Wildfires are terrifying. They are especially gobsmackingly horrible when you add in hurricane-style winds. I will never forget the day of the Marshall Fire when my daughter stepped out of the car and literally blew down the street, forcing us to race after her and catch her. In those environments, it’s easy to see how a wildfire can spread so fast and furious. My heart continues to go out to all in Los Angeles who are still navigating the immediate aftermath of this. We in Boulder know that it’ll take a long time to recover – and that even after you rebuild your house, you will still shudder when the wind is strong.
As truly horrible and horrifying as wildfires are, there are people out there who make a big difference in putting a stop to them. These are the organized firefighters on the front line and in the air as well as the individuals who do the best that they can to prevent one structure from burning down. Their work is made possible through resources and community infrastructure, like access to water. But what makes them so inspiring is their will to put their bodies on the line to stop the spread of fire.
Most firefighters do not go at it alone. They work to ensure that they have accurate information so that they can make strategic choices about where to invest in building the fire line. They work as a team, constantly in communication as they divide the work and tackle the small issues to tackle the bigger one.
No firefighter wants to lose a structure, let alone a human life. But when they’re working, they’re focused first on containment. Cuz worse than losing a structure is allowing the fire to spread.
Even a the firefighters are still working a fire, emergency management services are kicking in to support those in need. While there are material needs upfront, many of the deep needs that are provided center on mental health. There is shock and trauma in every direction – especially for those who have lost their homes or loved ones. And unlike other kinds of trauma, this kind of trauma can’t be solved by just having someone find strength in their home because their home is gone.
Sometimes metaphors are helpful as anchors to ground us when we’re doing the work. As I speak to people trying to navigate the various dimensions of what’s unfolding all around us politically, I keep returning to the metaphor of a firefighter tackling a wildfire amidst 80mph winds. We need some people to focus on building the fire line. Others need to tend to those in trauma. Others need to ensure that the communication lines are open and clear. Others need to start investigating the causes of the fire to prevent future fires. And still others are out there working on saving that one house. All of this is important work. In short order, we’re also going to need those who can assess the damage, those who can see what environmental toxins were left behind, are those going to help rebuild.
As people start to come to terms with the shock-from-the-distance of seeing the wildfire play out on nightly TV, it’s now time to figure out which role in this fire do you want to play? If you are not yourself a firefighter, what support can you offer to those who are? How do you prepare to serve in the rebuilding process?
Democracy cannot and should never be taken for granted. It is a struggle. We must collectively work to achieve democracy, not expect it to happen to us. The fires are burning hot right now. The wind is often too fierce to send out firefighters in certain quarters. But that doesn’t mean we can’t prepare. And that doesn’t mean we can’t start imagining what rebuilding might look like.
After watching countless members of the public from across the political spectrum demean and dismiss mission-driven civil servants, I’m dreaming of a future where people understand and appreciate the administrative state and want to step in to help rebuild it. I’m dreaming of a future where our tryst with hate is recognized as the devil’s work. I’m dreaming of a future where we all recognize that we cannot address our global challenges through nationalism. What dreams are you hoping to manifest on the other side of this wildfire?
Many of us are aghast at the unprecedented dismantlement of the US administrative state. Mass terminations. Website erasure. Removal of watchdogs. Unchecked access to the treasury. All around me, people are trying to connect what’s happening to historical events. Is this fascism? A hostile corporate takeover? A coup? People want a frame both to understand what’s happening and grapple with what’s coming. Most of the people I know are also struggling to figure out where they can take action.
I’ve spent the bulk of my life tracking different dynamics in the tech industry. And, for the last decade, I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside federal civil servants and observing their commitment to American democracy. So as I watch this unfold, a few frames keep coming to mind. Frames that explain both the moment and how we got here. These are not frames that provide me with answers for the future, but perhaps they offer insights that others might be able to build on.
Jenga Politics.
Think about the wooden puzzle known as Jenga, where a tower is made out of criss-crossed wooden blocks. Players are asked to take out pieces of the wooden puzzle from the structure and then place their piece on top, increasing the pressure of gravity on the structure. The goal of the game is get your opponent to take the blame for making the entire system fall.
For years now, this has been my description of the administrative state as we’ve known it. Conservatives primarily take pieces out of the tower while liberals primarily add new blocks to the top. But all have a habit of removing blocks and adding pressures in certain circumstances. Meanwhile, both well-intended advocates and malfeasant ones mess with the blocks along the way.
The role of the civil servants play in the game of Jenga Politics has been to run around with duct tape in an exhausting effort to try to repair the tower before it all topples over. These “deep state” actors are viewed negatively by nearly everyone else by simply trying to keep the tower intact. In response, civil servants have been increasingly handicapped in what they can do to repair the tower. But like masochists, these mission-driven bureuacrats keep trying anyway – even as a range of well-intended and malfeasant actors attempt to make their work impossible. And, as with any system increasingly made of duct tape, their actions keep opening up new vulnerabilities into the system, new sites of potential exploitation. But that’s the point of this game. The mal-intended might not have designed the vulnerabilities, but they’ve studied the tower long enough that they know how to exploit them.
We’ve been playing Jenga Politics for a long time now. Austerity politics and outsourcing are mechanisms to take the blocks out. Administrative burdens and bureaucratic HR requirements have been new blocks placed on top. Meanwhile, lawsuits and weaponized FOIAs have been types of handicaps placed on civil servants – both by well-intended actors and those with ill intent. All have been collectively creating the conditions for a “normal accident,” where one wrong pull can topple the whole thing.
I’ve been anxious of this configuration for years now, but I always assumed that the wrecking ball move would not be so obvious. And yet, here we are. The civil servants aren’t just being handicapped – they’re being excised. Multiple forces are pulling out blocks as fast as they can, happy to watch the whole thing topple. And those who are accustomed to trying to “fix” things by putting pressure on top are at a complete loss of what to do.
My only hope at this point is that the blocks still exist when we get to the other side of this so that a new tower can be built. In reality, I’m concerned that we’re about to watch as kindling is brought in to ensure that the existing blocks are turned into ash.
Dismantlement, Reverse Hockey Stick Style.
The tech industry loves hockey sticks. Late stage capitalism is not simply about linear growth, but exponential growth. Faster, faster, faster. After all, financialized instruments depend on return-on-investment, not just profit. And so we’ve seen countless businesses drive towards sharper and sharper hockey sticks in pursuit of their unicorn dreams. Social media companies that want eyeballs obsess over hockey stick growth in views. Those that want to disrupt an existing business also seek exponential user growth, but they achieve this by purposefully forgoing their profits to capture the market before ratcheting up the costs once their competitors are dead.
For all of the attention paid to the growth curves in these systems, too little attention has been paid to the curves at the start of collapse. These too are often hockey sticks, but in the reverse. When MySpace came undone, the collapse was slow until it was explosive. The economic collapse tends to occur much later than the collapses of trust, interest, and user engagement. And many companies can milk out profit long after the collapse took place, usually by positioning themselves in a particular structural position or through a particular deal. Then they can live on with a much smaller userbase so as to have a long and slow death unless they innovate their way out. Think about Yahoo! or Firefox. They can also persist through lock-in, as grouchy users fail to leave the system because the cost to leaving is just too high.
The end can also be elongated through what we might call corruption. Twitter had been experiencing a long, slow decline for years before Elon Musk took over the company. His actions sped up the collapse, as though he was aiming for failure. As users and advertisers rushed out of the platform, Musk took to blaming everyone but himself. And then he started suing anyone he could think of. Now it appears that he’s gone one step further by making his platform the only place to ask questions and learn about certain kinds of government updates. No matter than he’s banned many journalists from using the site. This takes “lock-in” to the next level.
