Brain Rot

Discussion post for December 10, 2024

Today, Sarah and Beth are following up on some of our conversations from the headlines last week, discussing social media in the context of overconsumption and the many (many) words of the year.

Topics Discussed:

• Good News Makes Headlines

• Social Media, Our Brains, and How we handle it

• Outside of Politics: So Many Words of the Year

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Episode Resources:

Good News in the Headlines

• The fall of Bashar Assad after 13 years of war in Syria brings to an end a decades-long dynasty (The Associated Press)

• The Only Remaining Online Copy of Vogue's Asma al-Assad Profile (The Atlantic)

• Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire Talks Gain Steam, Officials Say (The New York Times)

• Luigi Mangione, suspect in health care CEO's killing, charged with murder (CNN)

Social Media

• Tik Tok and Byte Dance v. United States (United States Court of Appeals)

• Senators turn to Elon Musk to pressure House on child online safety (The Washington Post)

• Instagram makes teen accounts private as pressure mounts on the app to protect children (The Associated Press)

• Implications of Salt Typhoon Attack and FCC Response (Federal Communications Commission)

• Succession drama: Rupert Murdoch loses court bid to leave son media empire (Axios)

• Australia passes landmark social media ban for children under 16 (NBC News)

• Australian social media ban started with call to act by politician's wife (Reuters)

• The Sky Isn't Falling for Cable News TV Ratings (Yet) (The Hollywood Reporter)

• The great subscription news reversal (Axios)

• Facebook turned off the news in Canada. What happened next? (The Economist)

• The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry (The Verge)

• The Brave New World of A.I.-Powered Self-Harm Alerts (The New York Times)

• Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity (Peter Attia)

SO MANY Words of the Year

• Merriam Webster: Polarization

• Oxford Press: Brain rot

• Australia's Macquarie Dictionary: Enshittification

• Dictionary.com: Demure

• Collins Dictionary: Brat

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.

Sarah [00:00:10] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics.

Beth [00:00:12] Where we take a different approach to the news.

[00:00:14] Music Interlude.

[00:00:29] Thank you so much for joining us today. Since we spoke on Friday about how much has changed in the Middle East, there's been another major shift there. So we're going to talk today about the overthrow of the Assad regime along with other good news around the world. For over a month, we've been planning to talk about overconsumption. Feels natural to start with media. So today, we're going to talk about the TikTok ban and influencer shake ups and cable news and how we're feeling about kids and media and social media and policy and being ready to just really shake things up even more than they're already being shaken up. And Outside of Politics, we're going to talking about the words of the year and how many of them there are and how that's really just a continuation of the discussion that we started on overconsumption.

Sarah [00:01:12] Before we get into that, we did want to say that on our Substack feed we're having a great time. And guys, let's just tell you one of the main reasons that we moved to Substack because we want you to be able to give subscriptions because you asked us to be able to give subscriptions every day. And so it was a huge reason we moved. And so in case you didn't know, the time has arrived. If you would like to give a premium subscription for the holiday season to Pantsuit Politics shows both the News Brief, including the Good News brief that I do and the More to Say that Beth does and the Spicy More to Say we do together. You can do that now. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord. You can gift a subscription to our Substack channel. Yay! It feels so good to be able to finally say that after, I don't know, three to four holiday seasons of being tortured by the fact that we could not say that.

Beth [00:02:03] We also know that some of you would like to give that subscription to other Pantsuit Politics listeners who, for financial reasons, are not on Substack right now. So Alise has put together a spreadsheet for Listener to listener gifting. You can find that in our show notes. You can add your name to give a subscription or to receive a subscription. And we love that you all have such generous spirits and do so much to support each other and our work. So thank you very much. Next up, we have a whole segment of good news for you.

[00:02:32] Music Interlude.

[00:02:41] Sarah, I'm so happy we get to start with just a whole segment of good news.

Sarah [00:02:45] For those of you not on our Substack, I do a Good News Brief every Thursday morning. It is the best part of my week and it really trains you to look for good news. And it really has built a muscle where I look for it, but my favorite weeks are when I don't have to look for it. And it's just the top headlines, which is what we got going on right now.

Beth [00:03:10] So we'll pick up from our last episode with the good news that the Assad regime has fallen in Syria. This family that has ruled Syria for over 50 years has been driven out. Bashar al-Assad is an asylee in Moscow now.

Sarah [00:03:27] Now he is up in some billion dollar apartment complex. I'm trying hard not to think too much about that. And it's really interesting. I fell down this dark hole about the Assad family because I had to get mad again about the Vogue article in 2011 about his wife. For those of you who don't know, Anna Wintour commissioned a profile of Assad's wife in 2011. The rose of the desert, Beth, the safest state in the Middle East. She was just this picture of modernity and then like six months later, he was using chemical weapons on his people. So it didn't age well. It's what I'm saying. So I looked it up and one of their sons has studied in Moscow and knows Russian and they have all this real estate in Moscow. So it's like clearly they had their escape plan ready.

