Great essay. A context I hold is that "there is a price for everything, and you always pay." No human technological advancement comes without cost. Which should be obvious, but we (maybe naturally) tend to focus on the glittering promise more than the potential costs. The whole idea that every human technology from flint tools to social media is "progress" and "advancement" is so entrenched. The truth is, there are always both real advantages and real downsides, as you point out so well regarding urbanization vs. village life.
I have always imaged that the longing for individual liberty has been in the hearts of some humans of all ages. Who was that crazy woman who wanted to do something different, something innovative? Who was that man who refused some time-honored ritual? How did these outliers plant cultural seeds that led to changes like urbanization, even as they may have been killed or ostracized? As you write, only with urbanization that gradually developed in human societies could that freedom really be explored by the people who wanted to explore it. And yet, here we are back in the awful cages, but without the benefits of the village!
I'm speaking generally about human technology (and I'm not an anthropologist or expert in any way, so maybe someone else could comment). All I mean is that there were tradeoffs, as there always are in evolution, whether physical or cultural. Each step in human technological achievement led humans to be more successful in dominating the planet. That's just what happened, with some happy results and some not so happy. For humans as well as other species. I'm certainly not saying tool making or social media "shouldn't" have happened, just that there are usually downsides to every new technology meant to improve our lives. Each step in human early societies led towards the invention of agriculture, to storing food, eating less of a diverse diet. Tools let to agriculture, which (from what I have read) most definitely had its downsides to our health, even as it helped us dominate and procreate even more successfully. Teeth became crooked, common digestive problems began as humans foraged less. Farmers had to work longer hours than hunter gatherers. So "better" is always accompanied by "worse" in some ways!
No i got ya, i knew what you meant. And i wasnt using flint tools as a metaphor for all technology. I was just struggling to come up with any downsides to stone tools.
Maybe it looked different to the people at the time. Perhaps they debated about whether or not they should adopt these new "tools", maybe they worried about degradation to their society. Or more likely they complained after the fact, bc when do humans ever stop to consider the consequences? We seem to have a compulsion to take up any new anything that promises "easier" or "better", and only later do we see more clearly.
Ive got no problem saying social media shouldnt have happened. But should is never the question, and once invented there was no way it wasnt going to be embraced. Just another in the many steps humans have taken leading us to... wherever.
Vulnerability in terms of requiring access to the source. Flint us not as readily available as wood and bone and if the source is coveted by a neighbouring band, mimetic violence ensues or must be resolved. Might also restrict how far from a, source of flint or chert is willing or able to move to retain access
They ushered in an entirely new concept among our distant ancestors - the concept that we could make and use tools to manipulate our environment to suit our own needs, and as our innovative brains made more effective and more environmentally altering tools, have increasingly done so with utter disregard for the rest of life on earth, all too often including elements of our own.
Of course the original ’tools’ was built in - our expanding brain and our opposable thumb, without which few of any other tools are possible.
One only has to look at those tools that entirely altered our existence - the flint knife, the digging stick and the plow, the written word, the printing press, the steam engine, the computer. Each one ushered an entirely new era in human history, each one advanced our existence to a new plane, and each one was a Damoclean sword.
We’ve now invented two tools that have the capacity to alter our existence beyond comprehension - genetic engineering and atomic power (I’ve left out AI because that properly belongs in the computer category).
The problem is that while we have advanced our technological potential almost beyond belief, we ourselves are in most essential ways the same creature who first snapped a flint, and that may prove to be our undoing.
Hm idk.. seems like plenty of peoples were using stone tools *and* living in balance with their environment. In fact, they did so for many thousands of years.
But something changed a few thousand years ago. Ofc an obvious answer is agriculture, but theres some interesting theories challenging that scenario. Regardless, idt i can just jump to the assumption that the adoption of primitive tools was simply the first step on a road leading to here and now. Its too fatalistic for my taste
And i cant agree with your last sentences. I think its actually the opposite. Whatever changed for us a few thousand years ago, it altered us and made us different than those who came before.
(I jacked most of this from james c scotts against the grain, which challenges this linear progression narrative. Its a good read)
"i can just jump to the assumption that the adoption of primitive tools was simply the first step on a road leading to here and now. Its too fatalistic for my taste”
I assume you meant that you ‘can’t’ just jump.
I’d suggest you ask the 18 million who died in WWI of the tens of millions in WWII or those who are still dying in the Middle East and Sudan and a number of other places around the world even as we speak. Or perhaps you could ask those in China, North Korea, Russia and other places about the technology which not only enables autocratic states to keep track of every aspect of their lives (a part of Mr Mounk’s thinking here) but also provides them with the military and economic power to oppress them.
Yes, there were thousands of years of ‘peaceful co-existence' between human beings the world they inhabited, largely because we had not yet developed the technological ability to substantially alter that environment. But the acceleration in technology brought about by the invention of writing, which gave us the capacity to store knowledge in a way that memory could not, and the Agricultural Revolution that began to geometrically increase human population (and at the same time began to degrade our physical health and to increase the effects of disease in large, close living urban populations) which began in the Ancient Near East and in comparative terms rapidly spread to the rest of the world took only five thousand years to bring us to our present state in which our industrial activity threatens our environment in ways many of us are happily ignoring and our military capacity which threatens all life on earth.
