, you need the human fact checker to call the person and say, did you say this thing?
38:09:
(Gia Tolentino)
Because if they, and if someone is doing the quick shortcut and being like, hey, chat GPT, like did, is this quote from this book real?
38:16:
(Gia Tolentino)
Chat GPT will say like,
38:17:
(Gia Tolentino)
hey, genius, like it is real and it won't be, you know, like we physically, you know, like there was that whole thing where, you know, for like a couple of weeks, ChatGPT was like, you'd be like, hey, ChatGPT, like I had an amazing business idea to like cut off my head and sell it for $2 million.
38:33:
(Gia Tolentino)
And they would be like,
38:35:
(Gia Tolentino)
Fam, like, you know, many people in this world are afraid to take risks, but not you.
38:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, and it would just like say, you know, like if you asked it, should I stop taking?
38:45:
(Chris Hayes)
Yes, they had to basically just the story was that the model was too flattering because the training, what had happened was basically like the training data had shown that like users like that the most.
38:57:
(Chris Hayes)
And so the model had gotten too flattering and they had to like go into the guts of the model and like turn down how flattering it was.
39:03:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah, like people would ask it.
39:05:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like there were screenshots like all over people being like, Chai GPT, like should I stop taking the lithium that I've been prescribed for 25 years?
39:11:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it would be like...
39:12:
(Gia Tolentino)
Girl, absolutely, you know?
39:15:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it's like, it's really funny, but it's also like, oh my God, you know?
39:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like someone probably murdered their whole family because of like a system update into LGBT, you know?
39:24:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it's like, and it is funny finding myself like, it does feel kind of fuddy-duddy, but it also, I don't know, it like makes sense.
39:32:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like you-
39:34:
(Gia Tolentino)
you simply need people rather than machines trained on endless loops of increasingly incorrect data to determine your world.
39:44:
(Chris Hayes)
I think this idea, this sort of ethos that I think is like an emerging ethos that I do think is a kind of exciting to me, an exciting sort of, I think, political and ideological movement of like the primacy of the human.
40:00:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, and again, like,
40:04:
(Chris Hayes)
Has real resonances with the Industrial Revolution.
40:06:
(Chris Hayes)
And, you know, Brian Merchant has a book called Blood and the Machine, which is sort of about the origins of the Luddite movement.
40:12:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah, they were right.
40:15:
(Chris Hayes)
And how and he writes a lot about this and he's got a sub stack that's that's that's very good.
40:20:
(Chris Hayes)
I recommend to people.
40:20:
(Chris Hayes)
But.
40:22:
(Chris Hayes)
this idea and Ezra's talked about this and, and D Graham Burnett, who's a, a attention theorist who I really respect and activist on this, like as the kind of machinification of intelligence happens as, as we sort of, the sort of product, the industrial, the industrialization like reaches into our very consciousness and minds, like reasserting the primacy of human, of humanness and humans doing stuff.
40:52:
(Chris Hayes)
I think is actually a kind of emerging priority politically, personally, spiritually, ideologically.
41:01:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah, right.
41:03:
(Gia Tolentino)
I mean, it's like sometimes there are posts on Reddit that are like, wait, before Google Maps, what did people do?
41:10:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah, how did they?
41:11:
(Chris Hayes)
No, I saw that one the other day.
41:12:
(Gia Tolentino)
How did they get around?
41:14:
(Chris Hayes)
How did they navigate?
41:16:
(Chris Hayes)
How did people get to an address?
41:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
41:20:
(Gia Tolentino)
And like, and it's like, you know, I like, there are so many things that I've outsourced to the phone, such as like the storage of visual memories, right?
41:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, like there, and, and, you know, like there are plenty, but, but it's, yeah, it's like, it, I mean, the thing about the whole thing, it's like, I think I wrote about this in the broken brain thing.
41:38:
(Gia Tolentino)
It's like, why is there this
41:42:
(Gia Tolentino)
Why is there this mass de-skilling experiment at a time when with the skills we have, we're already not doing very well, like living in contemporary reality.
41:52:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like we are already kind of psychologically unequipped to live in this contemporary reality.
41:57:
(Gia Tolentino)
And our response to it is like further de-skill ourselves by handing over...
42:02:
(Gia Tolentino)
basic kind of questions of comprehension of reality to chat GPT.
42:08:
(Gia Tolentino)
It just seems like, yeah, on a very pragmatic level, all of this aside, it's like on a selfish level, I can't de-skill myself any more than I already am because I'm already not doing well.