In the tech context, we see a lot of moves to avoid dismantlement. But tech logics long ago converged with the logics of one segment of the financial sector. The tech industry used to be afraid of the extractive logics of hedge funds and private equity. This is why people like Mark Zuckerberg have a controlling interest in their companies. Tech titans have learned the lessons of financiers and put them to use. Hedge funds and private equity aren’t interested in the underlying organization, innovations, customer bases, or value to society. They’re interested in extracting as much value as possible from a particular configuration. They say that they’re maximizing efficiency, but what they’re really doing is reverse hockey stick dismantlement.
This is Arson.
Both Democrats and Republicans have long loathed the administrative state. For almost a century, conservatives have been crystal clear that they want to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. Yet, liberals have also been caught up in a spiral of making government more “efficient” while labeling civil servants as lazy, stupid, or both. Lyndon Johnson brought in the economists. Bill Clinton outsourced. Barack Obama sprinkled elite do-gooders all across the federal government. Whenever it was their turn, Republicans pushed and squeezed civil servants into a corner. Both added administrative burdens, not just to achieve their policies but to make life worse for civil servants. No politician has truly appreciated civil servants in recent decades, even as those individuals wake up every day and try to keep the administrative state alive.
Given this, I shouldn’t be surprised that the Democrats are doing almost nothing to protect the civil servants as the heart of the administrative state right now. But I am none-the-less horrified by some of the rhetoric I hear in some quarters. One frame is particularly disturbing to me, especially on the heels of the nightmare in Los Angeles. I am stunned that anyone can argue that this is a healthy fire that will make way for new growth. This is not brush burning. This is arson.
The administrative state was in a precarious place after the first Trump Administration. As much as I love many people who went into the Biden Administration to “build back better,” I was repeatedly frustrated with friends who rejected my pleas to focus on improving the underlying infrastructure. Over and over, I was told that the Administration could not prioritize the administrative state because so much else was needed. Fixing the administrative state would need to wait. And then I was told that all was solved. There were executive orders and changes to OPM and OMB. I shook my head, unconvinced but also unable to convince anyone that the tower was toppling. As I was cut out of conversations, I knew that I had failed to be pursuasive. And so I just had to cross my fingers.
But here we are. The prioritized projects of the last Administration were easily dismantled. And the precarious structure of the administrative state is now even more on the brink. I was hoping that there would be enough resilience in the system to withstand the first tsunami. As I watched horrible cruel policies roll out, I watched as civil servants gritted their teeth and focused on protecting the systems they devoted their lives to ensuring could help the American people. And then the first true breech happened.
Amidst all of the news of all of the horrible actions of this Administration, it’s hard to explain the significance of political appointees accessing the Treasury’s systems and locking out civil servants. Systems like this are the protected jewels of the Jenga tower, the ones that civil servants obsess over protecting regardless of who is in power. They are like the key node in a social media network, after which the decline spirals out of whack. Many journalists recognized this, breaking the news at the top of their respective outlets. The Trump Administration also realized this, quickly announcing gobsmacking tariffs to shift the media’s attention. After all, the public is more interested in tariffs (and ICE) than esoteric technical systems that keep the government functioning. But the ashen look on the faces of civil servants I know said it all. It has been a hard two weeks for them, but, regardless of the legal dynamics, turning over access to the core systems at the heart of an administrative state to a wrecking ball is really really bad.
It’s All One Big Game.
Trump is all about spectacle. But all around him are gamers. And not just any gamers – gamers who are happy to destroy their opponents at any costs, regardless of the societal consequences. Gamers who see such destruction as a source of their power, rooted in their visions of masculinity. Gaming has long been entangled with masculinity, even before there were video games. Sports, gambling, and the stock market are all gaming practices known for expressions of masculinity. Gaming in the context of computing offered an alternative form of masculinity, one that was deeply empowering to so many geeks.
Bannon is an old skool gamer. And Musk never stops reminding us of his passion for gaming. But these guys aren’t just any gamers. They’re trolls who sharpened their claws during #GamerGate. Their version of gaming took on a toxic and abusive form long ago, one seeped in aggression and hate. The men’s rights movement wasn’t simply about allowing men to feel comfortable in their own identities; it was about justifying the oppression and abuse of anyone who dared to suggest that other lives might be valuable. It didn’t take long for a coalition to form around those invested in claiming power through oppression, justified by grievance. But within this ecosystem, the gamers are gonna game.
War, politics, and financial markets are often viewed as games that attract all sorts of problematic behavior. The very idea of a society is to create rules and guardrails, checks and balances. But gaming logic has always been about pushing those edges, exploiting the gaps, and finding the secret passageways. For decades, we’ve struggled to contain war mongers, corrupt politicians, and fraudulent scammers, although we’ve had mixed success. But this crew of gamers is playing a different game. And so we are going to need a whole new strategy for containing their destructive tendencies. In their minds, we’re the mob boss that must be defeated. We aren’t going to change this configuration by simply trying to give the mob boss more weapons. Instead, what’s our next move?
To make matters more complicated, there’s not just one game at play right now. Different actors in this melange are playing at different games. There are divergent ideas of what the “win” state is. And this has led people to be very confused about what’s happening. Is this about financial gain? Is this about power? Is this about a particular vision of the future? Or is this just downright fuckery because you can.
I don’t have answers.
Like everyone else, I’m stunned by everything I’m hearing. I don’t have a clear-eyed path forward. But I am trying to understand and frame what I’m seeing. And I relish others’ frames too.
Fuck you Facebook. That was the first thought I had when I woke up this morning. Followed by: What ministry is Mark Zuckerberg volunteering to manage for the dictators of the world? All I could think of is how Orwell’s Ministry of Love is about hate. So what are we creating here? The Ministry of Empowerment to ensure the oppression of the most vulnerable? Lovely. But maybe you, dear reader, have a better Ministry name for their new organizational identity?
(Perfect image brought to you by AI, complete with too many fingers.)
This isn’t about free speech. It’s about allowing some people to harm others through vitriol – and providing the tools of amplification to help them.
This isn’t about shareholder value. It’s about a kayfabe war between tech demagogues vying to be the most powerful boy in the room. Just as Elon Musk doesn’t give a shit if X makes him a lot of money, Mark Zuckerberg has obtained enough wealth that he’s looking for other things. And since he owns a powerful tech platform with lock-in control, no one can oust him.
This isn’t even about appeasing the incoming Trump Administration. This is a Naomi Wolf-esque desire to be worshipped by someone, anyone. And if the people you originally aligned with are always pushing you to be better by challenging you, fuck them, you’ll align with the crooks and conmen and sociopaths.
As I lay in bed, I thought about Mugabe’s transformation from a disruptive revolutionary into a corrupt dictator responsible for genocide. I thought about Henry Ford and Joseph Stalin. And Darth Vader. Arrogant, confident men who wanted to change the world in pursuit of goodness only to embrace various versions of dark sides when the only way to be loved was to be feared.
Of course, there’s power in pretending like this is about free speech. Or good business. Or wise politics. Even to oneself. And I have to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg and those who are surrounding him have countless self-justifications for their actions. But I still cannot imagine sitting in a room writing a script for explicitly justifying hate speech and harassment directed at a specific population with religion as the explicit excuse. Who was in that room? How were they justifying the text they were creating and publishing? Did anyone recognize the echos of history here?