And that’s not to mention the effect we've already had on the rest of life on earth.
But the inherent traits which we brought with us across the boundary between our primitive ancestors and ourselves - primarily aggression and territoriality have also helped immensely in this progression.
Were you around and aware in October of 1962 when we came perilously close to a nuclear war (even the pale imitation of what we could do today)? I was seventeen, and I promise you I’ve never since been so terrified. One would have thought that lesson would have made us think far more carefully about our choices, but the sabers are being rattled across the world again in a way they have not been since then.
No human being, however wise, should have at his fingertips that kind of capacity, particularly given the very brief amount of time he or she would have to make a decision that could affect the entire world before many of us were even aware of the need to make it.
Great stuff. I still remember my first real city-life experience, when at 16 I left my "village" for Tours, France to study for several months. I knew then I would always live in a big city. I ended up in NYC for 12 years, yet I certainly felt this happening, along with similarly dystopian consequences, during my last years there.
Social media ruined social life, and I don't know if we can come back from that now that the genie is out of the bottle.
Interesting how social media can create “strict cages of norms” while at the same time seemingly grant people the opportunity and license to be their worst selves!
Since you mentioned discipline and punish, public punishments in the town square were historically ubiquitous, a moment of ostracism that also imbued the community with solidarity and granted the individual some form of catharsis. This form of punishment seemed both necessary and popular for a enclosed community. Despite liberalism’s great crusade against inhumane punishments demeaning human dignity, we’ve moved this online instead, and I dunno if we can ever escape this seemingly inevitable aspect of the human condition
Excellent and thoughtful argument, Yascha. I suspect that we find ourselves at the intersection of two major arcs. The first might be summarized as the thrust of human social evolution from the cave to the village to the city and exurbs. The second is the profound, breathtaking explosion of technological and consumerist evolution beginning in and after WWII. With its peculiar gifts of natural resources and geography (both its relative isolation and its vast Lebensraum) it’s no surprise that the US would find itself as a focus and fulcrum of change as these arcs collided. So here we stand—thousands of years of human experiments in coexistence with each other and holding in our hands the machine that can be any machine, finding ourselves able to touch the entire world at our whim. In our characteristically myopic perspective, most of us see only the immediate past and future and think we have become as princes and kings. But the longer view tells another story: that most of mankind has only recently begun to pull itself from from the trees and caves, through serfdom and servitude and not a little destruction,, by slowly discovering the physics and science that gave rise to us. Regrettably, along the way we have invented tools for our self immolation as well as self advancement. Time will tell whether we have evolved in wisdom sufficiently to thrive or whether our primate fears will lead us to terminate the human experiment. From this vantage, one might describe our present fascination with and impulse to social criticism and prescription as just one more unique intersection along these arcs. Whether we use our gifts to advance or destroy ourselves continues to engage us.
An enjoyable read, thank you. We need to look deeply into our history and culture now and again. The current panopticon of politics will not solve much of anything.
Fascinating reading .. In your artfully crafted and wise essay you reflected and so capably presented thoughts, feelings, anxieties of many a city dweller carried for quite some time .
One note - at the risk of being fastidious - "the horrors of Nazism", and "the disfunction of communism" somewhat understates horrors that communism brought to the world, at least as measured by the sheer amount of people in misery or dead as a result .
You state: "a significant share of citizens now has deep skepticism about our political system." Is it truly skepticism about the underlying theory of the system or is it skepticism born of disappointment regarding the management of the system by it's so called "leaders"? My view is the latter. The leadership of the "western democracies" over the late several decades has been abysmal IMHO. And the future seems equally fraught. Cheers...
This is an excellent historical perspective on how humans have transformed in a relatively short time though I disagree with some of it, such as “The content of the norms to which you are subject are ultimately arbitrary…” and “we all live in a village now … a digital village…” I don’t live in that fiction.
I believe the content of our norms has become completely shaped by money. Though money’s been around forever, it’s only when industrialized economies required a mass consumer culture for marketing and employment that money became the the primary shaper of culture and personal meaning (mostly unacknowledged).
The structure of urban culture and economics of our time results in people having little time or attention for literature and philosophy that explores and critiques how values have degraded to the point of empowering urban fascists like Donald Trump. There’s no one like T. S. Eliot creating a work like The Waste Land to speak to the soul about the corruption of values. Soul is too profound for most people to even contemplate much less cultivate.
Interesting essay, but I disagree with your sweeping generalization about the nature of modern cities: You write: “We all live in a village now. But it is a digital village, a bizarro version of the original, hypercharged with the easy judgments and harsh punishments of rural life, and painfully devoid of its joys.”
Yascha, where do you live?
Recently, I’ve taken up residence in Sunnyside, Queens and have been pleasantly surprised by how friendly people are. It’s a gentle, settled neighborhood of astonishing ethnic diversity, and a reminder that New York is made up of many thousands of distinct neighborhoods and lifestyles.
For years our family have enjoyed spending days in a small cottage on the Shoreline in Connecticut. In true Yankee fashion, neighbors are there for neighbors. But they don’t pry into private lives, shame or judge.
… And the Coldplay couple. They were high-flying executives. I don’t think that a story about a random couple in the 99% would blow up on social media.