Beth [00:04:11] And that's frustrating. To the Vogue article, there was hope when Bashar al-Assad took over that he would be a reformer for Syria. And like many people who were supposed to be reformers in the Middle East, as soon as he experienced how difficult it is to rule a country, he adopted the brutal tactics of his father. I was trying to tell Ellen, my nine year old, about this story this morning. And I said that he suppressed opposition, imprisoned his enemies. She said it's giving Henry the eighth. And I said, honestly, I think it's been a lot worse than Henry the eighth. As bad as that was, this has been so brutal. Our Middle East expert, Kerry Boyd Anderson, send us an email after the regime fell and said, look, I'm hearing from people that there is a sense of being freed from an open air prison. There is real hope and celebration in Syria. And even if the new regime is still authoritarian and harsh, there is hope that it can be better for people there. And so we celebrate that.

Sarah [00:05:15] Well, there were videos of people being freed from actual prison that a huge prison complex with hidden cells. They're still trying to unearth where people were just running free. I watched a video of a man running and he was like, God is great. God is great. And somebody said, what happened? And somebody said, the government fell. And he just kept running. I mean, people that had been in prison for 10 years. I heard a rebel say, I'm going to find my mother and my brother and my cousin. They've been in prison since 2011. Tortured children in prison with their mothers. And those are the people that are still alive. 500,000 people have died during the Syrian civil war. 500,000 people. One of the most deadly conflicts in the modern era. And it had just sort of faded from view for the rest of the world, but not for Syrians. We had a listener who teaches some Syrian immigrants and their children were like, Syria is free! Syria is free! Like Syrians all over the world, 14 million of which fled.

Beth [00:06:15] Half the country. Half the population had to leave.

Sarah [00:06:17] Half the population fled. They're celebrating. They feel free. And yes, of course, we don't know what's going to come next. But there is no reason not to be joyous that this incredibly oppressive, heinous, horrible regime has fallen and that for this moment the Syrian people feel freedom.

Beth [00:06:44] And there will be domino effects of this. We're already seeing ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas gaining momentum. And that's for a lot of reasons. Hezbollah and Israel reached a cease fire. Now, it has not been a calm cease fire. There has been tension and flare ups and uncertainty around it. But that combined with the election of Donald Trump and the relationship that he has with Benjamin Netanyahu and others in the Middle East and just the Iranian government having one setback after another. And particularly, I think, for Hamas to see the Syrian regime fall this way when it has enjoyed the support of Iran for so long, hopefully will tip the balance so that we get a deal that stop the fighting in Gaza.

Sarah [00:07:36] And the cease fire between Hezbollah, the group in Lebanon and Israel seems to be holding the New York Times did a whole thing on Iran's terrible year because between the weakening of Hezbollah and Hamas-- and weakening is probably not a strong enough word to describe either of those groups. And the fact that Russia is also weakened and distracted, to me, that's the other good news about this story from Syria; is it's just an embarrassment for Putin on the global stage and reminds people that he's not invincible and he's not this all-encompassing power all over the world. There are other places and Africa in particular, where Russia has exerted an enormous amount of force and influence. I wonder now that those groups are seeing what has happened in Syria, if there will be continuous fallout around the world where people see their moment to overcome a repressive government that has been backed by Russia. And so I think all of this speaks to the destabilization. And it's so easy to get into a space where destabilization can put us in a place of anxiety that there are only be bad outcomes from destabilization, but that's not true. Sometimes destabilization has positive outcomes, and we're seeing that right now in Syria.

Beth [00:08:50] We also have another update from our last episode. As you may have heard, prosecutors have charged a suspect with murder in the assassination of the CEO of United Health Care. This person was in a McDonald's in Pennsylvania and an employee recognized him and local police approached him. And he made the very bad mistake of lying about who he was and also having a ghost gun with him that had been 3D printed. So Pennsylvania authorities were able to arrest him and hold him. And New York jumped right in. And so we are swiftly seeing a resolution to what had been a very tense hunt for that shooter.

Sarah [00:09:31] Yes, I am so relieved that they have made an arrest. I understand that this crime unleashed a lot of pent up emotions about the American health care system. But gunning someone down on the street should be punished. And it sounds like from the initial reporting and should not be surprising to anyone, that he had had some both physical health problems and mental health problems; that he had disappeared from his family and friends who could not get in contact with him. Because it's never going to be some cool headed, logical person who's making the decision to use violence to solve a political problem because that is not a cool headed, calm strategy. That is the strategy of someone who is struggling mightily with mental health problems. And so I'm not surprised that they found him. The level of surveillance, especially in midtown Manhattan. And I'm impressed with the police work at how quickly they gathered up those images and were able to distribute them. Because even the very first image where you could just see half his face, I thought if you knew who he was, you'd know who this was. And then once they really distributed images of his whole entire face, I thought it was just a matter of time. I think I said by the time we record next Tuesday; they'll have found him. Didn't I say that?

