Will Kids Online, In Fact, Be All Right?
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Welcome to Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Vincent Cunningham. And I'm Nomi Frye. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hi, guys. Hello. Hello.

So as I've mentioned before on our show, I myself have a teenager. And in fact, she's told me, stop talking about me on your podcast. But since she doesn't listen, I can just keep talking. And I'm not mentioning anything, you know, bad or personal. Anyway, I really like you.

I recently watched something that has been described as a kind of horror movie for the parents of teenagers. But in fact, it's not a horror movie. It's a documentary. It's called Social Studies. I recently wrote a piece about it for the New Yorker website. It's a five-part miniseries created by the photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield. And it documents the lives of a group of teenagers living in L.A.,

Post-early pandemic, I would say, like a year and a half into the pandemic. And it documents both their real-life interactions with their peers, with their teachers, with their parents, and also, interestingly, their online lives. I definitely fell into a little rabbit hole, especially earlier quarantine over summer. My social media consumption, it was like 12 hours a day. ♪

I definitely found myself, like, comparing to people online that I didn't even know. People will take videos, like, whether they're drunk or high, and it looks so much fun. All of my friends, we were all kind of like, this is cool. You didn't have anything else to do. The past year plus has been... What Greenfield did was she sought permission and received permission from the teens who agreed to participate in this documentary to...

screen grab their phone activity. We see their texts with their friends or with their parents. We see their likes. We see what they're scrolling on TikTok. We see their DMs. And so it kind of brings you in into the world as it is for these digital natives who Greenfield calls

kind of clarifies to us are the first generation to have been born with social media. Right. Essentially. Right. What struck you guys about the way the series portrays social media use among these teens?

Well, I think what struck me the most is the sense of inescapability. And that's something that the teens themselves wrestle with. And I know that we're going to talk about it as it appears in the documentary and elsewhere. But this sense that even as the teens themselves are kind of the most articulate critics of the social media industry and platforms, and they're very aware of

the dangers and the damage that they're doing, they feel that they cannot give it up because that is where so much social life is taking place. And so just seeing that in action was very striking and also seeing the teens be really thoughtful about it was striking. Yeah. Early on, I think it's in the first episode of

One of the young women says, you know, I just can't imagine what I'd be like without it. Like I'd just be this like uninformed, like lousy 14-year-old. But, you know, this girl who, by the way, is smart, articulate, has this great relationship with her mom. But she, again, with full knowledge of some negative effects, feels that she would not be able to build an identity without this. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I think one of the main things that struck me about this very good, I think, series is that on the one hand, it's

We don't need much to be alarmed. Right. This is kind of like a new thing that has some very far-reaching consequences. But on the other hand, also it did strike me that the tone of the show kind of tapped into this long tradition of panicking about what the kids are up to.

There have been many texts that have aimed to show us why we don't understand our kids and why we should be scared that we don't understand our kids. And part of what I'm thinking is how much of this concern around social media use by teens is warranted. On the one hand, asking if the kids are all right, quote unquote, is something that's happened to basically every generation. But on the other hand...

Kids right now are adapting to one of the most massive, if not the most massive technological shifts in modern history. That's today on Critics at Large. Will the kids online, in fact, be all right? OK, so let's start talking about social studies. So this is a show created by Lauren Greenfield. It's been airing on FX this fall. It's also on Hulu.

Initial impressions, did you guys like it? Did you enjoy it? I loved this show. Okay. I loved this show. I was afraid to watch it. Yeah. Even though I should note that Alex has a young child, certainly not Instagram age. I have a child who's more than a decade away from being a teen. And yet, she's already terrified. Yeah.

No, I was really trying to engage with the people actually living this reality right now. And I think the subjects of this documentary are, as Nomi said before, the first generation to be kids with social media. And that first, I think, by and large, by evidence of this documentary, but also a lot of other stuff that we're going to get to, has been more of a burden than a privilege. So anyway, I loved this series in part because I loved the kids, right?

And I do think the documentary gave them room to be really thoughtful about their own lives and personal interviews and also was pretty honest about showing how they live their lives when they're not reflecting on them every second because they're just going through life like everybody else, but more so because they're teenagers. And I did find it.

