This week we ask if we should all just quit social media, because it's better for us?
Social media is woven into everyday life, yet growing concerns about its effects on mental health, public debate and personal wellbeing have led many to question whether it is worth staying online at all. With governments exploring age restrictions for younger users, and public discussion becoming increasingly polarised, is quitting social media the ethical choice?
In this episode, Rob Simpson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College London, joins Emily McTernan to discusses the moral dimensions of stepping away from social media platforms, drawing on his recent work on the ethics of quitting.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:05] Emily McTernan: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we'll be asking should we all quit social media.
Hello, my name is Emily McTernan, and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Social media can be a pretty toxic place. By now, many of us have the sense that it might not be doing us all that much good. Indeed, Australia has just banned it for the under sixteens and the UK is considering doing the same. And social media's been blamed for quite a lot of ills. Some argue that it's played a role in the rise of mental health issues. Many of us worry that we're wasting precious moments of our lives doomscrolling. And it would be pretty hard to argue that social media sites have had a net positive impact on the quality of public debate, which has become increasingly polarised and misinformed. So shouldn't we just quit?
Today, I'm joined by Rob Simpson, Associate Professor in Philosophy here at UCL. He is, I think it's fair to say, a social media sceptic. And today we'll be talking about his recent chapter on the ethics of quitting social media platforms.
Welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you with us.
[00:01:15] Rob Simpson: Thanks, Emily. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:18] Emily McTernan: So, Rob, are you on any social media platforms?
[00:01:21] Rob Simpson: No, no. I lurk on Reddit, which some people think of as a social media, and there is a kind of really dorky philosophy, social networking site called PhilPapers. So I have my papers up on PhilPapers, but that doesn't have, you know, chat function and posting and stuff. So I'm pretty close to being a complete abstainer from all of this stuff.
[00:01:45] Emily McTernan: And why is that? Why, why should we be thinking about quitting social media?
[00:01:49] Rob Simpson: Well, as an individual, I just think that the preponderance of evidence suggests that using social media isn't doing you much good. It's a little bit tricky to make big generalisations about that because you know any particular individual, suppose that your best friend, that's the easiest way for you to have regular two-way chat with them, is just to post on each other's walls on Facebook or something like that.
So I'm, it would be kind of preposterous to say, oh, any person is gonna be better off not using social media. There's always gonna be particularities of a person's circumstance where they could get a significant benefit out of it, but the kind of latent background costs, the way that it mucks up your patterns of attention, the way that it induces all of these status anxieties, the way that it, yeah, drags you into echo chambers, politically, et cetera all of these things.
I think just about any user, certainly circa 2025 when a lot of the big networks have gotten really degraded, whatever benefits you're getting out of it in terms of amusement or being a source of information, I suspect that all things considered your welfare would be better if you, if you used it less.
[00:02:58] Emily McTernan: This is sounding like what you describe in the paper as a trivial lifestyle choice. Is that fair or are you seeing it as a deeper thing? I mean, this sounds a bit like it would be better if you did weights every day.
[00:03:07] Rob Simpson: Yeah.
[00:03:07] Emily McTernan: And ate more vegetables. Or do you think there's something worse for you about not quitting social media, not following that health advice?
[00:03:14] Rob Simpson: Yeah, interesting. Again, I think it's kind of difficult to generalise. So there are people for whom the choice whether to be on social media or not might simply be lifestyle. And for that person, the argument is, make lifestyle choices that are better for your welfare. I mean, no one's gonna twist your arm, but if you care about your welfare eat fewer ultra processed foods, exercise a bit, don't go on social media, whatever.
I definitely think for some people it becomes a more complex socio-political choice. And there again, it's hard. You know, I don't wanna say for every individual, your ability to be a good citizen or a good member of your community will be higher if you're not on social media, because different people are differently kind of socially and politically situated and that they use social media for different things, but for most of us, yeah, I think we'd be better citizens and better members of our community if we didn't mediate our interaction with our social communities and our political communities through these tools.