Beth [00:10:55] Yes, you did.

Sarah [00:10:56] I was proven correct.

Beth [00:10:57] With all of that surveillance, there were privacy advocates saying they're probably going to use facial recognition technology to figure out who this is. And the police said, nope, this was just an old fashioned we have a picture, we shared it with the public, media got it out there and someone saw him and said something. And so the role of media in connection with this story is probably what consumes me most, both on the police work side and the reaction to it on social media. I really thought we had maybe hit our bottom in terms of humaneness on social media when that submarine where wealthy people had gone down to look at the Titanic imploded. But this story has been really alarming to me in a number of respects, just in terms of like what we're willing to tolerate and how we think about violence when it's done in some way connected to a cause that we experience frustration and heartache and suffering around. So a lot is changing for me rapidly in my own intake of social media. And Sarah and I wanted to sit down and look at just a huge shift in the media landscape along so many dimensions. So that's what we're going to talk about next.

[00:12:09] Music Interlude.

[00:12:17] Sarah, for months we have been planning an episode on overconsumption. We're going to have that conversation on Friday. But it felt right to start with media in the overconsumption discussion because it is both the cause and effect for many of us as we think about what we're taking in, what we're spending money on, where where our time is going.

Sarah [00:12:37] Yeah. And there's been a lot of headlines that have either come recently or come in the recent months that are sort of not hard to talk about individually, but maybe don't rise to the importance of a whole episode. But when you put them all together, you see a lot of pretty dramatic shifts in both traditional media, social media. This week we've had the tick tock legislation that forces TikTok to divest by January 19th upheld by the D.C. Federal Appellate Court. I like how all the coverage pointed out that these were Reagan, Obama, and Trump appointees who all said under the strictest First Amendment scrutiny, this law passes muster. And so TikTok will have to divest. Now, they're not done fighting. They've filed another appeal. They're going to try to take it to the Supreme Court. Legal experts are split on whether they think the Supreme Court will take this or not. But something is still happening with the "TikTok ban" between security concerns, the First Amendment fight, and the fact that it is still a predominant app in people's lives.

Beth [00:13:48] To the politics of it all, the decision from the federal court stressed that discussion about restricting TikTok began with the Trump administration and continued under the Biden administration, and both administrations spent enormous amounts of time negotiating with TikTok and the affiliated companies, trying to work out a deal where TikTok could live in an Oracle cloud in the United States and be separated from entities controlled by the Chinese government. There have been years of investigative work and discussions and people trying to use their leverage to figure out how this could work. I think the truth is no one wanted to get to a TikTok ban. And I think people tried in really good faith from lots of different segments of the government to avoid this outcome. But in classified briefings, members of Congress were convinced that this is so dangerous to our national security, the only path forward is to divest, is to require a U.S. company to own this if it is going to continue to operate here. And so I keep talking to my daughter about this. Her friends are so mad about this law. They think it is the dumbest thing to ever happen. They think it is 100% about politicians not liking the truth being told about them unchecked.

Sarah [00:15:20] Oh my goodness.

Beth [00:15:20] And so I sent her language from the opinion and said, look, this federal court, based on all the evidence is talking about how TikTok tracks your location, it tracks your keystrokes. It gets all of this personal information about Americans. And a government that is an adversary to us has access to that and has been found just on the most basic level to not be trustworthy in its dealings with us, because that government also has access to our water supply, our electrical grids. Day after day, we're discovering all the ways that the Chinese government is surveilling Americans. And this is the best call they could make under really hard circumstances.

Sarah [00:16:04] Yeah, we have an episode that we're working on about the Salt Typhoon hack. If you have not followed this, it's another one that's sort of bubbling under the surface but seems to have enormous importance and impact that because it's intimidating and scary, it gets buried. But there are Chinese hackers that were able to infiltrate our telecommunications infrastructure and they are not out. They just had a meeting in the White House with Verizon and AT&T and all the telecom bigwigs, and they have not extracted the hackers from the system. They are worried that beyond encrypted communications, which they believe are still secure, that they could have been spying, listening, tracking across a broad array of Americans from presidential campaigns to national security officials. And it will be interesting to see the Trump administration's approach to this. You have a China hawk with Marco Rubio being nominated for secretary of state. But you have this sort of (I liked how Axios put it) the Silicon Valley swamp, which is an administration full of billionaires and tech executives and the PayPal mafia, these guys who founded PayPal back in the day and still exert an enormous amount of influence. Marc Andreessen tweeted the other day that political power is better than economic power. They're feeling themselves.