And let’s be honest. Countless tech workers are going to hold their nose and just keep moving forward, regardless of their own personal beliefs. After all, most are upper middle class people with families and mortgages who know that the tech industry is ageist and fear the loss of their jobs. They’ve watched so many around them struggle to find work after the layoffs. This is what economists who say that the economy is great miss. Many people are in jobs where they are underpaid for their skills – and many middle class people fear losing the job that they have because they expect that the next job will pay worse. Fear is powerful. And fear will keep Meta employees in place – at least the ones that the executives are most concerned about staying. Welcome to being conscripted into modern day warfare, brought to you by late stage capitalism.
This isn’t simply toxic masculinity. It’s also the toxicity of pursuing the latest variant of masculinity. To feel whole. To feel worthy. To feel powerful. To have a purpose. This doesn’t have to be toxic. But the problem with masculinity is that it’s socially constructed. And so when you’re comparing yourself to other demagogues, you need to out demagogue them. Forget a cage match between two bros. Instead, let’s put all of those vulnerable to the power of these men into the cage so that they can fight over who can squeeze the cage harder. This is what modern day conquering looks like. And to give yourself an edge, you need to ensure that others are weakened so that you can show your strength. All in the name of empowering free speech. And if Mark Zuckerberg’s pursuit of having his masculinity validated wasn’t glaringly obvious, he made it crystal clear when he asked a professional fighter known for domestic violence to be his boss not-boss.
Well, it’s been one heck of a year. ::shaking head:: Although I love getting those end-of-year postcards from folks, I’ve never managed to make them. Instead of recounting my familial adventures and emotional trials and tribulations, I thought I could at least step back and reflect on some professional endeavors over the last year, many of which I did a lousy job of sharing when they happened.
1. I wrote three papers this year that I’m quite proud of.
“The Resource Bind: System Failure and Legitimacy Threats in Sociotechnical Organizations” explores how time and money are weaponized by different actors involved in the Census Bureau and NASA in ways that threaten both the scientific work as well as the legitimacy of the organization. This was a Covid collaboration as Janet Vertesi and I spent long hours comparing our two different field sites to understand the constraints that each agency faced.
“Techno-Legal Solutionism: Regulating Children’s Online Safety in the United States” emerged when Maria Angel pushed me to step back from my fury over the motivations behind proposed laws like Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act in order to interrogate the proposed interventions. What we came to realize is that legal policy is now demanding technosolutionism, pushing tech companies to solve problems that they have no power over and no right to decide.
While these papers might not be as sexy as hot takes on AI, they all gave me great joy to write, both because my collaborators were awesome and because they involved deeper thinking about sociotechnical configurations. If you haven’t looked at them, please check them out! (And ping me if you can’t access them – I’m happy to send you a copy!)
2. I talked a lot. And in a lot of different contexts.
I appeared in the “Truth or Consequences” episode of “What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates” (which you can find on Netflix).
I keynoted AI, Ethics, and Society where I built on the “abstraction traps” work I did with colleagues to highlight how the same traps and more are appearing in AI conversations. I repeated that argument a few more times in academic venues and now I need to write it all up.
I sat down with Tressie McMillan Cottom and Janet Vertesi at the Knight Foundation’s Informed conference where we explored what different theoretical insights have to offer practitioners.
I got to hang out with Kevin Driscoll at the Computer History Museum and discuss old skool online communities. (They called it The Prehistory of Social Media but that always makes me think of dinosaurs.)
I gave the Wendy Michener Memorial Lecture at York University on how to be intentional about nurturing the social fabric that holds you. I also gave the Information Law and Policy Annual Lecture at the University of London on the importance of focusing on interventions, not solutions. (I hope to write these up shortly.)
I also bounced in other places around talking about such an eclectic set of topics that I’m starting to wonder who I am. I dove into synthetic data in Sweden, AI policy in Berlin, responsible AI in Edinburgh and Boston, survey methodology in Ithaca, political polarization in Cambridge, public trust in federal statistics in DC, online safety in a virtual conference, the politics of ignorance in Philadelphia, and youth mental health in multiple online venues. It’s been a weird year.
3. I failed to learn that policymakers don’t give a flying f&#$ about helping people.
Every time I get the pleasure of advising Crisis Text Line’s amazing team, I’m reminded of how much this network cares deeply about kids’ mental health and strategically leverages data to improve their services to meaningful help people.
And then I end up in policymaking conversations that are purportedly about helping people only to learn that no one wants to ground their interventions in evidence and, besides, helping people is only the rouse for other things. At peak frustration, I ranted a bunch of times. Two examples: 1) KOSA isn’t designed to help kids and 2) the ludicrous frame of harm that’s used in policy debates.
But let’s be honest, I mostly found myself screaming into the void to no effect.
Amidst this, I witnessed so many friends and collaborators be tortured by politicians, political operatives, and their various bulldogs. These acts of harassment were designed to silence my friends in the name of free speech. And it’s been devastating to see the effects.
It’s really hard not to get disillusioned. And still, I can’t resist trying to find a way to make a difference. Here’s hoping that I can find a new approach to my Sisyphean activities.
At least on the plus side, I’m actually enjoying the various conversations unfolding on Bluesky these days. It’s been nice to be back in online community with a range of people after running away from the high pitched hellzone that other sites had turned into.
This is a huge professional transition (and it means moving to Ithaca!) but I’m genuinely stoked about the new adventure, albeit sad to leave my MSR colleagues after 16 years. Still, ::bounce:: I can’t wait to see what this will lead to!
5. I read. A lot. And forced others to read too.
At night, my kids and I curl into a cuddle pile and read together. We read (and play board games) a lot. My favorite fun book this year was Trust by Hernan Diaz, which initially annoyed the heck out of me and then blew me away. On the professional side, I can’t stop thinking about how people throw chickens into airplane engines to test them. Thanks John Downer’s Rational Accidents. But there were also so many other good books. (I still use Goodreads to keep track.)
Since I hate reading alone, I’ve dragged so many people around me into book clubs all year long. I just want to publicly apologize to you all for the never-ending requests to read with me. But also, thanks!
6. Resilience is my word for 2025
In a meeting this week, Nancy Baym talked about how she wasn’t really into New Year’s resolutions. Instead, she chooses a word that she uses as her mantra for the year. A word that will work at multiple levels and invite deep reflection. I love this idea.
I’ve chosen the word “resilience” for next year. I’d like to think about how to ensure that I am personally resilient to the challenges and pressures that come with change and uncertainty. I’d also like to think about how to support the development of resilience in people and organizations around me.
So I will leave you with this thought: what’s your word for 2025?
When I announced my intention to join Microsoft Research in 2008, my friends set up a betting pool over how long I would “last” there. No one thought that I’d be at MSR more than 7 years. And here we are, almost 16 years later. I still love MSR. I love my colleagues. I am forever grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to learn and grow and have impact. And yet, there’s been this itch that has been growing for years. When I started my PhD, I didn’t know if I would want to teach. But every time I’ve stepped into a classroom in recent years, I feel like I’m able to make a kind of difference that I can’t make just as a researcher. And every time I get a chance to work with students, I leave glowing like a proud mama bear. Over the last few years, I’ve started to wonder if, when, and where becoming a full-time professor might make sense.