42:22:
(Chris Hayes)
I also think there's a real...
42:24:
(Chris Hayes)
I do think, because I think that there is some light at the end of the tunnel where I think there's some reasons for optimism.
42:29:
(Chris Hayes)
I also think that the experience...
42:32:
(Chris Hayes)
The experience of online life, which again is life.
42:35:
(Chris Hayes)
Again, this is not some other quadrant of life, right?
42:40:
(Chris Hayes)
Is generally understood to have gotten worse and people don't like it more and more.
42:44:
(Chris Hayes)
And I do think there's a huge, the 404 piece that you referenced before about AI slop,
42:50:
(Chris Hayes)
There is a huge spam problem coming for all of these platforms, which is we've all experienced both email and text spam making both of those mediums harder to use and less enjoyable beyond.
43:05:
(Chris Hayes)
There is now spam at scale for content.
43:09:
(Chris Hayes)
You could just automate it all like you were saying before, like the chain of like a chat GPT prompt to a mid-journey video to a, you know, Google VO, you know, it's all can be automated.
43:18:
(Chris Hayes)
And
43:21:
(Chris Hayes)
you know, you're gonna have more and more slop and more and more spam.
43:24:
(Chris Hayes)
Which is going to make, I think, the user experience worse.
43:27:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, the user experience got worse in email when spam blew up.
43:30:
(Chris Hayes)
It's gotten worse in text as spam has blown up.
43:32:
(Chris Hayes)
It's gotten worse in old-fashioned regular mail.
43:37:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, why do all of us ignore our mail?
43:39:
(Chris Hayes)
We ignore our mail.
43:40:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, I'm speaking for myself, but I feel like everyone does this.
43:43:
(Chris Hayes)
Ignore the mail because 90% of it is not actually for me.
43:46:
(Chris Hayes)
If it was all for me, I would be like stoked to open letters to me.
43:50:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, but that's not what's happening.
43:52:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think...
43:53:
(Chris Hayes)
If you're ignoring it, like, I do think there's a real problem.
43:56:
(Chris Hayes)
I think they have created a bit of a Frankenstein's monster for themselves.
44:00:
(Gia Tolentino)
You don't think that we will just, like, accept the garbage?
44:04:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, you don't think that the titration of increased garbage will be slow enough?
44:07:
(Chris Hayes)
We're just like pigs.
44:07:
(Chris Hayes)
We're like, feed more...
44:10:
(Gia Tolentino)
I think you're right.
44:11:
(Gia Tolentino)
But I think like, I don't know, like the internet, I mean, we've both talked about this with each other.
44:16:
(Gia Tolentino)
And, you know, I think so much of it, it's like the experience of the internet has lost the sort of, you know, the magic has been diminishing every, you know, it's getting less and less funny and it's getting worse and worse and worse.
44:29:
(Gia Tolentino)
My screen time hasn't gone down, I'll say.
44:31:
(Gia Tolentino)
Do you know what I mean?
44:32:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, it's like, it's never going down.
44:34:
(Gia Tolentino)
And this is like, again, someone that like over and over writes about how important it is to like.
44:39:
(Chris Hayes)
Same, same.
44:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, and it's like, my screen time's not going down, you know?
44:43:
(Gia Tolentino)
And so I think you're right.
44:45:
(Gia Tolentino)
There's like a huge problem.
44:46:
(Gia Tolentino)
But I think what is also just as likely to happen is us being like, well, the world's just worse now.
44:55:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yum, yum, yum.
44:55:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, like it's, and that, you know, and arguably I've already been doing that.
45:01:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, the one thing that I do, I think that's true.
45:03:
(Chris Hayes)
The one thing I kind of, I've been circling around this idea about how, because this is an idea that came,
45:10:
(Chris Hayes)
became clear to me as I was writing about social media and in the sirens call about attention.
45:14:
(Chris Hayes)
But I actually think it's sort of broadly true of our version of capitalism.
45:20:
(Chris Hayes)
If your consumer is too satisfied and happy, you are leaving money on the table like the optimal the optimal experience of the consumer is to be like annoyed and hassled, but still using the product.
45:35:
(Chris Hayes)
So like, it's like if the airplane seat is super comfortable, then you could shrink it by an inch and a half.
45:42:
(Chris Hayes)
And it will not be that comfortable, but they'll still probably buy the ticket, right?
45:47:
(Chris Hayes)
But it also feels like there is some point at which people are like, I'm not flying that airline or I'm not using that service.
45:54:
(Chris Hayes)
And it's a weird thing that businesses are always aiming for.
