https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XNODFVQP7YI
For millennials, and maybe even more so for Gen Z, I suspect that there is a pivot to something else. And many people, you know, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have certainly talked about IGEN, the internet generation. But what I suspect is really going on is that if you are sufficiently plugged into the internet early enough, there comes a point at which the your persona on the internet takes primacy. It is more important than your actual physical life. Jesus, it’s worse than that. It’s worse than that. I would say from personal experience, there is more of me on the internet than there is in me. My electronic avatars are far more powerful than me personally, you know, and I can watch this because I’ve been away for a year and a half. And yet my internet presence has steadily increased during that time. And I look online now and it’s 700 million views. Something like that. Now imagine that as the developmental environment for children. Now here’s the connection I want to draw. My contention is that the online landscape is postmodern, right? That if we were just to simply describe it, the rules, the physics of online life are postmodern. Because it’s abstracted from the environment. Right. So for example, it’s like living in a dictionary. If I decided tomorrow that I was a woman, right, I could change my internet presence such that I would present in a female way. I could say, hey, anybody who doesn’t treat me as female is a jerk. And the point is, I have transitioned completely. Right. Now, obviously, there is no such thing in the physical world. You can transition. You can take hormones or blockers. You can get surgeries. But no man has ever become a woman and reproduced in a female way. Right. So the point is the physical world has all kinds of constraints that come from physics and biology, which do not translate to the online world. And for people like you and me, for whom the online world is an add-on world, we think well, obviously, real life is the important one. And then the online thing has some interface with it, which is frightening, but we understand how they relate. But if you reverse these two things, then what you get is a generation that its problem-solving mind says, actually, of course, you can transition. You can transition. And then it is everybody’s obligation to live by who you’ve told us you are. And anybody who doesn’t is a bad person. What has to be true for that to be the case? Right. You know, I had a fantasy a long while ago that people would end up wearing glasses like the Google glasses that would be illegal to take off. And that you’d be mandated to see what people wanted you to see. It was their right to be presented to you in the manner that they chose to present themselves. You know, and I’m not saying that’s a particularly brilliant vision, but it’s very much in keeping with what you’re describing. So. Yep, I think it’s I think it’s close. But if you imagine then that an online world in which effectively we can all be equal tomorrow, as long as we say that that’s the objective and we can all present as we want and others can be forced to adhere to it or be thrown off of whatever discussion, then all of this begins to make a great deal of sense. And so I’m wondering if we are not in effect. In a kind of civil war between those for whom the real world has primacy and those for whom the online world has primacy and if that’s not the fundamental nature of the battle. Well, I think it could be the fundamental nature of part of the battle, I mean, part obviously part of what’s going on is whatever this unbelievably rapid rate of technological transformation is doing to us. I mean, my my daughter and and some people of approximately her age, so late 20s, are helping me with. Manage social media, let’s say. She’s noticed that people five years younger than her have advantages in understanding the newly developed forms of social media that she’s already outside of. And so that process of being hooked into the web and that being the determining factor for your worldview is probably accelerating. I mean, it’s going to accelerate, obviously it’s going to accelerate because the web is becoming more and more dominant and machines are becoming more and more intelligent. So they abstract themselves away from the world. And then the question is, well, what’s the consequence of that abstraction? But it’s funny that it’s postmodern. And that doesn’t. There’s more going on with whatever it is that’s happening than than technological transformation, but you think that’s the fundamental driving factor? Well, I think there are a lot of ways you can look at it. Obviously, I don’t think this is a real battle. Obviously, the Internet runs on hardware in the real world and everybody, you know, when the power goes out, we are all reduced to our biological self. So I don’t think there is actually anything to fight over. One of these worlds has primacy and the other is an add on. And this is not debatable. But my point is really about the mental confusion that arises from for most people. I mean, if you think about the lives that most people are living. Right. Most people at best are working a job in which they trade their labor for money that they get to spend on goods or relatively generic adventures. And the part of their life that is interesting and compelling is, you know, the Internet over which they range freely and engage in battle. And, you know, they fall in love increasingly and whatever else they do. And so my point is that that is a distortion developmentally. It misleads the mind into misunderstanding what is necessary. If you take the postmodern rules of the Internet and you now impose them on politics in the real world, you get crises. You get the basic structure of civilization coming apart in front of our eyes, which I really believe that it is right with the homelessness crisis in the U.S., for example, is jaw dropping. And we have a particularly acute crisis on the West Coast in the U.S. that appears to be the result of people being utterly compelled of their own political beliefs to an extent that even as those beliefs are failing around them visibly, they just double down. So imagining that people who think the Internet has primacy are now exerting a force to correct the real world in the direction of their naive Internet understanding of things are in danger of crashing the aircraft. And in some sense, people like you and me are responding to what they’re saying about how we should restructure the real world and saying that doesn’t make sense. It won’t work. It is going to put us in grave danger. It is going to disrupt essential things. And, you know, there are those who can hear us and we are popular with those who can hear us. And then there are those who regard our pointing out the obvious as a danger to their program who are intent on silencing us. And so I thought about this obsession with identity from a developmental perspective, too. And I thought this insistence by a loud minority that their determination of their identity take primacy is first of all, it’s just it’s wrong, technically, I think, because an identity isn’t merely what you feel you are. An identity is way more complicated than that, as any decent social constructionist should already know. An identity is a role, a set of complex roles that you negotiate with other people so that you can thrive across a very long span of time. And it can’t be something that you impose on other people because then they won’t cooperate with you. Now, you might say that you have a right to impose certain aspects of it on other people, and you could have a reasonable debate about that. But identity is definitely not merely what you feel it is. And it’s certainly not merely what you feel it is moment to moment. That identity is actually much more like that of a three or four year old child. And I mean this technically, it’s not an insult. So when you’re a child, you pick up one identity after another and play with them. So, for example, my granddaughter, who’s about three at the moment, if you ask her who she is, she has two names, a first name and a second name, and her dad calls her by her second name and her mom calls her by her first name. So she’s Ellie or Scarlett. And she’s fine with either of those. But she’s also Pocahontas. And if you ask her whether she’s Ellie or Scarlett or Pocahontas, she will say Pocahontas. And she has said that for eight months. It’s amazing. It’s been that persistent in a child of that age. It’s quite remarkable. But what she’s doing is playing, you know, and girls will play to be boys at that age and boys will play to be girls. And they play with multitudinous identities and then they settle into one. So then the question is, what if you disrupt that play? That’s fantasy play. And then another question might be, well, what if you disrupt it with technology? Not the technology itself is producing a message that’s counter to that. But that the fact that children are on technology all the time means they’re not engaging in that kind of identity, establishing fantasy play. And then you might say, well, maybe what you see happening in that case is that it bursts out in late adolescence. And the insistence there that my identity is what I say it is, is actually the scream in some sense of a of an organism that hasn’t gone through that egocentric period of play where they are in a fictional sense, exactly the way they define themselves. You can’t tell my granddaughter, who’s three, that she isn’t Pocahontas. It’s stupid to tell her that because she means it in an experimental sense. And all you’re doing is interfering with her fantasy play. And so I see a fair bit of this as delayed fantasy play with the kind of. Pathology that comes up when you delay a necessary developmental state.