Certain things were essential to me. I wanted to be able to be in an intellectual environment that was just as vivacious as MSR – and just as open to research that didn’t fit neatly in a disciplinary box. More importantly, I wanted to be surrounded by kind and generous scholars. I’ve been truly spoiled at MSR because my colleagues are just so darn awesome. And, much to the confusion of others, I wanted to be in a position where I could be a professor rather than an academic administrator. That last desire turned out to be an odder request than I realized it would be. (Many places only hire senior folks into administrator positions like chair or dean.)
Last year, I got a call that knocked my socks off. Lee Humphreys from the Cornell Department of Communication reached out to see if there was any way that I might consider joining the Cornell faculty as a professor. As many people close to me have heard me say, I’m convinced that there has to be something in the Ithaca water because everyone up there is just so brilliant and nice. We started talking and I started letting a bud of a dream grow. I went to give a job talk and I felt like I was in academic heaven or an intellectual candy store. There are just so many amazing people there that I would be ecstatic to work with.
And so… It is with a ridiculous amount of joy that I’m going to become a Professor of Communication at Cornell, starting in the fall of 2025!! ::bounce:: OMG I’m so excited. For those who want to read more, Cornell officially announced this move today.
This has been a long time in the works – and is still, in many ways, a long time off. But I don’t want to keep it secret anymore. And I want students who might be interested in working with me to know that I’m headed to Cornell. (I’m especially keen to find intellectual misfits who are asking surprising or novel questions about our sociotechnically configured world.) Already, I’m on the books as a Visiting Professor which has allowed me to bask in campus discussions. And when I get to Cornell, I’m going to be teaching two undergrad classes: Data & Society (yes, really. ::giggle::) and Trust & Safety. I’ll also teach a grad seminar.
The hardest part about jumping towards this new opportunity is stepping away from MSR. Luckily, folks at MSR have been overwhelmingly kind and supportive of me making this transition. When I nervously told my boss about my craving to be a professor, she was just so darn gracious. She fully understood that this was an itch I needed to scratch in order to feel whole. She saw my eagerness and said “there’s really nothing I can do to change your mind, is there?” Kindly, she encouraged me to stick around as long as possible. So I will be at MSR until next summer, when I make the transition (although I won’t take on interns this year, but my dear colleagues in the Social Media Collective are hiring a postdoc and interns!).
Many people in my world (including my partner) think I’m off my rocker for leaving MSR. After all, the intellectual freedom and opportunities that MSR have afforded me have been mindblowing. But one of my dear colleagues nailed it when she reminded my other colleagues that MSR has been the only real job I’ve had since grad school. And it’s true. Becoming a professor has blossomed in my head in so many ways that I’d regret not trying it, especially at a place as amazing as Cornell.
In truth, I don’t know that I’ll ever fully leave MSR. They may stop paying me, but I adore too many people there to not continue collaborations with folks there. And, in practice, I’m pretty crap at fully leaving behind people and organizations that I love anyways. (See the fact that I’m still involved in both Data & Society and Crisis Text Line as “an advisor” even after “leaving” both orgs.)
After I stepped off the Data & Society board, lots of folks contacted me with all sorts of “but what’s the real story?” questions. No one could believe that I would walk away from my baby, but I genuinely believe that founders need to let go to help their babies grow up. And so I’m bracing for another round of “what’s REALLY going on?” as I announce my departure from MSR. But the truth of the matter isn’t scandalous. It’s boring. I simply want to be a professor. And if it turns out that I suck at it, I really hope that MSR will take me back.
Since the “social media is bad for teens” myth will not die, I keep having intense conversations with colleagues, journalists, and friends over what the research says and what it doesn’t. (Alice Marwick et. al put together a great little primer in light of the legislative moves.) Along the way, I’ve also started to recognize how slipperiness between two terms creates confusion — and political openings — and so I wanted to call them out in case this is helpful for others thinking about these issues.
In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?”
The language of “harm” in this question is causal in nature. It is also legalistic. Lawyers look for “harms” to place blame on or otherwise regulate actants. By and large, in legal contexts, we talk about PersonA harming PersonB. As such, PersonA is to be held accountable. But when we get into product safety discussions, we also talk about how faulty design creates the conditions for people to be harmed due to intentional, malfeasant actions by the product designer. Making a product liability claim is much harder because it requires proving the link of harm and the intentionality to harm.
Risk is a different matter. Getting out of bed introduces risks into your life. Risk is something to identify and manage. Some environments introduce more potential risks and some actions reduce the risks. Risk management is a skill to develop. And while regulation can be used to reduce certain risks, it cannot eliminate them. And it can also backfire and create more risks. (This is the problem that María Angel and I have with techno-legal solutionism.)
Let’s unpack this a bit by shifting contexts and thinking about how we approach risks more generally.
Skiing is Risky.
Skiing is understood to be a risky sport. As we approach skiing season out here in the Rockies, I’m bracing myself for the uptick in crutches, knee wheelies, and people under 40 using the wheelchair services at the Denver airport. There is also a great deal of effort being put into trying to reduce the risk that someone will leave the slopes in this state. I’m fascinated by the care ski instructors take in trying to ensure that people who come to the mountains learn how to take care. There’s a whole program here for youngins designed to teach them a safety-first approach to skiing.
And there’s a whole host of messaging that will go out each day letting potential skiers know about the conditions. We will also get fear-mongering messages out here, with local news reporting on skiers doing stupid things and warnings of avalanches that too many folks will ignore. And there will be posters at the resorts telling people to not speed on the mountains because they might kill a kid. (I think these posters are more effective at scaring kids than convincing skiers to slow down.)
No matter what messaging goes out, people will still get hurt this season like they do every season. And so there are patrollers whose job it is to look for people in high-risk situations and medics who will be on hand to help people who have been injured. And there’s a whole apparatus structured to get them of the mountain and into long-term care.
Unless you’re off your rocker, you don’t just watch a few YouTube videos and throw yourself down a mountain on skis. People take care to learn how to manage the risks of skiing. Or they’re like me and take one look at that insanity and dream of a warm place by a fire or sitting in a hot tub instead of spending stupid amounts of money to introduce that kind of risk into their lives.
Crossing the Street is Risky.
The stark reality is that every social environment has risks. And one of the key parts of being socialized through childhood into adulthood is learning to assess and respond to risks.
Consider walking down the street in a busy city. As any NYC parent knows, there are countless near-heart attacks that occur when trying to teach a 2-year-old to stop at the corner of the sidewalk. But eventually they learn to stop. And eventually they learn to not bowl people over while riding their scooter down that sidewalk. And then the next stage begins — helping young people learn to look both ways before crossing the street, regardless of what is happening with the light, and convincing them to maintain constant awareness about their environment. And eventually that becomes so normal that you start to teach your child how to J-walk without getting a ticket. And eventually, the child turns into a teenager who wanders the city alone, J-walking with ease while blocking out all audio signals with their headphones. But then take that child — or an American adult — to a city like Hanoi and they’ll have to relearn how to cross a street because nothing one learns in NYC about crossing streets applies to Hanoi.
Is crossing the street risky? Of course. But there’s a lot we can do to make it less risky. Good urban design and functioning streetlights can really help, but they don’t make the risk disappear. And people can actually cross a street in Hanoi, even though I doubt anyone would praise the urban design of streets and there are no streetlights. While design can help, what really matters for navigating risk is rooted in socialization, education, and agency. Mixed into this is, of course, experience. The more that we experience crossing the street, the easier it gets, regardless of what you know about the rules. And still, the risk does not entirely disappear. People are still hit by cars while crossing the street every year.
The Risk of Social Media Can Be Reduced.