45:57:
(Chris Hayes)
It's like, how much can we extract out of our customer?
46:00:
(Chris Hayes)
How much can we annoy them?
46:01:
(Chris Hayes)
How much can we create hassle where they're still attached to the product?
46:05:
(Chris Hayes)
And at what point does it tip over where they're like, I'm done?
46:07:
(Chris Hayes)
And clearly to your point, like they're still in the...
46:11:
(Chris Hayes)
with both of us and with a lot, you know, at scale across 2 billion users, which is what Meta has, they haven't tipped over into the I'm done.
46:18:
(Chris Hayes)
But like there has been steady.
46:20:
(Chris Hayes)
They have kind of declining active users on all these platforms.
46:24:
(Chris Hayes)
And there are changing behaviors of younger people who basically don't kind of use public social media anymore in the same way.
46:33:
(Chris Hayes)
They're all doing sort of private messaging.
46:34:
(Chris Hayes)
So like, I do wonder if there's a, if there are sort of turning points where like people do say I'm out.
46:41:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah, I think that's right.
46:43:
(Gia Tolentino)
But I do, you know, it's like even something like Reddit, which I think has thrived because it is for a while it was like relatively, it was, you know, I mean, it's the fifth.
46:52:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah, it's pretty human.
46:53:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it's like famously while like Google did AI on its search and now everyone, you can only find human information if you add Reddit onto any search term, right?
47:01:
(Gia Tolentino)
But now already like Reddit is flooding currently with
47:05:
(Gia Tolentino)
chat gpt text and that's you know but but yeah you're right there is i mean i don't mean to downplay the exercise of human agency that we do every day but yeah we'll be right back after we take this quick break
47:47:
(Chris Hayes)
I think that to the degree that these people...
47:51:
(Chris Hayes)
To the degree that you keep seeing these sort of pockets of rebellion with like phones out of schools and the sort of like little bit nascent and burgeoning attention movement and like people, you know, talking about this experience the way they talk about air.
48:06:
(Chris Hayes)
They used to talk about air travel or they talk about traffic as like, you know, the like universally bummer aspects of modern life.
48:15:
(Chris Hayes)
That I guess what I'm saying is there's potential there.
48:18:
(Chris Hayes)
There's like real to me, there's real.
48:20:
(Chris Hayes)
The discontent produces potential.
48:23:
(Chris Hayes)
The thing that you're writing about in the essay is like the checking out that happens, which I totally agree, like is also part of what's happening.
48:29:
(Chris Hayes)
And people are kind of fed up with politics and people feel overwhelmed by it.
48:33:
(Chris Hayes)
But to me, on the other side of that, and part of that, too, is like.
48:38:
(Chris Hayes)
I do think just in our lived reality, like the primacy of hanging out with people, this is a huge thing that I keep coming back to.
48:47:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think COVID broke something in all of us.
48:49:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think it reset our level for digital companionship way higher.
48:55:
(Chris Hayes)
And we're having a hard time getting it back.
48:59:
(Chris Hayes)
But I do think a huge thing to reclaim in contemporary life is people being around other people.
49:07:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
49:08:
(Gia Tolentino)
I mean, I wonder what you like, I have wondered how this will be when my kids get older, where this like becomes, you know, are your kids old enough to have phones?
49:16:
(Gia Tolentino)
No.
49:16:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah.
49:17:
(Chris Hayes)
So yes, the eighth grader.
49:19:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
49:20:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it's like, I mean, you know, I will have to ask you at another time, like, or maybe now, like what, I mean, what do you do?
49:25:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, it's like, I have kind of thought that my, you know, as a person that is addicted to my phone, like the only pitch that I will have
49:34:
(Gia Tolentino)
you know, to mitigate all the incentives to just like be an adolescent girl and like lock onto it is just like you, your human experience of living in the world will suffer if you are not faced, if you are not getting messy face to face, like, you know, like it's, it's, it's not like an ethics thing.
49:50:
(Gia Tolentino)
It's not a, it's not a virtue thing.
49:51:
(Gia Tolentino)
It's not a whatever.
49:52:
(Gia Tolentino)
It's like literally in, in my, like, I want you to experience pleasure and contentment in the world.
49:58:
(Gia Tolentino)
And the only way that
49:59:
(Gia Tolentino)
we can kind of protect the ability for that to be possible is to like put a guardrail on here, you know?
50:05:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, one of the things I think, I'm not going to speak specifically about my daughter is because I want to like protect her universe of privacy.