The problem isn’t social media. The problem is the Woke left. We now exist in entirely different realities, have become incomprehensible to each other and can no longer communicate. We always just talk past each other. Where is the common ground in such an infinitely wide divide? There obviously is none. This is an impossible situation. Does this mean we are doomed to a devastating civil war? Not necessarily. My hope is that AI advances will refocus our attention and alter our present trajectory. Hope springs eternal. We’ll soon see about that. The best of times. The worst of times.
Gov Pritzker supports Mayor Brandon Johnson who says “law enforcement is a sickness.” Where are the democrats who object to this, and I mean even in the general public, not just in the Democratic Party and their media?
Mayor Brandon Johnson sparks outrage after saying “law enforcement is a sickness.” (3 min)
Democrats consider meritocracy racist since it has a “disparate impact” on blacks and are replacing it with equity aka race based equal outcomes. Where are the democrats who object to this, and I mean even in the general public, not just in the Democratic Party and their media?
Bill Maher on Kamala Harris and Chicago public schools.
“Chicago Teachers Union: Tests are racist.” (2 min)
Ive always thought that woke was a product of social media. At least, i dont see how it wouldve gained the traction it did without sm. And i think the same could be said of the maga right. With both, social media amplified what started as reasonable ideas into outrageous bullshit that lost their grounding in reason.
And as you pointed out, we really have lost the ability to talk to each other. I see this as a direct result of social media. No longer do we have to consider other peoples ideas and views, we can just cozy up in our preferred echo chamber, which creates the amplifying feedback loop, which in turn requires more and more extreme views to gain recognition. Reasonable discourse makes for boring memes.
I also place a fair chunk of the blame on the scrolling feed. That made social media highly addictive, and as any addict of anything can tell you, whatever it is that youre addicted to becomes the centerpiece of ones life, with an overwhelming need for *more*.
Edit: not that anyones reading days old articles, but heres ezra klein, published this morning, basically saying the same thing.. "The conversations pulsing across these platforms are shaped not by civic values but by whatever proves to keep people scrolling: Nuanced opinions are compressed into viral slogans; attention collects around the loudest and most controversial voices; algorithms love conflict, inspiration, outrage and anger. Everything is always turned up to 11"
Some of my favorites I follow online are John Mearsheimer, Glenn Greenwald, Lena Petrova, Kim Iversen and Tucker. I’ve learned a lot that I would not have known about things like Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, the CIA, Israel and many other things. I live on the northwest side of Chicago but without social media I’d miss a lot about what’s happening in Chicago plus I learn a lot about so many other areas like health, financial and economic issues, geopolitics and so many other things.
I voted for Trump 3 times and had high hopes for him but now consider him a disaster who’s turned the world against America and has ignored and even reversed most of his campaign promises such as America First, no more war, the Epstein files, transparency and restoring the rule of law. Would Kamala have been better? Fat chance. She would have re-opened the southern border, re-started the war on meritocracy which was being replaced with equity aka race based equal outcomes, and made it a top priority to put Trump in prison and to grind his supporters like me into the dirt. I basically totally distrust the democrats. No society so devoid of trust and so full of hate can survive as a nation. America has already ceased to exist as a country internally which is why it’s so rapidly unraveling externally. God only knows where we’ll all end up.
Outstandingly good answer by JD Vance. Democrats say diversity is our strength. Not true. Our strength was having a common identity as Americans not as different groups where some are classified as oppressors and some as oppressed which is a recipe for tribal warfare which we’re already in which is not a good place to be or a sustainable place to be. What we’ve got now is not working at all. Time for the Woke left to wake up to this fact.
“Immigrant Asks Vance: Why Did You Sell Us a Dream…Now Say We Have Too Many, Will Take Them Out?” (9 min)
My hope is that AI advances will refocus our attention and alter our present trajectory. Hope springs eternal. We’ll soon see about that. The best of times. The worst of times.
This essay prompted me to write a long reply in Project Save the World's Substack: "Let's Get Over Privacy." I'm not sure how to share things this way; I'll paste part of it here, but you can see it here: https://projectsavetheworld.substack.com/p/lets-get-over-privacy
– Metta Spencer
*******
Calera, Oklahoma had a population of 300 when I was born there in 1931. I lived there twelve years, thus qualifying to speak from experience about the lack of privacy in villages, compared to cities. But we never called our town a “village.” That would have been like calling the local farmers “peasants.”
Everyone was plainspoken. I don’t think I ever heard anyone mention “privacy.” We couldn’t have kept anything secret if we’d tried, and nobody apparently wanted to. But it was a friendly, sane community. Only one woman had a history of mental illness. There were no drunks or criminals. (Today all my friends have at least one member of their family with Alzheimers, Aspergers, autism, or addiction.) I miss that openness, which I think kept us normal. Here I want to make the case for transparency, frankness, even radical honesty.
Privacy is not always a benefit and urban dwellers do not always practice it. Thank heavens, openness can flourish in cities too when that’s what people prefer. A culture can change its norms about secrecy quickly.
During the 1970s I did a lot of encounter grouping – always in cities – and my co-workers and neighbors expressed their feelings and opinions in everyday interactions far more than today. It was safe to talk about major problems in groups because we were more forgiving then.