Yeah, I did. Okay. I'm just going to say it. I don't want to strike the match of moral panic in this room and have us all, you know, screaming and jumping to the rafters. We got time. We can get there if you want. Yeah, I just, you know, I thought that it gave a very convincing impression of a really difficult situation, which is being –

In the broad sense, unable to leave. For me as a teenager, and I'm trying not to see it through exclusively personal lens, but... It's kind of hard not to in some ways. Well, I think it's... Exactly. You kind of look through all this stuff personally because we all were teenagers. Being able to leave situations was extremely important for me as a teenager. Like being able to say, I need to opt out of this right now. And the thing that really strikes me about social media is that for these teenagers, that's not an option because it...

feels like it threatens social death. And so that, to me, was the kind of overarching theme of the documentary, this being unable to opt out. Now I'm curious what you guys thought. I really liked it, too. I mean, it's...

What always strikes me when I am forced to look directly at teenagers is that so much of our sensibility is really formed so early on. So much personality, so much identity, so much of the mark that makes us individual. That crucible –

is entered very early on in our lives. And this is precisely like what scares us about it, right? That it's this little, you're in this little boat from one shore to another. And like, will you make it to the far shore? Will you make it past this era, this moment of yes, deep vulnerability? Yes. Like psychic peril, all these things. But,

But one during which kind of much of what makes you is already intact. And therefore, much of what makes you can possibly be like whatever, broken, hurt. And this really – so, yeah, just like – I remember comments people made to me, good and bad. I remember compliments that I got when I was 13 years old. And they were – they were things that I like tried to form my identity around later on. It's like, do you really see that in me? I now am aiming at that because – so, yeah.

That moment where like so much can toss and turn you. And so for me, and we can get into this. Yes, it was about this particular issue of social media and whatever, you know, what it means precisely. But to me, it was more about just that moment in our lives and what happens when that moment in our lives kind of comes up against the weird semi-permanent thing that is society. Yeah.

Yeah, no, totally. I mean, I agree. I love this show. And I think it reminds you that teenagers are both like so sophisticated, like in ways where I was like, OK, they know these kids know way more than me and can articulate like the bind they find themselves in living through the age of social media better than I can, because that is like the

And also you're reminded that they're like mere babies who know nothing. One character I thought was really interesting and who had quite a trajectory over the course of the series was this girl Sydney. When the show starts, Sydney is actually a college freshman and seems not...

I'm just going to be frank. She doesn't seem that smart of a character. She seems like she seems very, very eager to fit in on the social world online where basically she's a minor who's posting a ton of really, really sexy content. When I was in high school at Pali, I would post pictures that were just not sexy.

normal to post for being a minor, but that's what you see online and on TV and everywhere. And that's what's marketed. Social media is more about looking good and appealing to what other people like. And I like tagged my Instagram account, like so people would be like, "Oh, she's like hot. I'll follow her Instagram." Like I would post on TikTok to get more followers on Instagram. Like it's like a whole cycle.

You get this view of her social accounts and especially her TikTok where she's doing really provocative dances. She's wearing really skimpy clothing. She's posing in like, you know, sexy ways. And Sydney is interesting because she ends up actually, first of all, being a lot smarter than I perhaps cruelly assume that she was and also being a lot more reflective, which are not always the same things.

She goes – when she goes to college, she gets a group of friends and it seems like she is having a much more wholesome social media life because they're posting like fun TikToks. She's no longer doing all this like sexy stuff that actually got her slut shamed and also, of course, like a lot of comments from older men online when she was in high school. But that also blows up in her face because –

when a lot of your friendships are taking place in social media, if something goes on in them that might fracture a relationship, which happens with her roommate, then she kind of immediately gets, you know, cyberbullied by, there's like a little army descends on her, and this happens to other kids in the show too. And she kind of tries to move away from a life where presenting herself on social media is going to be her primary identity. So I would say I was very interested in her just because of

like how out there she was and how she kind of does start because she's on the older end to make it through this period that Vincent was describing or going to the other shore. Yeah. I mean, I've been an admirer of Greenfield's work for a while now. I wrote about a show and book she put out maybe eight years ago called Generation Wealth, which called photographs from, you know, her childhood