[00:17:31] They're feeling like they're going to have their hands on the wheel from Elon Musk on down with the Trump administration. And so it will be interesting because it feels like all of these things are converging. It feels like we have a greater understanding, an agreement that China is an adversary and that they are using tech, social media to spy on us and to gather information about us while we're heading towards this trade war with them. We have this enormous power of tech executives coming into the Trump administration saying we don't want regulation, we don't want legislation, take your foot off our necks. And just a massive influx of wealth through cryptocurrency and taking your hands off the wheel on that. At the same time, it feels like the public particularly when it comes to kids and social media and just generally (we're going talk about this with overconsumption) are fed up and feel frustrated and feel like it's gotten too big, too fast, too much. And so it feels to me like they have some conflict inside the administration among these different camps. It feels like we have a real instability around how Americans feel around social media and tech, much less traditional media. And it just feels like a powder keg to me right now. That's how it feels.

Beth [00:18:51] And I think we all hold some contradictory positions. We are fed up with social media, but the TikTok ban is unpopular.

Sarah [00:18:59] Yeah.

Beth [00:19:00] Everything that you said about the Chinese surveillance and hacking, I just want to underscore one thing that really jumped out at me from the federal court opinion here, which is that even with all of that information going on-- and we've had a couple of years with those efforts from China to deeply embed themselves in American society at the forefront in Congress, there are special committees studying those issues, developing recommendations on how to move forward. Even with all of that, the federal court said it is clear that TikTok was the priority. They had enough information to believe that this was the place deserving of the most focus and attention out of the gate. And so I hope that that helps us have a little bit more patience for something that people don't like. To understand that the people who've been working on these issues prioritize TikTok against this landscape of security concerns.

Sarah [00:19:52] Well, that's my concern. It's this moment where people are frustrated, where you have global efforts like in Australia to ban social media under 16, I've gotten so many ads from Instagram for teens. Like new campaign from Instagram that they have special teen accounts. I know that there was a lot of legislation on deck with regards to the hearings that happened on Congress with regards to teenagers and kids and safety online. So it's like that seems to be gaining momentum. But I feel like to get us through that and to really put some regulations in place with regards to the-- I mean, the security of our children and the security of our nation seem to be something we should prioritize when it comes to media regulation, but it takes leadership. And I'm going to be honest, I don't feel like there's going to be a lot of great leadership within the Trump administration and the Silicon Valley swamp helping us find a path where we're regulating and we have those safety priorities in mind. But we're not stepping over innovation, which I'm not concerned with like lessening innovation. I think that's some manipulative tool. But I'm a little worried. I don't see a lot of leadership from this new administration on this issue.

Beth [00:21:18] What I think is concerning is that it's hard to have trust in the people who will be influencing these decisions. So the ban in Australia on social media for children under 16 is very popular. It has like 77% support in Australia, but that 77% support came in large measure because of Rupert Murdoch. He owns the biggest media outlets in Australia and those outlets went all in on a campaign called Let Them Be Kids pushing for this law to be passed. Now, can you imagine that someone who is heavily invested in legacy media would want to limit children's use of social media for reasons that are not entirely related to their mental health and wellbeing? Of course, you can. And I think that's what's going to permeate discussion here, even as steps are being taken. How do you trust those steps if the billionaire class is directly involved in moving legislation forward?

[00:22:23] In July, the United States Senate passed easily the Kids Online Safety Act that would require platforms to take some steps to deal with cyberbullying and substance abuse and other ways that the Internet is harmful to kids. But it's stalled out in the House because House Republicans think any attempt to regulate anything online amounts to viewpoint censorship. So some of the senators who've been working on this legislation, including J.D. Vance, have enlisted Elon Musk to try to convince House Republicans to take it up and move it forward again. And they've made a bunch of compromises to try to get the legislation in a form that's acceptable to the House. Well, if you hear Elon Musk, owner of X, is directly negotiating legislation about kid’s online safety, you start to think, is this more about PR for the platforms? Look, we did something. We solved it. Everybody shut up now. Or is it really about doing something that protects children online? That trust deficit, I don't know how we work through.

Sarah [00:23:26] I don't trust Instagram. They're not impressed me with their PR campaign right now about the Instagram for teens accounts. It's such bullshit. It's all like recommendations and they check for selected words. But even the time limit they're like with recommended time limits. I'm like right, you're not going to shut it down. You're not going to do the thing that you could do, which is just shut the app down and kick them out after a certain amount of time. There will be workarounds like there is on all this stuff. Apple has known for how long that they can shut the phone down once it reaches a certain speed while we're driving. Does it do that? Of course, it doesn't. Because their bottom line is always going to be at the center point. And I think you take this traditional media shift in combination with the social media shift in combination with the richness of listening to anybody on the right talk about viewpoint censorship. When I was getting Elon Musk and far right wing things sent to me through the X algorithm throughout the entire presidential cycle.