I remember once when the therapist in a group asked a woman in the circle whether she had killed her mother. She replied that she wasn’t sure. Someone else had given her mother an injection after she did, but she may have administered the real lethal dose. She was suffering and we all felt for her. She didn’t need secrecy, she needed support – and she had ours.
The best epiphany I ever had in my life was after spending a day in an est gathering in Manhattan with 5,000 people who were talking with the trainer about their issues. I could see my problem in what another woman said and later that night I recognized my own lifelong error and knew that I’d never have another depression. I haven’t. I also discovered that I loved 5,000 strangers. That was an immensely important recognition – that you can truly love any number of people, whether you know them or even like them. I wouldn’t have discovered that if those people had protected their privacy.
It is safe to be truthful when you’re talking to kind persons. I was in another est meeting that showed a film about sex – how snakes do it, how old crippled people do it, etc – and afterward the trainer said that if we’d had sex with a relative, please stand up. About 10 percent of the room stood. Who has had sex with an animal? Stand up. (Another 10 or 15 percent.) Who has ever accepted money for sex? (About 20 percent of the women stood.) By the end of his long list, almost everyone had stood up once or more about something.
So, what were the repercussions? None, apparently. Except that at breakfast, one man still appeared stunned because his wife had stood up about accepting money. He hadn’t known before. My conclusion: If people intend to empathize with you, you’re safe telling the truth.
So why, within the past two decades, has privacy come to be considered sacred? I waste hours every week trying to find people’s contact information. Sometimes I need a phone number to invite someone to a meeting or confirm a quotation for publication. Even public figures have become unreachable. They hide their emails and phone numbers and provide write-back boxes that never get answered. Meanwhile, the spammers find me easily.
We conceal ourselves because we think secrecy keeps us safe. I won’t tell you any of my passwords here. But secrecy also keeps us apart.
Digital culture has turned privacy into a kind of moral panic. The villains of the story are hackers, advertisers, and authoritarian states — and yes, all of those exist. But the answer cannot be permanent isolation. A culture of concealment doesn’t stop bad actors; it mostly punishes good people. Privacy walls make it harder to cooperate. Crooks don’t respect your boundaries; they tunnel through them. But decent people hesitate to knock. The result is a civilization of fortresses where only the invaders roam freely.
I am proposing what I call ‘Radical Trust’. It begins with a simple faith in human decency: that if we risk telling the truth about ourselves — even our faults — others will usually meet us with generosity, not scorn.
We hide our mistakes, our griefs, our grudges. We fear judgment more than deception. Yet every honest conversation proves the opposite: once someone admits imperfection, we exhale and like them better. Authenticity breeds affection.
Privacy was meant to protect dignity, but too often it protects pride. If we could admit our failings and doubts openly, our relationships — and our politics — would be more forgiving. We could restore relationships built on candor instead of formal restraint. Radical Trust isn’t surveillance.It’s voluntary transparency born of goodwill — the courage to be known. Its ethics is simple: Be findable. Be fallible. Be forgiving.
Every time we make ourselves unfindable, we increase the friction of collective life. A researcher can’t collaborate; a journalist can’t fact-check; a neighbor can’t help. We waste precious time reinventing connections that secrecy destroyed. The irony is that digital technology, designed to connect us, has made us wary of connection.
A healthy democracy depends on transparency that flows in every direction — among citizens as well as institutions. If we design systems that keep us hidden, we will never learn to trust one another enough to deliberate together. Openness, not secrecy, is the real foundation of pluralism. Still, openness will fail if we weaponize confession. For Radical Trust to work, society must pair transparency with compassion. When someone admits a mistake, the proper response is gratitude, not punishment. We must learn to say, “I was wrong” and hear, “That’s all right.”
No democracy can survive perpetual outrage. We can’t deliberate when every past error becomes a scarlet letter. The courage to tell the truth requires the promise of forgiveness.
Paradoxically, openness is safer than secrecy. A visible world is one where lies die quickly and help arrives faster. When people can reach you, they can also warn you, support you, or defend you. The greatest shield against exploitation is not privacy but community.
Imagine a culture where being reachable is a badge of honor, not a risk; where we give our real names, share our contact information, and speak frankly about our flaws; where forgiveness is fashionable and secrecy unfashionable.
Yes, we will still need passwords and locks. But emotionally and socially, we need the opposite: open hearts and open doors. So, here is the small revolution I propose:
* Post your phone number and email address. (Just delete the spam quickly.)
* Answer most strangers kindly. (But feel free to yell at crooks.)
The relative decline in antisemitism, especially in the US, was also a post war anomaly, and antisemitism remains a feature of village life everywhere, including on the Internet.
Great essay. A context I hold is that "there is a price for everything, and you always pay." No human technological advancement comes without cost. Which should be obvious, but we (maybe naturally) tend to focus on the glittering promise more than the potential costs. The whole idea that every human technology from flint tools to social media is "progress" and "advancement" is so entrenched. The truth is, there are always both real advantages and real downsides, as you point out so well regarding urbanization vs. village life.
I have always imaged that the longing for individual liberty has been in the hearts of some humans of all ages. Who was that crazy woman who wanted to do something different, something innovative? Who was that man who refused some time-honored ritual? How did these outliers plant cultural seeds that led to changes like urbanization, even as they may have been killed or ostracized? As you write, only with urbanization that gradually developed in human societies could that freedom really be explored by the people who wanted to explore it. And yet, here we are back in the awful cages, but without the benefits of the village!
