Derek Thompson on the Anti-Social Century

Welcome to the third installment of our interview series here at The Honest Broker—also available on our new YouTube channel and Apple Podcasts. Today, I’m happy to share my conversation with Derek Thompson.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).When Derek came to Substack, he said he wanted to focus on three issues:* The Abundance agenda, building on the bestselling book he’s published with Ezra Klein.* Science in a way that’s both curious and skeptical.* The anti-social century. (Derek published a great piece on the subject at The Atlantic in January.)I wanted to focus on that last issue in our conversation. This intersects with issues about which I care deeply: the loneliness epidemic, alienation driven by adoption of new technologies, and the impact of AI on our lives. You can find more of Derek’s work on his newsletter. Highlights from the Derek Thompson InterviewFor the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.Jared: Derek Thompson, thanks for joining us.Derek: It’s wonderful to be here.Jared: When you launched your newsletter, you had this nice sort of thesis statement. You said ‘I’m going to cover three topics.’ One was them was the Abundance agenda, the other was covering science in a way that’s both curious and skeptical. And then there was a third: the anti-social century. That one stuck out to me. How bad is it out there?Derek: I think many writers live with a kind of hypocrisy at the heart of their work. And I would say that my personal hypocrisy is that I’m mostly optimistic about science and technology, but I’m also pessimistic about the social changes that come with science and technology. And so in a weird way, I find myself often writing about how thrilled we should be about all sorts of advances in medical technology and biotech. I’m fascinated, by the way, with just GLP-1s and everything they seem to do. And at the same time, I find myself consistently drawn to the way that modernity changes habits and behaviors in ways I find often quite bad. I wrote this cover story for The Atlantic on the phenomenon that I called the anti-social century. And the antisocial century emerged really from one key statistic that I found in the American Time Use Survey. One of the things that they ask is, how much time do you spend socializing with other people in face-to-face communication? And the key statistic that I found is that the average amount of face-to-face socializing in this century has declined for all Americans by about 20% and for young Americans by about 40 to 50%. What I’m identifying here is the fact that in the 25 years since Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone there has been an antisocial quarter of a century. It touches the anxiety crisis that we see among young people. I think it changes our politics by alienating us from our neighbors. I think there are so many different tendrils that emerge from the phenomenon of the anti-social century. Jared: There’s a bit of an irony when you read Bowling Alone. He has a very optimistic chapter about the internet. When he’s writing around the year 2000, the internet is still new. And he’s like, oh, we’re going to form community networks. People are going to organize ways to go out together. They’re going to use the internet to have conversations with their neighbors.Derek: Oops!Jared: In a revised introduction to the second edition, he admits that he whiffed it. He was wrong. He thought it could maybe bring us together, especially if we created small, intentional, locally based communities. He was essentially imagining the Nextdoor app, which is of course a cesspit. No one thinks ‘Wow, I like my neighbors more because we interact on Nextdoor.’ So, I guess we could ask specifically about what the internet is doing. Because I know lots of 14-year-olds, and you’ll ask them how they spend time with their friends. And the number one answer they give is Discord.