[00:24:32] And you have another piece of good news we didn't even cover in the first segment, which is Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who share his political leanings, lost their bid to overtake the trust that controls Fox News. Because basically the concern was it was going to go to all four kids. Several of them are much more liberal than Rupert and Lachlan. They didn't like that, so he was trying to fix it so Lachlan could keep Fox News as far right as it currently is. And they lost. I hope you everyone saw that the reporting in Axios was that the kids have come together and formulated a PR plan for when Rupert does eventually die. Which I assume he will, despite the fact that he's in his 90s and just got married for fifth time after they watched Succession and the chaos that fell out on Succession when the dad died and they're like, man, I guess we better get a plan together. It didn't look so great on the TV show, which is just delightful on many levels. But I think that was such an interesting component today. As I was thinking about this, I'm like, okay, so the traditional media, even the most successful-- because Fox News is kick in everybody's but in the cable news right now. That he couldn't protect the viewpoint protection that they're so concerned about just on the other hand.

Beth [00:25:47] Yeah. I'm not sure how we protect children better online until we change adult’s social media habits. I think there are a lot of good initiatives out there to try to restrict children's usage of social media, to try to limit what they see in terms of sponsored content. I just don't know how we get there without fundamentally shifting what social media is.

Sarah [00:26:12] Well, I think it's happening already. There's no stasis. There's no stasis with traditional media. It doesn't matter if he'd won his suit to protect the right wing bent of Fox News. There is no standstill in media, traditional or otherwise. So people's habits are going to shift. I think we're seeing that already with traditional media and have been for, what, a decade? People watch less traditional media. Certainly they read less traditional media. Traditional media is trying to figure that out with regards to their profit and how they were getting traffic. There was just this massive shift between traditional journalism and social media when Facebook started sending them a bunch of traffic and decided we want to keep this all in Facebook because that's where we make our money. We don't want to send them to your news website. And that's when the ad revenue dropped off the planet. And that's the second phase, right? First, the ad revenue fell off a cliff with regards to local papers because people moved to Craigslist instead of classifieds and advertising local paper. Then you get this next wave of people were getting tons of traffic from Facebook and X, and then they both were like, no, we want to keep them here because we have to advertise to them.

[00:27:29] Then now we're going into okay, well, we'll try to do subscription and paywall. But it's like that's to me converging with that lack of trust in the media. So you're asking me to pay, but I think you're biased anyway. To me, what's so concerning is Facebook shut that down and so people aren't getting news anywhere, as far as I can tell. They don't want to pay for it through a website. Local news is limping along. People don't watch nightly news or cable news. I don't have a huge news presence on my social media feed. I have a political presence, but that's not the same thing. And so, that's going to continue to change. I think as our generation gets older and more and more fed up with social media, especially through the lens of what it has done to children and to our children, I think people's usage is going to continue to decrease anyway. That's my sense of the thing. I could be totally wrong and maybe this is just a bubble in which I am constantly trying to reduce my social media use and have and my phone usage. That's the other thing. There's just so many layers to this. Are we talking about journalism? Are we talking about entertainment? Are we talking about social media? Are we talking about just being online? Are we talking about our phones? There's just so many layers of this that I think are so hard to piece apart when it talks about the presence of an influence of all of these things in our lives.

Beth [00:29:10] My sense is aligned with yours that people who are getting news are getting it almost exclusively through influencers talking about news, because that's what social media is now. And traditional news outlets are struggling because you put that subscription model in place, but not enough people pay for news to allow you to absorb all the expenses associated with being a news outlet. And so you still need advertising, but people don't like advertising either and see advertising as part of your bias or the way that you don't fully live your values out if you have an advertiser that challenges something that comes across the editorial page or whatever. And so the revenue model is so difficult and at the same time as people are dealing with the difficulty of that revenue model, they're trying to report on news that is increasingly complex and just because of the passage of time requires more and more information to be able to digest it.

[00:30:20] As I've been reading about Syria this week, I thought, who were these articles written for? Because the average person really does not have the base of knowledge to understand what this news is supposed to mean to them or to put it in any kind of context. I have thought for years that the BBC does a better job than most American news outlets in beginning a story by saying, hey, if you don't know anything about this, these are kind of the essential pieces of context you need to have before you start reading about what just happened, or at least making it obvious where you can go to get those essential pieces of context. But it's really tricky and I worry about this all the time because I do think we do not have a functioning democracy if we don't have people regularly engaging with news. And I think social media for 100 reasons, most of them related to how someone makes money, is pushing us farther and farther from people getting news and more and more into people latching on to personalities and adopting the worldview those personalities are putting forward.

Sarah [00:31:25] I think you're exactly right that the new media economy, including the news and journalists’ space, is really occupied by what I would say is a combo of influencers and short form video. Short form video to me is the connective tissue here. That's what TikTok is, obviously. YouTube shorts, that's what I can't get my kids off of. Instagram reels. You see The New York Times adopting this short form video format. I was talking to Jamie Golden from the Popcast, and she told me that they did an episode where they talked about the creator economy, which was $250 billion last year. The film economy was $258. So we're talking about a growing piece of the pie that is this influencer, creator economy. Because I had sent her an article about how there's basically too many influencers. You can't make money the way you used to because the market is so saturated. And you have news influencers, people who come on and do these short form videos to tell you the news and some long form obviously, too. But that aspect of this new environment which really isn't social, there's not a lot of social aspect to just consuming this short form video.