What were the downsides to flint tools?
I'm speaking generally about human technology (and I'm not an anthropologist or expert in any way, so maybe someone else could comment). All I mean is that there were tradeoffs, as there always are in evolution, whether physical or cultural. Each step in human technological achievement led humans to be more successful in dominating the planet. That's just what happened, with some happy results and some not so happy. For humans as well as other species. I'm certainly not saying tool making or social media "shouldn't" have happened, just that there are usually downsides to every new technology meant to improve our lives. Each step in human early societies led towards the invention of agriculture, to storing food, eating less of a diverse diet. Tools let to agriculture, which (from what I have read) most definitely had its downsides to our health, even as it helped us dominate and procreate even more successfully. Teeth became crooked, common digestive problems began as humans foraged less. Farmers had to work longer hours than hunter gatherers. So "better" is always accompanied by "worse" in some ways!
No i got ya, i knew what you meant. And i wasnt using flint tools as a metaphor for all technology. I was just struggling to come up with any downsides to stone tools.
Maybe it looked different to the people at the time. Perhaps they debated about whether or not they should adopt these new "tools", maybe they worried about degradation to their society. Or more likely they complained after the fact, bc when do humans ever stop to consider the consequences? We seem to have a compulsion to take up any new anything that promises "easier" or "better", and only later do we see more clearly.
Ive got no problem saying social media shouldnt have happened. But should is never the question, and once invented there was no way it wasnt going to be embraced. Just another in the many steps humans have taken leading us to... wherever.
I don't know about stone tools, but when bronze came along, it put a lot of "chippers" out of work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ
Great video!... Everyday we can learn something new .. At least is how do say it in spanish :)
I loved that clip, perfect! 😂
Vulnerability in terms of requiring access to the source. Flint us not as readily available as wood and bone and if the source is coveted by a neighbouring band, mimetic violence ensues or must be resolved. Might also restrict how far from a, source of flint or chert is willing or able to move to retain access
They ushered in an entirely new concept among our distant ancestors - the concept that we could make and use tools to manipulate our environment to suit our own needs, and as our innovative brains made more effective and more environmentally altering tools, have increasingly done so with utter disregard for the rest of life on earth, all too often including elements of our own.
Of course the original ’tools’ was built in - our expanding brain and our opposable thumb, without which few of any other tools are possible.
One only has to look at those tools that entirely altered our existence - the flint knife, the digging stick and the plow, the written word, the printing press, the steam engine, the computer. Each one ushered an entirely new era in human history, each one advanced our existence to a new plane, and each one was a Damoclean sword.
We’ve now invented two tools that have the capacity to alter our existence beyond comprehension - genetic engineering and atomic power (I’ve left out AI because that properly belongs in the computer category).
The problem is that while we have advanced our technological potential almost beyond belief, we ourselves are in most essential ways the same creature who first snapped a flint, and that may prove to be our undoing.
Hm idk.. seems like plenty of peoples were using stone tools *and* living in balance with their environment. In fact, they did so for many thousands of years.
But something changed a few thousand years ago. Ofc an obvious answer is agriculture, but theres some interesting theories challenging that scenario. Regardless, idt i can just jump to the assumption that the adoption of primitive tools was simply the first step on a road leading to here and now. Its too fatalistic for my taste
And i cant agree with your last sentences. I think its actually the opposite. Whatever changed for us a few thousand years ago, it altered us and made us different than those who came before.
(I jacked most of this from james c scotts against the grain, which challenges this linear progression narrative. Its a good read)
"i can just jump to the assumption that the adoption of primitive tools was simply the first step on a road leading to here and now. Its too fatalistic for my taste”
I assume you meant that you ‘can’t’ just jump.
I’d suggest you ask the 18 million who died in WWI of the tens of millions in WWII or those who are still dying in the Middle East and Sudan and a number of other places around the world even as we speak. Or perhaps you could ask those in China, North Korea, Russia and other places about the technology which not only enables autocratic states to keep track of every aspect of their lives (a part of Mr Mounk’s thinking here) but also provides them with the military and economic power to oppress them.
Yes, there were thousands of years of ‘peaceful co-existence' between human beings the world they inhabited, largely because we had not yet developed the technological ability to substantially alter that environment. But the acceleration in technology brought about by the invention of writing, which gave us the capacity to store knowledge in a way that memory could not, and the Agricultural Revolution that began to geometrically increase human population (and at the same time began to degrade our physical health and to increase the effects of disease in large, close living urban populations) which began in the Ancient Near East and in comparative terms rapidly spread to the rest of the world took only five thousand years to bring us to our present state in which our industrial activity threatens our environment in ways many of us are happily ignoring and our military capacity which threatens all life on earth.
And that’s not to mention the effect we've already had on the rest of life on earth.
But the inherent traits which we brought with us across the boundary between our primitive ancestors and ourselves - primarily aggression and territoriality have also helped immensely in this progression.
Were you around and aware in October of 1962 when we came perilously close to a nuclear war (even the pale imitation of what we could do today)? I was seventeen, and I promise you I’ve never since been so terrified. One would have thought that lesson would have made us think far more carefully about our choices, but the sabers are being rattled across the world again in a way they have not been since then.