25-year-long career as a photographer where she kind of documents the effects of America's kind of unsated hunger for all things luxury and surface, right? And she kind of looks at the complications of these kind of what might be considered superficial desires of the American mind. And so this social media project and social studies is

is very much in line with it. It takes place in L.A., but it's not just about L.A. It's about how social media has created this competitiveness or has honed in at least on the already underlying desires that maybe especially teenagers have to be competitive

You know, to be perfect, to be – to appear rather than to actually become something, right? To look rather than to be, to flaunt rather than to actually create and produce, right? And I think it's – she's perfect for this project because she's kind of spent her career looking exactly at these things, you know? What I –

One of the things I admire, and this connects to one of my favorite characters in the thing, by the way, is that Greenfield reminds us over and over that there are two sides of this social media equation. It's not like social media is just like ambiently in the air and every child is its victim. No, there are people that are on the sort of – that are clients. Right.

of what social media offers. Client slash victims. Victims, but that it is, that on the other side of it is capital. There's not just like invisibility on the other side. Someone is buying something and someone is selling something. And one of the kids is kind of on the business end of it.

This kid, his name is Jack Schwartz. Oh, Jack. No relation. What if he's your son? Okay. That is, first of all, extremely improbable. What if he's my long-lost half-brother? No relation. He's definitely not your son because his dad is like the mom from Mean Girls. He's like trying to be cool with Jack, like that party's going to be a rager, man. He's just like goading him on. He's like, how much did you pay? Tell us who Jack is. Let me lay it out. Jack is...

Jack is actually a very traditional figure. He is the rich kid, popular in part because of his like sort of affluent nihilism. He hosts a popular TikTok thing where he goes up to people on the streets and he is asking people how much your fit costs. I film a lot of my content at Rodeo Drive.

You see all the drip and all that. Shoes, like, I think, like, were $1,000. Sheesh. You got them Dior's on. Got 20 racks on the watch. Sheesh. $1,500.

And, like, you know, he just makes them give, like, the rundown. If the thing is cheap, he says, no, you know, I love it. I love to see it. You're sick. You're keeping it humble. And a guy is like, humble? This is pretty nice for the Midwest, he says about his $40 polo. Yeah. As he's negged by a fucking Jack. Yeah. Who's, like, a total sort of baby face. Pudgy baby face kid with long hair. Jack is, like, sort of a genius, sort of...

Rich high school, like, bro doofus. Yeah. But 100% a legend. Yeah. And the thing is that, like, I went to high school with a kid like this. Madison, my daughter, who is, like, speaking of the far shore, just turned 19, so is almost done being a teenager. Shout out to you, Madison. Happy birthday. I love you. She, like, there was a kid in her high school who threw the parties. Whether you liked this kid or not, you went to the parties he threw. I'd say there was about...

200 people there, which was pretty cool. And we charged like $10 each. And I guess at the time we were just doing it kind of for like the, you could say clout or just like attention or just fun. We didn't really think of it in a business perspective. And we found out you can make a lot of money for that. So I guess that's when the money and business mindset just started.

In this weird way, right, he uses social media instead of being just its client and victim. He's using it to make money. He can imagine himself on the other side of it. He has, like, thought himself onto the, oh, everybody else is using this thing to, like, look cool. Maybe I can be the one who profits off of that. So it's like he is kind of a legend, whatever, but he also plays this really big to me symbolic function in the show. Yeah.

Somebody's making money off of these kids. In a minute. What happens when young men run around in blue tailcoats, yellow waistcoats, trousers and tall boots and men decide to kill themselves? We're going to find out. Our favorite moral panics. That's in a minute. Do you need me to rephrase? On Critics of Large from The New Yorker.

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Okay, my friends. What were, would you say, some of the kind of moral panics of your own teenage years? Well, for me, so many of them had to do with music. I feel like

Whether it was, you know, the spectacle of concerned parents and social conservatives literally stomping on and breaking rap CDs. Or... Totally. The big one that I can remember was...