[00:32:51] Maybe you build a parasocial relationship with the influencer themselves and there's some real wacky stuff going on right there with people showing up at people's houses and copying what they're doing and feeling this sort of excessive fandom connection with the influencers. That's like a whole other piece of the puzzle over here. But it does feel like everything is converging into the short form video in a way that I find deeply problematic. I think it is bad for adults and children. I think it destroys our attention span. I think it reduces down everything in a way that is very harmful, particularly with regards to news and journalism. There's no space to address that knowledge gap, right? And if there is, to get you there quickly, you're missing a million things. And so then people just-- it's not even their attention. It's like people lose the ability to (I know this is the meme of the moment) to hold space for complexity and what they don't know. Like there's this none of that and our brains are so susceptible to this. Have you listened to Hysterical? The podcast of the year that's been everywhere.

Beth [00:34:16] I have not.

Sarah [00:34:17] It's so good. Well, I think the first two episodes are too long, but you can skip to episode three and keep going. But it's all about hysteria, right? These mass psychological events where people just know they've experienced something they haven't experienced. And so often-- Nicholas and I started laughing because so often people would say, well, clearly, there's not an easy explanation so that means somebody is hiding something. That's what our brains do. And I just feel like short form video and the influencer of it all just feed that aspect of our brain, that attribution bias, confirmation bias, this lean to the negativity bias. Those three biases are just put on steroids if all you're consuming all day is short form video.

Beth [00:35:06] And I think the response to the TikTok ban is going to be the intersection of all those dynamics. Because people do feel attached to short form video creators and want those creators to thrive and want their businesses to succeed. And they do have a susceptibility to the idea that government is doing this to censor speech, not to protect national security. And the explanation about why TikTok is a national security threat takes a lot longer and requires more complexity than can be contained in short form video. And so all those things come together in a way that is directly related to how we function as citizens in a democratic system. And I think we're going to have issue after issue after issue like that where these forces keep colliding. I was really interested in an article from The New York Times about schools using AI to monitor student’s activity on mostly their Chromebooks. And this AI would highlight when students use language related to suicidal ideation. And in some instances, that would mean an intervention during the school day. A student would speak to a guidance counselor to assess what was going on. There are a lot of false positives because of research kids were doing about historical events or current events. But in a number of cases, in pretty dramatic ways, this software probably saved lives. But also the software works 24/7 and so there are a couple of stories about pretty traumatizing events where police showed up at student's classes.

Sarah [00:36:50] Oh my God.

Beth [00:36:50] And in one of those instances a child had already started taking an intended overdose of a drug and they got the child to the hospital and saved her life because the software flagged what she was saying to friends on her Chromebook and the school contacted the police and the police went to the house and got the child. So it's like how do you prioritize the interest around a situation like that? And I think, again, we are going to analyze that with what we think about privacy online, what we think about kids in social media, what we think the role of the school is, how we feel about police in general. And all of that is hard and we cannot practice those skills through short form video and the way that short form video sort of trains us to talk about difficult issues. I just I don't know how we get together and think together about what we want and expect from schools, from police, from platforms when our rhythm of conversation is so influenced by these quippy bite-sized videos.

Sarah [00:38:01] Well, it doesn't train you to converse at all. It trains you to react. And my reaction to that story is we're awful far downstream here. Why are we worried so much about the moment when she was already trying to harm herself instead of going way upstream and saying why do we need this level of surveillance and software to begin with? Why is the suicide rate high? Why is the suicidal ideation such a problem that we need artificial intelligence frickin help with it? That's to me the question we're not answering. It is so hard to find a space to say what kind of life do we want to live? What do we want for our kids? What do we want their day to look like? What do we want their school day to look like? I want my children's school day to look like a lot less time online. Personally, I would like them to have paper, pen and books because there is something that happens to our brains when we are in front of a screen. I think the technological revolution in education has been a failure. That's my personal opinion. I don't think we see test results. I don't think we see social emotional learning results. Anything that indicates that what we're doing right now is just going well, I'm just killing it, that we're all getting the results we want. No one's happy with the results and we keep doubling down on the strategy.

[00:39:24] This is as far as we've gotten in this conversation, the first mention of artificial intelligence, which I think is just going to make any sort of extraction, any sort of pause, any sort of moment where we say what is it we actually want? What do we want any of this to look like? One of my favorite books I read this year was Outlive. And my favorite part of that book as he goes through all of this health stuff. Pages and pages of longevity and cardiovascular health and brain health. All of it. Metabolic health. And then he's like, what am I living a long time for? What am I doing all this effort for? Because I'm miserable. I have a real mental health crisis. So what am I trying to stretch my life out to do? And I feel like that with all this citizenship aspect with regards to journalism; the kid’s aspect with regards to tech usage. The adult's entertainment, relaxing, connection, what do we want that to look like in our lives regards to short form video? It all requires us to ask bigger questions with technology that's like, don't ask me questions. Look over here. Look over here. Look over here.