50:11:
(Chris Hayes)
But one thing that has struck me about kids that age, and I do think there's a lot of displacement of our own anxiety about our own phone use onto younger people that happens.
50:24:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah.
50:24:
(Chris Hayes)
Understandably too.
50:25:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean,
50:26:
(Chris Hayes)
One thing that is really different about being 13 is that you are IRL with your friends all the time.
50:32:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah.
50:33:
(Chris Hayes)
Which is awesome and is something that adults don't have.
50:38:
(Chris Hayes)
And in some ways, I think that that part of it, this is part of why I think, you know, remote schooling was so brutal for so many kids.
50:46:
(Chris Hayes)
13-year-olds do have a thing that is, as far as we can measure it empirically, diminishing for adults.
50:56:
(Chris Hayes)
Which is just like time with their homies.
50:58:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah, totally.
51:00:
(Chris Hayes)
So that actually, I do think acts as a little bit of a ballast.
51:04:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah, totally.
51:05:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, because if you're interacting with people, like I used to hang out with my friends all day, come home and talk on the phone for three hours.
51:13:
(Chris Hayes)
Back, this is pre-internet, right?
51:15:
(Chris Hayes)
So I'd like seventh and eighth grade, I would like get on the phone and I would just talk.
51:18:
(Chris Hayes)
Same.
51:19:
(Chris Hayes)
And I think to the extent that kids are using phones in that way, I think is way less insidious than some of the other ways they might use phones.
51:29:
(Chris Hayes)
Like when you're in this world where like your social world is so huge and important and it's kind of everything and the phone is one more vector to that, but it's still all smashed up against like IRL.
51:42:
(Gia Tolentino)
The primacy of the real world.
51:43:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah, I think that that actually weirdly has a kind of
51:48:
(Chris Hayes)
a little bit of a mitigating effect on it.
51:50:
(Chris Hayes)
Right, right.
51:50:
(Chris Hayes)
I think.
51:51:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, again, I'm sort of projecting here from a sort of sample of one and also not wanting to, like, get into the details of her life.
51:59:
(Chris Hayes)
Yeah, right.
52:01:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, one of the things I'm jealous of as I look at the life of an eighth grader is like you do spend a lot of time with your friends.
52:09:
(Chris Hayes)
And that's really awesome for your soul.
52:12:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, like that's a really, really important and good thing.
52:16:
(Chris Hayes)
And as far as we can measure this in America, Americans spend a lot of spending.
52:21:
(Chris Hayes)
We spend less time doing that than other countries.
52:24:
(Chris Hayes)
And we're spending less time doing it year over year.
52:27:
(Gia Tolentino)
Totally.
52:28:
(Gia Tolentino)
That Atlantic piece that was a while back that was like, Americans need to party more.
52:31:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I was like, that's right.
52:32:
(Gia Tolentino)
That's right.
52:33:
(Chris Hayes)
And even like, I don't know if you've looked at the data on like nightclubs and like, you know, there's a whole nightclubs have been, you know, really on the decline.
52:42:
(Chris Hayes)
I have a whole thing about, I mean, I'm going to dig this tongue in cheek, but that like the youngest generation needs to drink more.
52:52:
(Chris Hayes)
Which is a controversial take that I'm sort of saying, like, I am joking, kind of.
52:58:
(Chris Hayes)
And I understand there are all sorts of people have all kinds of relationships with alcohol.
53:01:
(Chris Hayes)
So, like, I am mostly saying that tongue in cheek.
53:05:
(Chris Hayes)
But what I am trying to get at is, like, I do think more, it doesn't have to involve alcohol, but I do think occasions for people to be together and partying and congregating, which, again, are measurably all kind of on the decline, is a real issue.
53:23:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah, I think, well, I just filed a piece for the New York, like reviewing a couple of books about like why Gen Z is having less sex and, you know, does have to do with the fact that they're drinking less.
53:32:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it was like, you know, these traditional, if like wildly imperfect methods of attempting to establish human connection, which is like getting wasted and taking someone home.
53:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
Like, it's like, yeah, it's not necessarily great, but like what the intention was to stumble in the dark and find something, right?
53:48:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
53:48:
(Gia Tolentino)
The idea was like something would be found, maybe not tonight, but maybe the next night, you know, and like it's not it's not necessarily like a yeah, it's not we're not neither of us is saying it's an exemplary sort of paradigm, but the idea that human connection was out there to be, you know, to be groped towards.
54:05:
(Gia Tolentino)
you know, was real.