No human being, however wise, should have at his fingertips that kind of capacity, particularly given the very brief amount of time he or she would have to make a decision that could affect the entire world before many of us were even aware of the need to make it.
Once upon a time people would say different places have different paces.
It seems we are now all tethered by the same electric gangline.
Great stuff. I still remember my first real city-life experience, when at 16 I left my "village" for Tours, France to study for several months. I knew then I would always live in a big city. I ended up in NYC for 12 years, yet I certainly felt this happening, along with similarly dystopian consequences, during my last years there.
Social media ruined social life, and I don't know if we can come back from that now that the genie is out of the bottle.
Interesting how social media can create “strict cages of norms” while at the same time seemingly grant people the opportunity and license to be their worst selves!
https://open.substack.com/pub/persuasion1/p/its-the-internet-stupid?r=1o4ugs&utm_medium=ios
Since you mentioned discipline and punish, public punishments in the town square were historically ubiquitous, a moment of ostracism that also imbued the community with solidarity and granted the individual some form of catharsis. This form of punishment seemed both necessary and popular for a enclosed community. Despite liberalism’s great crusade against inhumane punishments demeaning human dignity, we’ve moved this online instead, and I dunno if we can ever escape this seemingly inevitable aspect of the human condition
Excellent and thoughtful argument, Yascha. I suspect that we find ourselves at the intersection of two major arcs. The first might be summarized as the thrust of human social evolution from the cave to the village to the city and exurbs. The second is the profound, breathtaking explosion of technological and consumerist evolution beginning in and after WWII. With its peculiar gifts of natural resources and geography (both its relative isolation and its vast Lebensraum) it’s no surprise that the US would find itself as a focus and fulcrum of change as these arcs collided. So here we stand—thousands of years of human experiments in coexistence with each other and holding in our hands the machine that can be any machine, finding ourselves able to touch the entire world at our whim. In our characteristically myopic perspective, most of us see only the immediate past and future and think we have become as princes and kings. But the longer view tells another story: that most of mankind has only recently begun to pull itself from from the trees and caves, through serfdom and servitude and not a little destruction,, by slowly discovering the physics and science that gave rise to us. Regrettably, along the way we have invented tools for our self immolation as well as self advancement. Time will tell whether we have evolved in wisdom sufficiently to thrive or whether our primate fears will lead us to terminate the human experiment. From this vantage, one might describe our present fascination with and impulse to social criticism and prescription as just one more unique intersection along these arcs. Whether we use our gifts to advance or destroy ourselves continues to engage us.
An enjoyable read, thank you. We need to look deeply into our history and culture now and again. The current panopticon of politics will not solve much of anything.
What an enlightening essay. Food for thought. Thanks.
This is a fantastic, profound essay. I am hoping that it becomes part of a book.
Fascinating reading .. In your artfully crafted and wise essay you reflected and so capably presented thoughts, feelings, anxieties of many a city dweller carried for quite some time .
One note - at the risk of being fastidious - "the horrors of Nazism", and "the disfunction of communism" somewhat understates horrors that communism brought to the world, at least as measured by the sheer amount of people in misery or dead as a result .
You state: "a significant share of citizens now has deep skepticism about our political system." Is it truly skepticism about the underlying theory of the system or is it skepticism born of disappointment regarding the management of the system by it's so called "leaders"? My view is the latter. The leadership of the "western democracies" over the late several decades has been abysmal IMHO. And the future seems equally fraught. Cheers...
This is an excellent historical perspective on how humans have transformed in a relatively short time though I disagree with some of it, such as “The content of the norms to which you are subject are ultimately arbitrary…” and “we all live in a village now … a digital village…” I don’t live in that fiction.
I believe the content of our norms has become completely shaped by money. Though money’s been around forever, it’s only when industrialized economies required a mass consumer culture for marketing and employment that money became the the primary shaper of culture and personal meaning (mostly unacknowledged).
The structure of urban culture and economics of our time results in people having little time or attention for literature and philosophy that explores and critiques how values have degraded to the point of empowering urban fascists like Donald Trump. There’s no one like T. S. Eliot creating a work like The Waste Land to speak to the soul about the corruption of values. Soul is too profound for most people to even contemplate much less cultivate.
Interesting essay, but I disagree with your sweeping generalization about the nature of modern cities: You write: “We all live in a village now. But it is a digital village, a bizarro version of the original, hypercharged with the easy judgments and harsh punishments of rural life, and painfully devoid of its joys.”
Yascha, where do you live?
Recently, I’ve taken up residence in Sunnyside, Queens and have been pleasantly surprised by how friendly people are. It’s a gentle, settled neighborhood of astonishing ethnic diversity, and a reminder that New York is made up of many thousands of distinct neighborhoods and lifestyles.
For years our family have enjoyed spending days in a small cottage on the Shoreline in Connecticut. In true Yankee fashion, neighbors are there for neighbors. But they don’t pry into private lives, shame or judge.
… And the Coldplay couple. They were high-flying executives. I don’t think that a story about a random couple in the 99% would blow up on social media.