Beth [00:40:46] I think that technological revolution in school begs that question even more because we say, well, they have to use the technology in school so that they're ready for the modern workplace. And we have data along so many dimensions saying we're not happy with our modern workplaces either. I would personally like my workday to have a lot less time spent online. And I've been thinking about how to do that given what we do and where can I get good information and actually think about it, not just be in an endless loop of what other people think about it, but find space myself to consider what I'm learning and what questions I have and where I might go from here. And so that always kind of takes me back to we center so many of these conversations on kids because I think we find it easier to make changes for kids and to make rules for kids and to restrict kids in their activities. But we really do have to do it baseline at the the big picture societal level. You're right. What kind of lives do we want to have and what role do we want technology to have in those lives? And we're not all going to come to one answer about that. That's why I think the ban for 16 year olds in Australia is complicated. It sounds like a good idea, but as you discuss it more, you can come up with lots of reasons that it paints with too broad of a brush. It's not going to be an easy answer. I just want to keep thinking about the path to analyze the question more effectively. And I think that that for me means much longer form sources everywhere, instead of allowing everything to be filtered to me through the lens of personality.

Sarah [00:42:29] Yeah. I'm probably, as far as my own personal viewpoint and usage, way past analyzing the problem. I know what the problem is. It's the stupid phones. We're planning on doing a show about this as well. But I am at every moment thinking, how do I get this out of my life more and more and more? How do I put other things in place? Every time I just keep adding. It's the only additive place. Like how do I add more speed bumps? How do I add more restrictions? How do I add more habits? Because until it's a societal solution, the individual approach is a battle because of the way our brains work, because of the way this technology is built to profit off the moments of our actual life. It's not like the food industry where they can just convince you to eat more and more calories. You only have so many minutes in a day and they're competing for them and they have an enormous amount of resources, including now basically the entire Trump administration. So, to me, it's like it's got to be almost an overreaction to get anywhere close. And I actually think that's probably true on the policy level, too. To me, it's like move fast, break things. Well, we got to do that on the other end too. If that's their strategy, then that's got to be our strategy, both individually and as a society. I'm ready to overcorrect. I know sometimes that's not a great thing in American life, but I'm ready to all the way overcorrect. Ban TikTok. Ban under the age of 16. Let's shut all the way down. I'm ready.

Beth [00:44:09] Well, I'm sure that we'll continue to talk about this and that you all will have strong reactions to this discussion. We're looking forward to hearing them. And we will keep talking about overconsumption. And I'm sure that will have elements of social media on Friday's episode. Sarah, Outside of Politics, I think we're on theme with overconsumption and talking about how there are maybe too many words of the year this year.

Sarah [00:44:38] Well, it's not even that. It's such a reflection of everything we just talked about like the actual words and the fact that there are too many. So the first one I heard about was Brat from Collin's dictionary. Even though I don't know what Collins Dictionary is, but I did see news articles because I think they were first out the gate. I think Collins Dictionary was first out the gate with Brat. Very online referenced at Charli XCX: Brat Summer. Okay. Then I think the next one I saw was Oxford Press's Brain rot, which is again 100% short form video. What it does to your brain, exactly what we were just talking about. Then I think I saw Australia's Macquarie Dictionary. Who the heck is that? Enshittification. Which I actually think is the best one. Little lead if you don't know what in certification is, there was an article probably a year ago, two years ago--

Beth [00:45:29] Yeah, I think it's a while.

Sarah [00:45:31] It's pretty old, but it's finally getting out there exactly what we described in the previous segment. That they build a platform; it's for the users; the users love it, all get on board, then they decide it's not for the users, it's for the advertisers. And that's when you get the enshittification of the platform because it becomes an advertising platform instead of a social platform. Dictionary.com, to me, I think, is who I heard about next. And I think this is the best one, which is demure. Again, another extremely online reference to the viral TikTok about your work make up that should be very demure, very mindful. And then Merriam-Webster, which I think is who started all this, that's when we used to track pretty closely, right? But I think they were last. I think they created an opening. And also, I don't like their word. It's boring. It's not adding. To me the word of the year is always like this is a new word we've added to the lexicon. Isn't that your kind of understanding of it?

Beth [00:46:26] I have always thought of it that way. That we have a word of the year because our language continues to rise. And I think that's really interesting.

Sarah [00:46:33] Yes. And I agree with all. I agree with brain rot, enshittification, demure brat, all of those. I get it. I think they added to the lexicon. They adopted new meanings. They shifted. They gained new awareness. And then Merriam-Webster rolls out with polarization. Really? That is lame. That is a lame choice for word of the year. I'm just saying. It's not a new word. What is it, 2016? What are we doing here? What is going on?