It was kind of a mix of satanic panic. Yes. Which kind of went on all through my life. Say you love Satan. Exactly. With, again, music in the person of, the repugnant, it turns out, person of Marilyn Manson. It turns out they were right. They were right. A horrible person. Poorly intended all the way. Marilyn Manson, the stage name of one Brian Hugh Warner. Yes.

Wow, that just rolled right off your tongue. I didn't know about the U. He wore a livid face of white and black paint, and he was purported to relieve himself of at least two rows of his ribs, the better. All the better. All the better. To perform. To fillate his own surely lividly painted dick. And the idea that music was going to send

Yeah.

Alex, how about you? Well, okay. When I was a middle schooler and early teenager, just on the cusp of the new millennium,

There was a thing that my mom belonged to at my middle school called the Girls' Study Group. The name the Girls' Study Group can still send a shiver down my spine. Because a big thing that had happened in the 90s and goes on to this very day was concern about girls. Are girls going to be okay? They're so, you know, in our culture that is so obsessed with body image where they're getting this negative reinforcement all the time and is so materialistic and, you know, on and on and on.

The point of the girls' study group was basically like how can we help our daughters? And, of course, one of the major texts that I associate with this time, a text that lived, I believe, unread on my mother's bedside table probably between 1995 and 2005, was the book –

reviving Ophelia by the psychologist Mary Pfeiffer. And it was basically like case studies about girls who were just going down the toilet. And so that was this kind of sense of, oh my God, I'm a girl. I'm going to fall off the cliff. And the mothers are all trying to band together to discuss how they can hold us back. Just like trying to position themselves as our advocates. But in fact,

thereby turning themselves into our adversaries. I just felt like, don't study me. Alex, I mean, my memory of a moral panic is also related to a book, a book that I too read on the cusp of puberty. The book I'm talking about was a case study, turned out to be, was supposedly real, turned out to be totally false. Yes, I'm talking about Go Ask Alice.

Published in 1971 as the supposed found diary of a teenage runway whose, spoiler alert, overdoses by the end of the book. Turns out to have been totally made up, you know, basically to scare kids straight. And I remember reading it, yeah, when I was maybe 10 on the floor of like a mall bookstore and feeling completely terrified and being like, oh, my God, this is – as the book intended, you know.

this is what it means to be a teenager. It means you're going to have to have like

Wild sex, take speed and heroin, you know, like run away from home, become like a lost hippie lamb. I'm waiting for the fictional part. And die. My tongue lolling out the side of my mouth, you know, wearing love beads and, you know, a torn...

Are you describing Jenny from Forrest Gump? I mean, basically. But that's – but Vincent, that is so – I mean – R.I.P. Jenny. You know –

It was just like the specter of teenage-dom as disaster. Well, guys, I want to ask, let's widen the lens for a sec, because I'm not feeling sufficiently panicked about social media. I feel like I'm ready to lead the moral panic charge, the brigade. But Nomino, when you wrote about social studies in your piece, if I may just quote you to you. Oh, please do. You wrote that as you watch the series,

You say, I did feel that it occasionally struck an alarmist tone that reminded me of past what has happened to our children style teen-centric texts. And you go on to say that in a sense being worried about the waywardness of a younger generation has been part of American culture at least since F. Scott Fitzgerald's tales of the flapper 20s. So what about social studies made you think of this tradition of moral panics? Well, you know, I mean, I'm old enough to have been through –

To have myself, weirdly myself, panicked by kind of what culture was telling me about the kids. I remember moving, coming, about to go to high school in the States because, as you know, I'm from Israel and my father worked in the States. I was 14, about to go to high school to spend ninth grade in America.

And very early on in the year, maybe even the summer before, reading Brett Easton Ellis's, my dear Brett Easton Ellis's Rules of Attraction and Less Than Zero and saying, oh, my God, I'm going to have to become like a coke addict if I want to fit. I don't even know. You are so fearful of the hand, the arms, you know.