The problem isn’t social media. The problem is the Woke left. We now exist in entirely different realities, have become incomprehensible to each other and can no longer communicate. We always just talk past each other. Where is the common ground in such an infinitely wide divide? There obviously is none. This is an impossible situation. Does this mean we are doomed to a devastating civil war? Not necessarily. My hope is that AI advances will refocus our attention and alter our present trajectory. Hope springs eternal. We’ll soon see about that. The best of times. The worst of times.
Gov Pritzker supports Mayor Brandon Johnson who says “law enforcement is a sickness.” Where are the democrats who object to this, and I mean even in the general public, not just in the Democratic Party and their media?
Mayor Brandon Johnson sparks outrage after saying “law enforcement is a sickness.” (3 min)
CBS Chicago. Sept 19, 2025
https://youtu.be/roMm2sn2MfI?si=N4S9XWI7aA_UJ7Xa
Democrats consider meritocracy racist since it has a “disparate impact” on blacks and are replacing it with equity aka race based equal outcomes. Where are the democrats who object to this, and I mean even in the general public, not just in the Democratic Party and their media?
Bill Maher on Kamala Harris and Chicago public schools.
“Chicago Teachers Union: Tests are racist.” (2 min)
Illinois Policy. Oct 28, 2024
https://youtu.be/xp1DsUDCj1Q?si=cNST9rE_WvM_5qRw
Ive always thought that woke was a product of social media. At least, i dont see how it wouldve gained the traction it did without sm. And i think the same could be said of the maga right. With both, social media amplified what started as reasonable ideas into outrageous bullshit that lost their grounding in reason.
And as you pointed out, we really have lost the ability to talk to each other. I see this as a direct result of social media. No longer do we have to consider other peoples ideas and views, we can just cozy up in our preferred echo chamber, which creates the amplifying feedback loop, which in turn requires more and more extreme views to gain recognition. Reasonable discourse makes for boring memes.
I also place a fair chunk of the blame on the scrolling feed. That made social media highly addictive, and as any addict of anything can tell you, whatever it is that youre addicted to becomes the centerpiece of ones life, with an overwhelming need for *more*.
Edit: not that anyones reading days old articles, but heres ezra klein, published this morning, basically saying the same thing.. "The conversations pulsing across these platforms are shaped not by civic values but by whatever proves to keep people scrolling: Nuanced opinions are compressed into viral slogans; attention collects around the loudest and most controversial voices; algorithms love conflict, inspiration, outrage and anger. Everything is always turned up to 11"
“I see this as a direct result of social media.”
Some of my favorites I follow online are John Mearsheimer, Glenn Greenwald, Lena Petrova, Kim Iversen and Tucker. I’ve learned a lot that I would not have known about things like Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, the CIA, Israel and many other things. I live on the northwest side of Chicago but without social media I’d miss a lot about what’s happening in Chicago plus I learn a lot about so many other areas like health, financial and economic issues, geopolitics and so many other things.
I voted for Trump 3 times and had high hopes for him but now consider him a disaster who’s turned the world against America and has ignored and even reversed most of his campaign promises such as America First, no more war, the Epstein files, transparency and restoring the rule of law. Would Kamala have been better? Fat chance. She would have re-opened the southern border, re-started the war on meritocracy which was being replaced with equity aka race based equal outcomes, and made it a top priority to put Trump in prison and to grind his supporters like me into the dirt. I basically totally distrust the democrats. No society so devoid of trust and so full of hate can survive as a nation. America has already ceased to exist as a country internally which is why it’s so rapidly unraveling externally. God only knows where we’ll all end up.
The woke left, Seva?! Really???
Are you sure you're on the "Right" platform dear...🤔
Outstandingly good answer by JD Vance. Democrats say diversity is our strength. Not true. Our strength was having a common identity as Americans not as different groups where some are classified as oppressors and some as oppressed which is a recipe for tribal warfare which we’re already in which is not a good place to be or a sustainable place to be. What we’ve got now is not working at all. Time for the Woke left to wake up to this fact.
“Immigrant Asks Vance: Why Did You Sell Us a Dream…Now Say We Have Too Many, Will Take Them Out?” (9 min)
NTD. Oct 30, 2025
https://youtu.be/egkt4CMaez4?si=lT2gjxI7bOK2WC8l
I desperately want to preserve democracy. I believe in compassion, cot cruelty
My hope is that AI advances will refocus our attention and alter our present trajectory. Hope springs eternal. We’ll soon see about that. The best of times. The worst of times.
This essay prompted me to write a long reply in Project Save the World's Substack: "Let's Get Over Privacy." I'm not sure how to share things this way; I'll paste part of it here, but you can see it here: https://projectsavetheworld.substack.com/p/lets-get-over-privacy
– Metta Spencer
*******
Calera, Oklahoma had a population of 300 when I was born there in 1931. I lived there twelve years, thus qualifying to speak from experience about the lack of privacy in villages, compared to cities. But we never called our town a “village.” That would have been like calling the local farmers “peasants.”
Everyone was plainspoken. I don’t think I ever heard anyone mention “privacy.” We couldn’t have kept anything secret if we’d tried, and nobody apparently wanted to. But it was a friendly, sane community. Only one woman had a history of mental illness. There were no drunks or criminals. (Today all my friends have at least one member of their family with Alzheimers, Aspergers, autism, or addiction.) I miss that openness, which I think kept us normal. Here I want to make the case for transparency, frankness, even radical honesty.