Can social media be risky for youth? Of course. So can school. So can friendship. So can the kitchen. So can navigating parents. Can social media be designed better? Absolutely. So can school. So can the kitchen. (So can parents?) Do we always know the best design interventions? No. Might those design interventions backfire? Yes.
Does that mean that we should give up trying to improve social media or other digital environments? Absolutely not. But we must also recognize that trying to cement design into law might backfire. And that, more generally, technologies’ risks cannot be managed by design alone.
Fixating on better urban design is pointless if we’re not doing the work to socialize and educate people into crossing digital streets responsibly. And when we age-gate and think that people can magically wake up on their 13th or 18th birthday and be suddenly able to navigate digital streets just because of how many cycles they took around the sun, we’re fools. Socialization and education are still essential, regardless of how old you are. (Psst to the old people: the September that never ended…)
In the United States, we have a bad habit of thinking that risks can be designed out of every system. I will never forget when I lived in Amsterdam in the 90s, and I remarked to a local about how odd I found it that there were no guardrails to prevent cars from falling into the canals when they were parking. His response was “you’re so American” which of course prompted me to say, “what does THAT mean?” He explained that, in the Netherlands, locals just learned not to drive their cars into the canals, but Americans expected there to be guardrails for everything so that they didn’t have to learn not to be stupid. He then noted out that every time he hears about a car ending up in the canal, it is always an American who put it there. Stupid Americans. (I took umbrage at this until, a few weeks later, I read a news story about a drunk American driving a rental into the canal.)
Better design is warranted, but it is not enough if the goal is risk reduction. Risk reduction requires socialization, education, and enough agency to build experience. Moreover, if we think that people will still get hurt, we should be creating digital patrols who are there to pick people up when they are hurt. (This is why I’ve always argued that “digital street outreach” would be very valuable.)
But What About Harms?
People certainly face risks when encountering any social environment, including social media. This then triggers the next question: Do some people experience harms through social media? Absolutely. But it’s important to acknowledge that most of these harms involve people using social media to harm others. It’s reasonable that they should be held accountable. It’s not reasonable to presume that you can design a system that allows people to interact in a manner where harms will never happen. As every school principal knows, you can’t solve bullying through the design of the physical building.
Returning to our earlier note on product liability, it is reasonable to ask if specific design choices of social media create the conditions for certain kinds of harms to be more likely — and for certain risks to be increased. Researchers have consistently found that bullying is more frequent and more egregious at school than on social media, even if it is more visible on the latter. This makes me wary of a product liability claim regarding social media and bullying. Moreover, it’s important to notice what schools have done in response to this problem. They’ve invested in social-emotional learning programs to strengthen resilience, improve bystander approaches, and build empathy. These interventions are making a huge difference, far more than building design. (If someone wants to tax social media companies to scale these interventions, have a field day.)
Of course, there are harms that I do think are product liability issues vis-a-vis social media. For example, I think that many privacy harms can be mitigated with a design approach that is privacy-by-default. I also think that regulations that mandate universal privacy protections would go a long way in helping people out. But the funny thing is that I don’t think that these harms are unique to children. These are harms that are experienced broadly. And I would argue that older folks tend to experience harms associated with privacy much more acutely.
But even if you think that children are especially vulnerable, I’d like to point out that while children might need a booster seat for the seatbelt to work, everyone would be better off if we put privacy seatbelts in place rather than just saying that kids can’t be in cars.
I have more complex feelings about the situations where we blame technology for societal harms. As I’ve argued for over a decade, the internet mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly. This includes bullying and harassment, but it also includes racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, and anti-trans attitudes. I wish that these societal harms could be “fixed” by technology; that would be nice. But that is naive.
I get why parents don’t want to expose children to the uglier parts of the world. But if we want to raise children to be functioning adults, we also have to ensure that they are resilient. Besides, protecting children from the ills of society is a luxury that only a small segment of the population is able to enjoy. For example, in the US, Black parents rarely have the option of preventing their children from being exposed to racism. This is why white kids need to be educated to see and resist racism. Letting white kids live in “colorblind” la-la-land doesn’t enable racial justice. It lets racism fester and increases inequality.
As adults, we need to face the ugliness of society head on, with eyes wide open. And we need to intentionally help our children see that ugliness so that they can be agents of change. Social media does make this ugly side more visible, but avoiding social media doesn’t make it go away. Actively engaging young people as they are exposed to the world through dialogue allows them to be prepared to act. Turning on the spigot at a specific age does not.
I will admit that one thing that intrigues me is that many of those who propagate hate are especially interested in blocking children from technology for fear that allowing their children to be exposed to difference might make them more tolerant. (No, gender is not contagious, but developing a recognition that gender is socially and politically constructed — and fighting for a more just world — sure is.) There’s a long history of religious communities trying to isolate youth from kids of other faiths to maintain control.
There’s no doubt that media — including social media — exposes children to a much broader and more diverse world. Anyone who sees themselves as empowering their children to create a more just and equitable world should want to conscientiously help their children see and understand the complexity of the world we live in.
In the early days of social media, I was naive in thinking that just exposing people to people around the world to each other would fundamentally increase our collective tolerance. I had too much faith in people’s openness. I know now that this deterministic thinking was foolish. But I have also come to appreciate the importance of combining exposure with education and empathy.
Isolating people from difference doesn’t increase tolerance or appreciation. And it won’t help us solve the hardest problems in our world — starting with both inequity and ensuring our planet is livable for future generations. Instead, we need to help our children build the skills to live and work together.
Put another way, to raise children who can function in our complex world, we need to teach them how to cross the digital street safely. Skiing is optional.
I have to admit that it’s breaking my heart to watch a new generation of anxious parents think that they can address the struggles their kids are facing by eliminating technology from kids’ lives. I’ve been banging my head against this wall for almost 20 years, not because I love technology but because I care so deeply about vulnerable youth. And about their mental health. And boy oh boy do I loathe moral panics. I realize they’re politically productive, but they cause so much harm and distraction.
I wish there was a panacea to the mental health epidemic we are seeing. I wish I could believe that eliminating tech would make everything hunky dory. (I wish I could believe many things that are empirically not true. Like that there is no climate crisis.) Sadly, I know that what young people are facing is ecological. As a researcher, I know that young people’s relationship with tech is so much more complicated than pundits wish to suggest. I also know that the hardest part of being a parent is helping a child develop a range of social, emotional, and cognitive capacities so that they can be independent. And I know that excluding them from public life or telling them that they should be blocked from what adults values because their brains aren’t formed yet is a type of coddling that is outright destructive. And it backfires every time.
I’m also sick to my stomach listening to people talk about a “gender contagion” as if every aspect of how we present ourselves in this world isn’t socially constructed. (Never forget that pink was once the ultimate sign of masculinity.) Young people are trying to understand their place in this world. Of course they’re exploring. And I want my children to live in a world where exploration is celebrated rather than admonished. The mental health toll of forcing everyone to assimilate to binaries is brutal. I paid that price; I don’t want my kids to as well.
I have no way to combat the current wave of fear-mongering that’s working its way into schools under false pretenses of science. I don’t know how to stop a tidal wave of anxious parents seeking a quick fix. But I did decide to spend some time talking with some thoughtful reporters about “kids these days” in an effort to center youth instead of technology.