You know how we talk about the hand of the market? Yeah. You were like afraid of the hand of the culture, the invisible hand of the culture moving you. Yeah, yeah. You know, just pushing you face first into a pile of cocaine or, you know, I feel for you, young Novi. No, because I think it might have been because I was, you know, for me, all of these moral panics, not that, you know, Israel or any other place surely has its own

Whatever. Moral panics about the youth and has had. But I think America, especially because it's such a youth dominated society.

There are also so many fears about where, because the youth is leading so much, what are they up to and will they lead us astray? Are we going to hell in a handbasket? And so I think coming from outside, I was watching it kind of as an outsider and being like,

Okay, I guess I got to get with the program. Right. I mean, you know, your point about America and youth makes me think of somewhere that isn't America and another moral panic from the past, Goethe's book, The Sorrows of Young Werther. I don't know if you guys know about this. So Goethe, the German writer, when he was very young, 24 –

wrote and published the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. He published this book in 1774. It's about a young man stuck in a love triangle in love with a young married woman, can't have her, and so ends up getting two pistols and killing himself. And what then ensued is

is kind of, it's a little bit muddy. Basically, there is reason to believe that other young German youths, first of all, this novel was wildly popular. This was the viral 18th century novel. Sounds like a pop sensation. It was an utter sensation. It was actually banned because people were so afraid that young men would start doing this as perhaps they did. There's like some historical confusion over what actually happened. But in this case,

You know, the outfit that the protagonist of this novel wears was very distinctive. It was a blue tailcoat with a yellow waistcoat, trousers and tall boots. This became an absolute craze. And so the adults were on the lookout for young boys who were dressed like this and who, you know, there was a signature like Werther perfume.

They were on the lookout for kids who were wearing this stuff because they basically were seen as suicide risks. And there was this huge panic that that was – that, you know, the youth were going to do this to themselves. And the point of that work, to me at least, is the panic can be more of a problem than the youth. The reaction can be worse than the thing itself. Totally. I'm thinking about like the saggy pants. You know, I mean, you were talking about like –

The outfit and oh, my God, what does you know, they're like their jeans are ripped or like their pants are saggy. It means they're like gangster rappers, you know, like Bill Cosby classic, like pull up your pants like you're you're a miscreant. You're a it's it's this it sounds so familiar what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem to me that all these moral panics, I think that they have a root in guilt feelings.

We look at – adults look at the society that they have created. And then sort of children act as like this weird mirror of, you know, what the feared outcome is. In 1954, a psychologist named Frederick Wertham came out with this book that's called Seduction of the Innocent. And it sparked the comic books era.

sort of moral panic, where he was like, Superman is a fascist. Wonder Woman was created to turn young girls into lesbians. And he says that comic books were, quote, short courses in murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism, virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality, and horror. Has to do with affluence, too, coming out of the Depression and

You know, kids don't need to go work in the factory when they're, you know, there's leisure. And there's like, you know, we just got over a world war. Like all of the sort of violent, like all of the sort of zeitgeist ghosts that exist in the culture, we sort of imprint them upon the youth. But really it's about...

It's about a fear of what our world is. And instead of dealing with them and trying to change the society, sort of saying, oh, my God, look at these kids who are going to come along and ruin the world that we've already sort of so carefully constructed. So to bring us back to social media and technology and kids online, how scared should we actually be? That's in a minute on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

Hi, everybody. I'm Michael Kalori, Director of Consumer Tech and Culture at Wired. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a Senior Writer at Wired. And I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry at Wired. We're here to tell you about our new podcast, Uncanny Valley. It's about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.

Every week, we get together to talk about a story or a phenomenon bubbling up in Silicon Valley and how that thing is probably affecting you. We're super excited about the show, and we think you're going to love it. You can listen to Uncanny Valley wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now so you won't miss a beat. So where do we land? Is this really an unprecedented and very scary moment of extreme technological change?

Or is it just like the latest of many moral panics that we've been talking about that we've experienced throughout our lives that we've seen over the course of history? What do you guys think? Of course, the sort of sedate answer, the sober answer is a little bit of both. But I would say generally –

I think that the dangers of social media for kids, I think it's, to me, it's like obviously real on some level. Yeah. Like there's no way that you can just be like, you know, it's just like the boob tube. I don't think that's true. Not the boob tube. I don't think that that's true.