Privacy is not always a benefit and urban dwellers do not always practice it. Thank heavens, openness can flourish in cities too when that’s what people prefer. A culture can change its norms about secrecy quickly.
During the 1970s I did a lot of encounter grouping – always in cities – and my co-workers and neighbors expressed their feelings and opinions in everyday interactions far more than today. It was safe to talk about major problems in groups because we were more forgiving then.
I remember once when the therapist in a group asked a woman in the circle whether she had killed her mother. She replied that she wasn’t sure. Someone else had given her mother an injection after she did, but she may have administered the real lethal dose. She was suffering and we all felt for her. She didn’t need secrecy, she needed support – and she had ours.
The best epiphany I ever had in my life was after spending a day in an est gathering in Manhattan with 5,000 people who were talking with the trainer about their issues. I could see my problem in what another woman said and later that night I recognized my own lifelong error and knew that I’d never have another depression. I haven’t. I also discovered that I loved 5,000 strangers. That was an immensely important recognition – that you can truly love any number of people, whether you know them or even like them. I wouldn’t have discovered that if those people had protected their privacy.
It is safe to be truthful when you’re talking to kind persons. I was in another est meeting that showed a film about sex – how snakes do it, how old crippled people do it, etc – and afterward the trainer said that if we’d had sex with a relative, please stand up. About 10 percent of the room stood. Who has had sex with an animal? Stand up. (Another 10 or 15 percent.) Who has ever accepted money for sex? (About 20 percent of the women stood.) By the end of his long list, almost everyone had stood up once or more about something.
So, what were the repercussions? None, apparently. Except that at breakfast, one man still appeared stunned because his wife had stood up about accepting money. He hadn’t known before. My conclusion: If people intend to empathize with you, you’re safe telling the truth.
So why, within the past two decades, has privacy come to be considered sacred? I waste hours every week trying to find people’s contact information. Sometimes I need a phone number to invite someone to a meeting or confirm a quotation for publication. Even public figures have become unreachable. They hide their emails and phone numbers and provide write-back boxes that never get answered. Meanwhile, the spammers find me easily.
We conceal ourselves because we think secrecy keeps us safe. I won’t tell you any of my passwords here. But secrecy also keeps us apart.
Digital culture has turned privacy into a kind of moral panic. The villains of the story are hackers, advertisers, and authoritarian states — and yes, all of those exist. But the answer cannot be permanent isolation. A culture of concealment doesn’t stop bad actors; it mostly punishes good people. Privacy walls make it harder to cooperate. Crooks don’t respect your boundaries; they tunnel through them. But decent people hesitate to knock. The result is a civilization of fortresses where only the invaders roam freely.
I am proposing what I call ‘Radical Trust’. It begins with a simple faith in human decency: that if we risk telling the truth about ourselves — even our faults — others will usually meet us with generosity, not scorn.
We hide our mistakes, our griefs, our grudges. We fear judgment more than deception. Yet every honest conversation proves the opposite: once someone admits imperfection, we exhale and like them better. Authenticity breeds affection.
Privacy was meant to protect dignity, but too often it protects pride. If we could admit our failings and doubts openly, our relationships — and our politics — would be more forgiving. We could restore relationships built on candor instead of formal restraint. Radical Trust isn’t surveillance.It’s voluntary transparency born of goodwill — the courage to be known. Its ethics is simple: Be findable. Be fallible. Be forgiving.
Every time we make ourselves unfindable, we increase the friction of collective life. A researcher can’t collaborate; a journalist can’t fact-check; a neighbor can’t help. We waste precious time reinventing connections that secrecy destroyed. The irony is that digital technology, designed to connect us, has made us wary of connection.
A healthy democracy depends on transparency that flows in every direction — among citizens as well as institutions. If we design systems that keep us hidden, we will never learn to trust one another enough to deliberate together. Openness, not secrecy, is the real foundation of pluralism. Still, openness will fail if we weaponize confession. For Radical Trust to work, society must pair transparency with compassion. When someone admits a mistake, the proper response is gratitude, not punishment. We must learn to say, “I was wrong” and hear, “That’s all right.”
No democracy can survive perpetual outrage. We can’t deliberate when every past error becomes a scarlet letter. The courage to tell the truth requires the promise of forgiveness.
Paradoxically, openness is safer than secrecy. A visible world is one where lies die quickly and help arrives faster. When people can reach you, they can also warn you, support you, or defend you. The greatest shield against exploitation is not privacy but community.
Imagine a culture where being reachable is a badge of honor, not a risk; where we give our real names, share our contact information, and speak frankly about our flaws; where forgiveness is fashionable and secrecy unfashionable.
Yes, we will still need passwords and locks. But emotionally and socially, we need the opposite: open hearts and open doors. So, here is the small revolution I propose:
* Post your phone number and email address. (Just delete the spam quickly.)
* Answer most strangers kindly. (But feel free to yell at crooks.)
* Confess small faults before they fester.
* Forgive faster.
* Choose trust as your default setting.
The relative decline in antisemitism, especially in the US, was also a post war anomaly, and antisemitism remains a feature of village life everywhere, including on the Internet.