Taylor Lorenz’s “Power User”
Episode: Is Social Media Destroying Kids’ Lives? (+ Elon’s Secret X Account)
I continue to be impressed with Taylor’s ability to stand up to the trolls and offer thoughtful and nuanced takes on our sociotechnical world. So I was super honored when she reached out to see if I would be willing to talk about the latest moral panic with her. Hopefully this conversation can be a source of calm for the generation of anxious parents out there.
Stephen Henderson is genuinely curious to unpack why the focus on legislation isn’t the right approach to mental health. So we dove in together to talk this through. Hopefully his thoughtful questions and my responses will provide insights for those who are hoping that regulation can make a dent in this whole thing.
There is a Path Forward…
In both of these conversations, I offer some thoughts for different audiences out there, including parents, regulators, teachers, and even kids. I’ve said many of these before, but I want to highlight a few that are top of mine just in case you’re reading this but don’t have time to listen to our conversations. I’m going to keep them brief here, but I hope I can continue to unpack them more and more over time.
1. Parents: Ensure your kids have trusted adults in their lives. It really does take a village. Kids need to be able to turn to other adults, not just you, especially when they’re struggling. You can really help your kids by ensuring they have a trusted network of aunties and coaches and mentors and other such adults. Build those relationships early and allow your children to develop strong independent relationships with adults you trust.
2. Adults writ large: “Adopt” other youth into your life. Be a mentor, a supporter, a cheerleader, a trusted person that they can turn to. You can do this through formal mentoring programs or just being an auntie to friends’ kids. You can really make a difference.
3. Regulators: Fund universal mental health access, ffs. It should not be so hard to get access to quality care when you’re in a crisis. And it should not require parental permission to seek help. Make mental health care access easy! And not just crisis care – actual sustained mental health care. Kids’ lives depend on this.
4. Parents: Check your own tech use. You are norm-setting for kids out there. Create a household tech contract with your kids. Listen to their frustrations over YOUR tech use before you judge them. This starts with the tiny ones btw.
5. Philanthropy: Invest in a “digital street outreach” program. Remember when we used to reach out to young people who were on the streets and offer them clean needles, information, and resources? When young people are crying out online, who is paying attention to them? Who is holding them? Who is ensuring that they’re going to be AOK? The answer is ugly. We need responsible people to be poised to reach out to young people when they’re crying out in pain.
Please please please center young people rather than tech. They need our help. Technology mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly. It’s what makes the struggles young people are facing visible. But it is not the media effects causal force that people are pretending it is.
We’ve come a long way to get back to trodden terrain…
Ten years ago – on March 17, 2014 to be precise – Data & Society hosted its first event: The Social, Cultural & Ethical Dimensions of “Big Tech.” At that event, we brought together people from academia, civil society, government, industry, and others to start grappling with emergent challenges in a data-soaked world. It’s utterly surreal to realize that was 10 years ago. I went back and read the primers we created for that event and just smiled. The debates we elevated then are still with us today. I also can’t thank all of those who helped make that event possible – in effect, they helped write Data & Society into being.
(Side note: Data & Society is going to have many 10-year celebrations this year. Make sure to stay tuned to everything folks there are planning. And if you have the means to donate, that would be mighty nice. I continue to be in aw of all that D&S is doing!)
I’ve been thinking a lot about how far we’ve come in those ten years – and how many steps backwards we’ve also taken. On one hand, folks are much more willing to see the complexities and nuances of technology’s interactions with society. On the other, the techlash tends to be just as deterministic as the tech sector itself. And then there’s the tendency for policymakers to engage in techno-legal-solutionism which just makes me want to facepalm. (Congratulations to my co-author María Angel for an awesome presentation of our paper at the ACM CS+Law Conference last week!)
More and more, what’s going through my mind these days has to do with degradation. What happens when sociotechnical systems – and the organizational arrangements that rely on them – start to crumble? Not simply break or meltdown in a fatal sense. But, rather, just become shittier and shittier. Cory Doctorow has a term to describe this phenomenon in the context of technology platforms: enshittification (which, you have to admit, is just a damn good term). But the degradation and shittiness goes so far beyond platforms. For example, so many workers’ lives are becoming so much crappier. And this isn’t simply a story of AI. It’s a story of greed and oppression. Technology and law are just the tools to help aid and abet this configuration.
What’s worse is that degradation is sometimes the goal. Janet Vertesi and I just published a comparative ethnography paper this week in a fabulous Sociologica special issue on failure. Throughout the organizational sociology literature, there are case studies of how technical failures lead to legitimacy crises. And that’s for sure true. But in examining how resources (e.g., time and money) are constrained in public-sector organizations like NASA and the Census Bureau, we noticed something else going on. We started to see how a resource bind can be manufactured to help trigger legitimacy crisis which can push sociotechnical projects to the brink of survival. To get at this, we examined how money was contorted inside NASA alongside the political dramas of manipulating time during the 2020 census. So check out our paper: “The Resource Bind: System Failure and Legitimacy Threats in Sociotechnical Organizations.”
(Also, if you’re reading this and you don’t know who Janet Vertesi is, you should. In addition to being an amazing ethnographer of NASA, she’s constantly engaging in opt-out experiments, which are kinda like breaching experiments to protect privacy in a surveillance society. Hell, you should see what efforts she went to in an effort to evade Disney’s data collection regime. And yes, I was the friend who was convinced she’d hate Disney. Challenge accepted, right?)
Of course, it’s not just sociotechnical systems that are degrading. So too is our collective social fabric. And, with it, the mental health of young people. Last month, Crisis Text Line published some of its latest data about depression and suicide alongside what CTL is hearing from young people about what they need to thrive. (Hint: banning technology is not their top priority.) Young people are literally dying due to a lack of opportunities for social connection. This should break your heart. Teens are feeling isolated and alone. (My research consistently showed that this is why they turn to technology in the first place.) It’s also scary to see the lack of access to community resources. Communities are degrading. And there’s no quick technical fix.
These issues were all on my mind when Tressie McMillan Cottom, Janet Vertesi, and I sat down for a “fireside chat” at the Knight Foundation’s Informed conference. We kinda evaded the instructions we were given and, instead, decided to draw on the collective knowledge of our disciplines to offer theoretical insights that can help people think more holistically about tech and society. Along the way, we talked about how systems are degrading, how the technical fixes are harmful, and how we owe it to the future to address social issues in a more ecological fashion.
If you happen to be in DC on Wednesday, April 10th, I will be offering up a new lecture that connects some of these issues to the public conversations we’re having about AI. This will be part of Georgetown’s Tech and Society week. (I’m the distinguished lecture with details forthcoming on the schedule.) I hope you can join me there!
Congress is using kids to hold Big Tech accountable. Kids will get hurt in the process.
In a few minutes, the Senate Judiciary will start a hearing focused on “Big Tech and the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.” Like most such hearings, this will almost certainly go off the rails in a wide variety of directions that I can’t even predict. But almost certainly, given the committee, it will include references to the various efforts by Congress to purportedly protect children from the ill-intended motivations of social media companies.
To be honest, I am pulling my hair out over “online safety” bills that pretend to be focused on helping young people when they’re really anti-tech bills that are using children for political agendas in ways that will fundamentally hurt the most vulnerable young people out there.
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) continues to march through the halls of Congress as though it’s the best thing since sliced bread, even though one of the co-creators of this bill clearly stated that her intention is to protect children from “the transgender” and to prevent “indoctrination” from the LGBT community. I’m flabbergasted by how many Democrats shrug their shoulders and say that it’s still worth it to align with hateful politicians because it’ll help more kids. The thing is: it won’t.