The idiot box. The idiot box. I think that there are – I mean, listen, I'm not a scientist. I don't know about the rewiring of the brain. I really – I couldn't even tell you. I do recognize patterns of addiction, and I know that I experience those when I'm on my phone. And so to expose younger children to that must have real meaning. But to me, more –

And concretely, again, there is not just a mist behind these things. These are corporations seeking to take advantage of the vulnerability of the young to profit off of them. And so I think that they should not do that. I think that that is recklessly irresponsible. And we are still trying to catch up with real actors, real people with real motivations and

using children to achieve aims and ends that are not compatible with the good of most people. And so that needs to stop. I think this is a huge deal. I can't overstate what a huge deal I think social media is for all of us and for kids in particular. I know I sound like, you know, not

not so fun to say that. I'm not saying like, and I'm off it and I'm doing great. Look at me. But we actually, I think one thing we should stress here is we actually know some stuff now. Like we're not just speculating now. We actually know some stuff about the damaging effects that social media has. I mean, this is kind of, you know, there's been research at this point that shows strong core

And I'm talking about the huge spike in youth anxiety and depression.

Causation is, as always, a trickier question. But correlation is very strong. And I'm thinking of, for instance, in The New Yorker, the writer Andrew Solomon recently published a piece called Has Social Media Fueled a Teen Suicide Crisis? And there's some like pretty sobering stuff in there. I'm just glancing at the piece right now. Between 2007 and 2021, the incidence of suicide among Americans between the ages of 10 and 24 rose by 62%.

The Centers for Disease Control found that one in three teenage girls consider taking her life in 2021, up from one in five in 2011. The youth suicide rate has increased disproportionately among some minority groups. And this I found really interesting. Solomon writes, rates of depression have also risen sharply among teens, and 53 percent of Americans now believe that social media is predominantly or fully responsible. So one thing that I came across for me in social studies as well is –

It was interesting to me how the teens themselves were like, we don't like feeling this way and we do think it has to do with this stuff. It's different to me than in the past, like, you know, saying, no, you guys just don't get our music. I hear kind of like, yeah, we're not thrilled with the situation either, but opting out feels impossible. And that's very striking. Yeah.

And another work, you know, that has come out recently that's been hugely discussed and is everywhere speaks this directly. It's called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. The subtitle is How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jonathan. Exactly. You know, this is a huge bestseller. Haidt is a social scientist, and he believes he is making the case that brains are getting –

literally rewired, that neurons are responding, you know, in this very sensitive period of development. And he has this phrase that

That I think is right and resonated with me a lot. And I'm curious what you guys think. He basically thinks that, you know, kids of this generation are dealing with overprotection in the real world. Kind of like, you can't go out alone. I need to know where you are. I've got to track you. You know, I want to, like, watch your play from a young age, like littler kids. And underprotection in the virtual world. And seeing the Greenfield documentary, that struck me as so true. One very, like,

Yeah.

And just like flitting through all these different things and the fact that it's just like they're allowed to do it. They're allowed to sit there doing it. They're just holding their phone in class. I'm like, what the fuck is going on? No one is going to willingly give it up. I wouldn't willingly give it up. So where is the kind of proper protection going like, actually, not right now.

So, Haidt has made some recommendations, including no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, and no phones in schools. I have no idea if this is possible. I am not parenting a kid of that age. But, you know, I have noticed that there is currently legislation, especially in California, actually, where, you know, social studies was filmed. Yeah.

to try to make it... Well, it just passed, right? Well, there's been a few different pieces of legislation. In August, the Phone Free Schools Act passed. Yes. And by 2026, I believe it'll go into...