Beth [00:46:58] Well, and I don't know that polarization makes sense for this year in any way because we saw demographic shifts in the election that are indicative of our previous understandings of polarization being wrong. And we are confronting a whole host of issues where the traditional conservative to liberal spectrum makes no sense whatsoever. I think how you feel about capitalism changes when you start to bring big tech into the picture. All of our political taxonomy needs a refresh. And so to have the word of the year be based on a very old understanding of how we classified politics, I respect Merriam-Webster greatly, but I think they missed on this one.

Sarah [00:47:45] They missed. And also, we don't need five. So this is a moment for us to decide. We like the word of the year practice. We like being reminded that the language evolves and that lexicons change. I think either Oxford Press or Dictionary.com got it right this year. I would take either brain rot or demur. Probably brain rot because it's not like we didn't have the word demure before we knew it just people didn't know it. You know what I'm saying?

Beth [00:48:15] Well, and just Jools LeBron changed the way demure functions.

Sarah [00:48:19] For sure.

Beth [00:48:20] It's a totally different understanding of the word.

Sarah [00:48:23] So I don't know if we need to crown a new person and say they get to pick it or maybe they can have some sort of committee among all these dictionary sites and sources. But having five rollouts over the course of two weeks doesn't work for me. That's not what we want. That is the enshittification of this online space. Next year we're going to get 1500 short form videos about the word of the year and they'll be 10. We're on the wrong path world. Let's tighten this up a little bit.

Beth [00:48:57] But everybody has an incentive to get their word of the year out there because it means that people are talking about it even if it's for a day or an afternoon. So much of media right now is about feeding other media. And this is becoming really obvious to me as I plow through my normal news sources every day. I see more and more stories that I think this is really out there for other people to write about what someone has written. And it's just this cycle. It's not adding anything new. It's just creating new opportunities for more content. This is why I hate the word content. I hate the word content especially when we're talking about what we do.

Sarah [00:49:40] That's your anti-word of the year.

Beth [00:49:42] It is my anti-word of the year. You're right. Content. What's the opposite of a crown? That's what it gets. Because I want us to make something and have a lot of intention around what we're making and to say I've made something; I've taken it through a process; I've published it because I'm proud of the thing that I made. I don't want my life to be content. I don't want my every thought to be content. I want to really sit down and think hard about what it is I'm putting into the world. And I feel like that editing layer has just dropped off the face of the earth this year. That's why I would give the crown to brain rot because I learned something when I was reading about brain rot.

Sarah [00:50:24] Yeah.

Beth [00:50:25] I feel like the word of the year is in some ways for those of us who are a little bit older than where the culture is to gain some insight into what the youngs are talking about. And I didn't realize with brain rot that we're talking about content that is being made for the explicit purpose of just kind of dulling all of your senses to just have something running constantly. I think that's not great. And I would like to chat with the youngs about it. But in terms of a term that helped me understand something new about the world, I think the Oxford press got the assignment best of all of these outlets.

Sarah [00:51:03] You know what the paradox of all this is? It's that the content we're consuming, the short form video, takes an enormous amount of editing. That's the paradox. It's hard to create that content. I read this great piece about an influencer suing another influencer for basically copyright infringement. It'll be a really big test case because it's like exactly what you said. It's all produced. And these two were basically just replicating Kim Kardashian's beige minimalism and then fighting over who was ripping off who among the two people who are ripping off Kim. It's also derivative. But in that piece of this article, they were talking about the TikToker Nigel Kabvina [sp], who just turns his head. He's a Muffy. He'll post something funny like a meme and then he'll just turn his head. And he learnt that that's what TikTok rewarded. That helped the viralness. That helped the meme. But that process of editing and being responsive to the algorithm-- and of course in the article they called the algorithm your boss and employee feedback all the time.

[00:52:12] That's your boss; it's the algorithm. And you're editing, but you're editing to get to that brain rot place. You're using an enormous amount of sometimes creative capacity, sometimes tech capacity, sometimes just sort of data analysis to get to this seamless experience on the other end of the algorithm. That's what's so wild about it. That's what's so paradoxical about it. It's that the creators are using an enormous amount of brainpower to get us to the place of brain rot. That's what's so sort of mind bendy about this situation that I think we all feel. I think we can feel it. We can feel we're being manipulated. We can feel we're being put on a boat, but a boat on a Disney ride where there's a track underneath you. You know what I mean?

Beth [00:52:59] Yes, it takes and it takes and it takes. That's what I am feeling mostly about social media in particular. It just takes and takes and takes and it won't stop taking until you put up iron gates around yourself almost.

Sarah [00:53:16] Iron gates. That's what I'm saying. It has to be hardcore. Okay, we got to stop because clearly we have a lot to say about this. We have a whole episode on overconsumption that's going to be a beautiful complement to this episode and environment we're all living in on Friday.

Beth [00:53:35] So we really appreciate you joining us today and being part of these discussions. We will be back on Friday to talk more about overconsumption, how we're drowning in stuff and pressure to buy more stuff and what we can do about all the stuff. And we will see you back here then.

[00:53:50] Music Interlude.

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

Beth: Alise Napp is our Managing Director. Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

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