Let me try to lay out a few pieces of my frustration with this kind of bill (although I’m trying to keep this brief…). In short,
1. These “safety” bills are based on a faulty understanding of children’s mental health.
2. Bills like KOSA are predicated on the same technological solutionism that makes the logics of the tech industry so infuriating.
3. Children are dying. They’re in crisis. And we’re not providing them with the support they most need.
4. Many aspects of the tech industry are toxic. It’s politically prudent to use children. But it doesn’t help children and it doesn’t address the core issues in tech.
Let’s unpack these dynamics.
Wrong Definition of the Problem.
Are young people in a crisis? ABSOLUTELY. Suicide ideation and completion rates are increasing. Depression and anxiety are escalating. Youth are crying out for help in countless ways, including turning to the internet in the hopes that they’ll find support.
Depression, anxiety, and suicidality can never be explained by singular forces. They reflect not only an ecological problem but our steadfast refusal to see it as such. For reasons that have baffled me since I was a kid and told that “this is your brain on drugs,” I’ve been dumbfounded about the tendency to identify one problem and blame it for children’s woes. As a student, I went down a rabbit hole studying “moral panics.” I got a crash course on this when the public blamed Columbine on video games. Twenty five years later, I continue to be stunned by how powerful “media effects” rhetoric is. Why are so many people comfortable blaming some genre of media for social ills? Why is that so satisfying?
People keep telling me that it’s clearly technology because the rise in depression, anxiety, and suicidality tracks temporally alongside the development of social media and cell phones. It also tracks alongside the rise in awareness about climate change. And the emergence of an opioid epidemic. And the increase in school shootings. And the rising levels of student debt. And so many pressures that young people have increasingly faced for the last 25 years. None of these tell the whole story. All of these play a role in what young people are going through. And yet, studies are commissioned to focus on one factor alone: technology. (And people get outraged when reports like the one from the National Academies show inclusive causality.)
I wrote an entire book called “It’s Complicated” to try to unpack the myths we have about young people and technology. One message I’ve been trying (and failing) to get across for almost 20 years is that: The internet mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly. We know that media exposure can be a trigger. If a teenager is already experiencing suicidal thoughts, watching a show like “13 Reasons Why” can allow young people to justify taking their lives. When I was at Crisis Text Line, we saw the cost of that show as a trigger firsthand. We know that when celebrities die by suicide, the copycat phenomenon is heartwrenching. We also know that when young people experience a climate disaster, mental health falls apart.
Social media and technology connect young people to information and people. They can absolutely be exposed to content that is triggering. But some of the worst content out there comes from the news. Should we be blocking young people’s access to information about wars, climate disasters, and death by police?
The problem is not: “Technology causes harm.” The problem is: “We live in an unhealthy society where our most vulnerable populations are suffering because we don’t invest in resilience or build social safety nets.”
Solutionism is Counter-Productive.
In technology studies, it is common to eyeroll at techno-optimism and other fantasies of technological saviorism. There are many labels for the endemic problem in the tech industry: the “technological fix,” technological determinism, and technological solutionism. Each means slightly different things but the basic story is: people who are obsessed with tech think that it will solve all.the.things™ and they are fools.
For the last few years, I’ve been stunned to watch how the techlash has evolved from attempting to call into question these foolish logics to outright blaming tech companies for intentionally causing harms. Somehow, we’ve shifted from “tech will save democracy” to “tech will destroy democracy.” (Hint: democracy was in deep shit before tech.) The weird thing about this framing is that it’s as technologically deterministic as the tech industry’s orientation.
So imagine my surprise when I came back from a three-month offline sabbatical to discover that politicians wanted to legally mandate technological solutionism “for good.” Bills like KOSA don’t just presume that tech caused the problems youth are facing; they presume that if tech companies were just forced to design better, they could fix the problems. María Angel pegged it right: this is techno-legal-solutionism. And it’s a fatally flawed approach to addressing systemic issues. Even if we did believe that tech causes bullying, the idea that they could design to stop it is delusional. Schools have every incentive in the world to prevent bullying; have they figured it out? And then there’s the insane idea that tech could be designed to not cause emotional duress. Sociality can cause emotional duress. The news causes emotional duress. Is the message here to go live in a bubble?
The solution is not “make tech fix society.” The intervention we need to an ecological problem is an ecological one. The real question is what we are centering.
If You Care About Children, CENTER THEM.
In all of these discussions, we keep centering technology. Technology is the problem, technology should be the solution. What if, instead, we focused on what challenges young people are facing? What if we actually invested in addressing the issues at the core of their anxiety, depression, and suicidality? What if we invested in helping those who are most vulnerable?
Let’s start at the top of the stack. Most people under the age of 26 years old in the United States do not have access to mental health services without involving their parents. And even if you can find a therapist (good luck these days!), the likelihood of having sustained affordable access to mental health services is minimal. Around the world, seeking mental health support is sometimes more available but it’s often more stigmatized. Young people cannot address mental health struggles alone. They need help. We need to ensure that young people have access to affordable, high quality mental health services. This is a critical safety net.
When young people don’t have access to professional services, they are looking for people around them to help. We know that when young people have access to a wide network of non-custodial adults (think: aunties, coaches, pastors, etc.), said adults are more likely to sense out when things are bad. Young people are also more likely to turn to those folks. Guess what? Our social fabric in the United States has been fraying for a long time for a myriad of reasons. But this all got much more acute during Covid. Just as workers’ weak ties disintegrated during Covid, I suspect young people’s connections to non-custodial adults fell apart. And many of the adults who should be there for young people are themselves struggling. How many teachers out there are unable to support kids in crisis cuz they’ve got too much going on? It scares me how many young people can’t count a single adult that they can turn to in a crisis. Everyone who is on the front line of this crisis is feeling it. Ask any professor what they’re facing with this current crop of incoming college students. Ask those who are providing afterschool care. So many adults are falling apart trying to provide mental health services that they’re not equipped to offer because there’s no alternative and they care so much that they’re continuing to burn out.
Now let’s look at some of the sources of anxiety. Reducing climate anxiety through sound approaches to combating climate change would certainly be constructive. So would ensuring that young women had reproductive rights. So would protecting students from being shot down at school or walking down the street. So would empowering motivated youth to get an education without become trapped in indentured servitude. So would providing food security for families. So would making sure that a parent could afford to be around to help them out. So would guaranteeing that young people are accepted in a society no matter their gender, sexuality, ability, race, religion, caste, etc. Y’know… the fundamentals.
But I get it… the fundamentals aren’t politically tractable. And everyone can agree that going after Big Tech is a good idea. It’s way easier than doing the collective work or taking the collective responsibility to address the problems our children have. Too bad increasing tools for parental surveillance, blocking young people from tech, or empowering attorneys general to blame tech for content they don’t like won’t actually help young people.
Spend some time hanging out on TikTok or scanning Instagram or perusing YouTube and you can find numerous young people who aren’t doing well. They’re seeking attention, validation, belonging. And that ranges from normal teen dramas to full throttle mental breakdowns. Who is reaching out to those young people? Who is making sure that they are ok? We need a digital street outreach program, not a law that tries to render them invisible. When I was a teenager trying to grapple with my identity, strangers in chatrooms gave me hope and encouragement. Today, it is toxic people with an ideological agenda who are reaching out to those crying out for help in online communities. This doesn’t get fixed by pushing youth to the darkest corners of the internet or outing them to their parents through surveillance tools. To the contrary, that makes it worse. We need more people who are willing to be there for the next generation, not shun them.