Into effect. Yes. Cell phones won't be in use in schools. Yeah, that exactly. Limit or prohibit. Totally. Yeah. That it's going to be at least regulated. And another thing I saw that I thought was really interesting that was just signed into law in California is that there is going to be a law basically, I believe, prohibiting social media companies from sending alerts to

during school hours or late at night. And something that Haidt talks about a lot is like this kind of alert culture. Just like alerts, alerts, like constantly like something's happening. I'm getting an email. I've been mentioned in a story. I like, you know. Well, just the cortisol spikes themselves, you know, of just like it can be healthy. It can be good, yeah. So I don't, again, I really don't want to sound like finger waggy and so annoying and dull. No, but it's like scary and you know it and it's not, and it's not the thing is. Yeah.

It really is what Vincent said about the corporations. Like, who are we wagging fingers against here? We're not wagging fingers against the kids. We're wagging fingers against, like, Meta. You know, we're wagging fingers against...

Against, you know, TikTok. I almost said hip hop. I'm like, hip hop? What? Yeah. But you know what I mean? It's not like we're not like. These are people doing this. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like I'm not like against like Johnny Rotten, you know. I'm against like, you know, Tim Cook or whoever, you know. It's like or like Elon. Often opportunistic adults.

Totally. Yeah. But it's also, you know, while all that is true and I totally I agree. Every point about social media specifically, I totally am on board with. Also, though, this. Yeah.

This documentary, to me, paints a picture of a lonely world. Really lonely. And that's not just because of social media. And so my question is, okay, we get the kids off of these phones. What do we – what fills the gap? One young man –

Who I was really, I just thought was so charming. And his name is Keyshawn. He's a young black kid. He's 17 years old, raised by a single mom, et cetera, et cetera. I transferred from my old school to Pali for one reason, play football. I used to sneak on the bus to go to the games. Like I was really, it's all about football back then. I really loved the sport. That was like my ticket out. But things didn't fall out that way.

I lost focus in school and started to slip a little. I got kicked off the football team. And I didn't have football. I didn't have nothing. And that's when DJ came around. And then you see him get much more interested in being famous on TikTok. And he's like, you know, I'm going to he's on there with his girlfriend. He's all this stuff. And this might have been an editorial choice, but I didn't hear anything about any other groups which any of these kids belong.

I was saying, I was asking her. What used to be called this whole crust of society, which used to be called civil society. People joining trade unions and other kinds of things, lodges and guilds. Or having hobbies that aren't. Intramural sports. That layer of society is shrinking. And parallel to our, like, I think rightful crusade maybe against some of the ills of social media and other attendant forms.

phenomena is like, how do we rebuild that sector of society? And that's what I kept on thinking about. Absolutely. But I also think some of these kids, I think Sydney says, the girl Sydney, the one who posts sexy TikToks, says at one point, I have passions like photography or whatever, but I don't post them because they don't get likes. But I do think it's true. And as a mother of a young teenager myself, I

There are things that happen both online and offline that are creative and passionate, you know, whether it's like you're interested in a very specific sub-niche of music, you know, like my daughter is. And you learn a lot from being online and you might relate to other people who have this like niche interest. And that might be more kind of like productive than just like,

posting online and getting likes. It might also lead to that. I'm not saying these things are separate, but it's not like I think you're right, Vincent, that it's shrinking for sure. I don't think that it's totally gone. And I think that's the part that's maybe a little alarmist that I bet all of these kids are

On the chess club or whatever? I hope so. I don't know if chess club. They're all secretly on the chess club. But kids are still doing things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know? Kids are still playing guitar. Yeah. You know what I mean? They might be doing it less. But are they making a band, though? Because, like, cool, have your interest. I think they're making a band. But, like, interests that bring us into communion with each other. I think less so than before. I think there's definitely room for worry that it's shrinking, as you say. But I don't think it's totally gone. Yeah, yeah. Which the documentary –

might kind of lead you to think. Even though I think there is a problem out here, I am anti-alarm. Yeah, I feel like, Vincent, you know, the good news and the bad news is that the problem that you describe has been with us for a while. What you were saying just about kind of fraying civic society and community reminded me of

how could it not, the 2000 book Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam, which of course posits that Americans are dealing with, as its subtitle says, a declining social capital, that there really is a lack of social activity to link people together. You know, when we were talking about

preparing this episode, we were talking about some of the really like dark sides of the web that young people are getting sucked into. We were discussing people like Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes, the manosphere, like these kind of

Kind of like men's rights guru figures who seem to hold a lot of sway over teenage and like young 20s boys in particular. Like exactly the kind of people who might really benefit from having like some other stuff going on. This is Andrew Tate, who is a sort of former kickboxer, has recently decamped to Romania where he has been arrested, I think, several times on charges of rape.