54:06:
(Gia Tolentino)
And, and, and it feels like that, you know, that is the kind of end goal that you chase imperfectly is kind of corroding for younger people where it's, and that, and that's, and I think, you know, I mean, back to what I think one of the only ways that we sort of
54:24:
(Gia Tolentino)
re-establish a neural pathway to the idea that like the world is made of humans that we want to relate to differently and the world is full of actual situations that we want to change or improve like the only way to re-establish that instead of the like that can't be real that can be like the only way to remind ourselves that the world is in fact
54:45:
(Gia Tolentino)
unbelievably real.
54:46:
(Gia Tolentino)
You know, like, I feel like, I mean, it's, it sounds like something my dumb ass would say, but it's like, yeah, maybe fucking going to a nightclub like is an important part of that to like, it's, you know, I mean, it kind of is like the reason that going to a protest is useful.
54:59:
(Gia Tolentino)
It's like, it's just like, it's just a simple, simple reminder that there are actually humans that care about the same things and that there are humans actually responsible for the things that you hate.
55:09:
(Gia Tolentino)
And it reorients you to that rather than the like hypermediated, like, you know, untouchable hall of mirror thing.
55:15:
(Gia Tolentino)
And I do think that, like, hanging out with your homies is a good way of, you know what I mean?
55:20:
(Chris Hayes)
Yes.
55:21:
(Chris Hayes)
You know, there's all kinds of different ways that people do do this.
55:24:
(Chris Hayes)
Like, I, you know, was biking home along the west side and I saw people, like, in run clubs and playing pickleball.
55:31:
(Chris Hayes)
And there's this group of people that get together in this, like, big cavernous space somewhere in Brooklyn.
55:36:
(Chris Hayes)
They all sing together.
55:37:
(Chris Hayes)
Of course, I know this because of their social media videos.
55:39:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
55:40:
(Gia Tolentino)
Great social media.
55:41:
(Gia Tolentino)
Yeah.
55:41:
(Chris Hayes)
Of course, I know because they're social media, but I actually know someone who's done it with them.
55:44:
(Chris Hayes)
And like, you know, there's a million different ways to do it that that, you know, obviously don't need to involve alcohol or anything.
55:51:
(Chris Hayes)
But, you know, creating the structures and choosing to do that again, all the incentives push against it, you know, and so.
55:59:
(Chris Hayes)
Finding ways to reclaim the human and I think you're to end on this point on protest.
56:05:
(Chris Hayes)
I mean, that is a huge part of why protest is so important and so powerful.
56:09:
(Chris Hayes)
Because it shows you there are other people who care about the same things and that you're not alone and that people haven't all checked out from like, this doesn't matter.
56:17:
(Chris Hayes)
This isn't, this can't be real.
56:19:
(Chris Hayes)
You meet people, you feel the sort of physical feeling of being with other people.
56:25:
(Chris Hayes)
And that's like nourishing to your soul and to your politics and to your sense of collective strength.
56:32:
(Chris Hayes)
And all that stuff is really important right now, I think, because the sort of sense of individuation and alienation and my brain is broken and nothing is real is so, so overwhelming and powerful.
56:45:
(Chris Hayes)
Gia Tolentino is a writer for The New Yorker.
56:47:
(Chris Hayes)
She's got an incredible book of essays called Trick Mirror, which I highly, highly recommend.
56:51:
(Chris Hayes)
It's a
56:52:
(Chris Hayes)
It's a really great piece of work that you should check out.
56:56:
(Chris Hayes)
And the essay we were discussing in part here is called My Brain Finally Broke.
57:00:
(Chris Hayes)
That's available on the New Yorker website.
57:02:
(Chris Hayes)
Gia, thanks so much.
57:03:
(Gia Tolentino)
Thank you for having me.
57:11:
(Chris Hayes)
You can always email us at withpod at gmail.com.
57:13:
(Chris Hayes)
You can get in touch with us using the hashtag withpod.
57:16:
(Chris Hayes)
Follow us on TikTok by searching for withpod.
57:18:
(Chris Hayes)
You can follow me on Threads, Blue Sky and what used to be called Twitter with the handle Chris L. Hayes.
57:23:
(Chris Hayes)
Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
57:25:
(Chris Hayes)
Why Is This Happening is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Donnie Holloway and Brendan O'Neill, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper.
57:34:
(Chris Hayes)
Our associate producer for video is Joanne Kong.
57:37:
(Chris Hayes)
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57:41:
(Chris Hayes)
You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to NBCNews.com slash Why Is This Happening.