If You Wanna Go After Tech, Go For It. Just Don’t (Ab)Use Children In The Process.
I get why the public and politicians are annoyed with the tech companies. If this is news to you, check out Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con. He offers an impassioned account of how infuriating big tech can be. And he has choice words for Facebook in particular because he sees it as “uniquely bad.”
I have no interest in defending tech companies. I’ve spent years lambasting their abuses of privacy, their vulnerabilities towards algorithmic manipulation, their toxic dependence on advertising, and their arrogance. What irks me is not the idea that tech should be regulated, but the tendency by politicians to (ab)use children in their pursuit of regulating tech.
Part of why we are where we are is because politicians continue to fail to pass general data privacy laws. Anti-trust efforts have not had the teeth that anti-monopolists desire. And so many other efforts to curb the power and toxicity of tech companies have failed. Somehow, time immemorial, the answer to gridlock on important issues is to reposition them as “for the children.” After all, children can’t vote. And increasing parental controls is politically fruitful in the only nation that is a member of the UN but has not ratified the UN Rights of the Child. (Dear foreigners: the United States treats children as property of parents in so many different ways, starting with how we allocate political power.)
By all means, go after big tech. Regulate advertising. Create data privacy laws. Hold tech accountable for its failure to be interoperable. But for the love of the next generation, don’t pretend that it’s going to help vulnerable youth. And when the problem is sociotechnical in nature, don’t expect corporations to be able to solve it.
I Am Frustrated.
While politicians politic, young people struggle. The services that can meaningfully help young people are underfunded and drowning. Teachers and parents are burnt out. Access to mental health care is limited. And kids are turning to the internet in hopes of finding connection, community, and help. For some, going down online rabbit holes makes things worse for sure. But the fact is that many have nowhere else to go. That should scare all of us. Young people need social infrastructure to hold them. They don’t benefit from new tools for surveillance. And trying to block young people’s access to community and the online tools they use in pursuit of mental health support will not magically make the problems go away. Their pain will just become less visible.
Over the last year, I’ve struggled with whether or not to get involved with this fight. I promised myself that when I became a parent, I’d stop studying youth so that my children did not become research subjects. For the last decade, I’ve kept tabs on the research focused on young people and social media but I’ve focused my energies elsewhere. In addition to my work on privacy and the politics of data, I also devoted the last 10 years to addressing the mental health crisis through volunteering to support Crisis Text Line based on all that I learned studying youth. There, I’ve had a front row seat to the pain that many young people are facing.
A year ago, friends started asking me to engage on these political fights given my experience with an earlier round. But I also struggled to find my voice. Every time I tried to speak up, I was told that my expertise has no value for the simple reason that I currently work for the research arm of a technology company. It doesn’t matter that my research on young people pre-dated my employment or that my volunteer mental health work isn’t connected to the company. I was told time and time again that I am nothing more than an apologist for tech whenever I raise concerns about how we are approaching the relationship between young people and tech. I’ve been called a sellout for objecting to bills like KOSA.
At this point, I’m boiling over with deep frustration. I am a researcher. I don’t speak on behalf of my employer or any organization I’ve dedicated my time towards. I’m also a parent. But I don’t speak on behalf of my kids either. Nor do I think that my kids are representative of the kids that I met doing fieldwork or the conversations that I witnessed doing mental health work. I speak as someone who wants everyone to stop centering tech and start centering youth.
I’m tired of having my expertise regularly ignored. I’m also sick and tired of watching peers in the research community be harassed whenever they raise concerns about KOSA or question the dominant narrative the “real” problem is tech. Even those who have nothing to do with tech are being publicly shamed or harassed at meetings. People don’t get how shittily researchers who challenge a political message that’s supposedly “for the children” get treated. This is especially painful when we are doing it precisely to support the most vulnerable young people in society.
I learned this lesson hardcore fifteen years ago when I naively provided a literature review on the risks young people faced to the then-attorney general of Connecticut. He didn’t like what the summation of hundreds of studies showed; he barked at me to find different data. A few months later, I learned that a Frontline reporter was tasked with “proving” that I was falsifying data. After investigating me, she warned me that I had pissed off a lot of powerful people. Le sigh.
I am frustrated. Bills like KOSA will not help young people. They are rooted in a political agenda to look like they’re holding big tech accountable. But they pretend like they will make a difference and it’s not politically prudent to challenge the failed logic. Still, human rights and LGBT organizations see through this agenda. They are worried because these bills will be weaponized to harm those who are already at risk. And still, politicians are moving forward editing this bill as though something good will come for it. Why on earth do we allow politicians to use children in their agendas?
I’m scared. I’m scared for the vulnerable youth out there who don’t have parents that they can trust. I’m scared for the kids who are struggling and don’t have a safety net. I’m scared for the LGBT kids who are being targeted by politicians. I’m scared for the pregnant teenagers who don’t have the right to control their bodies. I’m scared for those who see no future with a planet that’s heating up. I’m scared for those who are struggling with wars. I’m scared for the children who are being abused. None of these young people will be served by wagging a finger at Meta and telling them to design better. More likely, more and more young people will be shunted from services that are their lifeline while their cries for help go unheeded.
I’m sick and tired of politicians using young people for spectacle. I get why well-meaning people are hoping that this imperfect bill will at least move the needle in the right direction. I get that parents are anxious about their kids’ tech use. But the stark reality is that bills like this will do more harm to vulnerable youth at the very moment when so many young people need help. They need investment, attention, support. What will it take for people to realize that focusing on tech isn’t the path forward to helping youth? Sadly, I know the answer. More dead kids.
I know I’ve been doing a crap job of sharing updates or juicy blog posts. Sorry! Here are some varied updates. And hopefully I’ll pen a proper commentary shortly.
I’m (hopefully) going to come back later this week with more thoughts on the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and what it takes to support young people facing a mental health crisis, but in the meantime, I wanted folks to see the paper that María and I just wrapped up. We focused on a very specific aspect of KOSA and bills like it. I’ve complained about deterministic thinking before. But here we are again, only one step further. Now the law is embracing the worst of tech companies’ deterministic logics and demanding that they be solutionistic “for good.” ::shaking head:: More on this shortly.
I’m ecstatic to be joining the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum. Not only am I a big fan of the work CHM has been doing, but I also find it good to anchor myself in history whenever I’m struggling with the present. The tech industry didn’t come from nowhere. Its story is messy and complicated – and it’s important that we collectively learn from that. And, besides, you can visit the museum and see esoteric things like the Utah teapot (which is meaningful for graphics geeks) or the interpreter source tape for Altair BASIC (which is meaningful for programmers) or a replica of the 1890 Hollerith machine (which is meaningful for census geeks). Sometimes, it’s super valuable to bask in the joys of computing.
I’ve been thinking a lot about multi-level marketing schemes lately. Much to my chagrin. And now I feel like I’m part of one. Don’t get me wrong – all across the internet, I’m being told that Girl Scouts is emphatically not a real MLM and I get that. Still, I feel like I’ve been enrolled by my kiddo to help her sell cookies so she can get prizes (and donate to amazing organizations and raise money for her troop) under the guise of female empowerment. And there’s an entrepreneurship badge for doing it. She’s not humored by my rants about capitalism or unhealthy incentives. Then again, she’s 6. But if you feel like helping me out, you can order cookies online and they’ll be sent to you. (Or if you live in the front range in Colorado, we can deliver.) (Or you can even just outright donate to her troop.) All through her online website.
Anyhow, I hope everyone out there is holding up ok. {{hug}}