Sex trafficking, sexual assault, other things. But is a very – I mean, again, not to keep invoking my daughter, but when she was in high school, there were boys who were listening to his frank, frank misogyny and bringing it into school. Same with my daughter. She tells me about it. Yeah. Yeah. That I find really, really freaky and I think is related directly to what you describe. If you're not in community –

Yeah.

Are there things that make us hopeful? Right. On that note? I mean, what's the solution? Yeah. I mean, you know, certain reasonable guardrails for every day. I mean, I'm even thinking of myself. Yeah, what are you going to do? A woman in her late 40s. And as susceptible as ever. As susceptible as ever. To compare and despair online. What's wrong with me? To me, it all – to me –

And this is—I don't know if it's advice. It's just my observation. But to me, I think that what young people value the most is independence, right? And is, like, freedom to have space to form an identity. And I think that there is an argument that, like, compassionate adults can make to kids that says, hey—

That space that you think is you're free to make something of yourself, that is owned by somebody and they have designs on you. It's just a business. It's a bunch of guys in suits or maybe they just wear fluffy vests. But it's like this is owned space. And again, classically, the idea of civil society is like where we join – this is like my one streak of like libertarian Americanism, right? Yeah.

Where we join together and make groups of our own choosing, whether they be, again, chess clubs or whatever, you know, whatever sort of affinity space exists in your high school, the LGBT group. Yeah. That where we choose our associations with other people is where we are actually free from these big government business, these big sectors of society. And the way to actually be punk is

is to get together with some other people and decide something to do together. And if we start to not only, like, create real legal guardrails, but, like, make the case to children that the freedom that you seek resides elsewhere, that, to me, is, like,

The hope. I know. I mean, the tricky thing is, though, that the last thing, like, our kids want to hear from us is what's punk and what's not punk. Good point. You know what's punk? So...

And so I'm like, you know, maybe I should be like, oh, yeah, this is actually like social media is super cool. I get addicted to it. And she'll be like, no, thanks. I kind of wonder about that, too. Even having an almost two-year-old, I look around the playground and seeing all the stooped-headed parents just like looking down into their phones. And I think, are these kids just going to be like, nothing could be lamer than that, which is totally correct. I know. Yeah. I mean, look.

To go back to your idea, Vincent, of your metaphor of the kind of boat traveling from one shore to another. I mean, it's funny. I transferred high schools. I left a co-ed school for a girls' school and was seen as like a complete weirdo and then everything clicked and it was great. That's again why I keep coming back to the same point of you have to be free to like remake yourself a bit. That's right. And not to have everything that's happened. I mean, honestly –

Maybe there would be some kind of way to just like a jubilee year. Wipe free the devices. No. Sorry. Everybody's got to choose a new handle. Yeah, just get – you can't have that past coming with you at all times. That's so key to be able to remake yourself. Yeah. And that's what I wish I would say for the teens. Know that it is possible to reset. Okay, you guys. Speaking of unplugging.

It's been a tough couple of weeks, let's face it. It's almost Thanksgiving. We're going to be taking a break from the pot next week. And maybe a break from the news? Maybe a break from our phones? Probably not. God willing. I don't know. But I hope our listeners can do the same. And I hope we all have a nice holiday.

This has been Critics at Large. Our senior producer is Rhiannon Corby and Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Condé Nast's head of global audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrado composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Jake Loomis with mixing by Mike Kuchman. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at newyorker.com slash critics. We'll see you again in December.

Celine Dion. My dream, to be an international star. Could it happen again? Could Celine Dion happen again? I'm Thomas LeBlanc, and Celine Understood is a four-part series from CBC Podcasts and CBC News, where I piece together the surprising circumstances that helped manufacture Celine Dion, the pop icon. Celine Understood. Available wherever you get your podcasts. From PR.