[00:04:15] Emily McTernan: And is this for the alienation from your local community, by virtue of being on a screen all the time reasons? Or are you worried here about polarisation and fake news, and the things, that kind of adverse interactions we get?
[00:04:27] Rob Simpson: Yeah, all of the above. So there's an aspect of this, which I think is really difficult to cash out, and in this particular paper, I don't attempt this. But, being in the room with people breathing the same air, interacting with all the very rich, complex communication that you get through gesture and body language and all that sort of stuff. I do think that's really important, not just for welfare, but for politics.
But how would you make an argument to that effect? I'm not attempting that in the paper. That's my hunch that there is some cost to how we do politics and just how we do community as a result of so much of our interaction with other people happening through these very depleted, communicative channels.
Uh, but yeah, you know, even if you don't buy that at all, there's other arguments about how this makes your worst citizen to do with echo chambers, polarisation to do with a kind of, uh, a sense of what quality of attention you need to bring to politics. Like maybe sometimes being a good member of a community or a good citizen is about sitting and listening patiently to someone who you find quite difficult or quite boring, and just hearing them out and metabolising what they're saying in this slow patient way.
And I just think what we get on social media, even when it's people we disagree with, isn't that it's this bite-sized instant, quick doomscrolly, kind of. It's this thing that hacks our patterns of attention in a way that, yeah, all things are considered, I think makes most of us worse citizens, worse neighbours, et cetera.
[00:05:59] Emily McTernan: So now this is something like a general scepticism about the possibility of interacting well online.
[00:06:04] Rob Simpson: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:05] Emily McTernan: In the paper I was detecting that it was the particular form of, uh, social media platforms that had you so worried and the people who are running them.
[00:06:12] Rob Simpson: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:12] Emily McTernan: Is that unfair or are, do you think it's a general problem with online interaction that you're seeing here, or is it the Facebook X Twitter-esque versions of it?
[00:06:22] Rob Simpson: So I'm definitely more anxious about it with these companies whose business model seems to be hook people in, make them engage a lot, and then sell them stuff or grab their data and sell the data. I think those sites and companies are the ones that we have most reason to worry about.
But your broader question, super interesting, and I'm not sure off the top of my head what I think I, I mean, I don't mean to be all kind of, Jordan Peterson does this thing where he sort of picks up on a word that someone says, and hyper fixates on that word. So what exactly do you mean by that word? So I'm not meaning to do that, but the thing in your question that makes me think, oh, I don't know, is just the word online.
So it's like it's very difficult to really live offline completely today, right? Every company uses things like Teams and Slack for daily communication and things like email for sending documents and longer communication. So I don't know. I don't think the issue is screens or communication that you know, runs through satellite. I don't think handwriting is somehow communicatively better than typing.
It's, it's not, that's not the focal point for where the complaint is, but it's probably true that like instantaneously and device mediation and all these things make it a little bit easier for communicative practises to be modified in ways that sort of work against patience and attention and depth and work in favour of instantaneously, et cetera.
[00:07:55] Emily McTernan: I mean, this is gonna be true of handwriting to typing as well, isn't it? Lots of what you said. So the
[00:07:59] Rob Simpson: mm,
[00:07:59] Emily McTernan: The importance of gesture and flourish and nuance.
[00:08:02] Rob Simpson: Oh, that's right.
[00:08:02] Emily McTernan: And you think someone's handwriting tells you an awful lot about how quickly they wrote your note, how much care they gave to it.
[00:08:08] Rob Simpson: Yeah.
[00:08:09] Emily McTernan: What kind of person they are, people thought, right? All those handwriting analysis people.
[00:08:12] Rob Simpson: Yeah.
[00:08:13] Emily McTernan: I dunno what the science behind that was like. But one assumes that the, the more tech we get, some of the stuff you're talking about does start to kick in, including perhaps the move from letters to email.
[00:08:23] Rob Simpson: There are these old ideas in the philosophy of technology. When I say old, you know, kind of mid-20th century, Heideger, Martin Heideger, the German philosopher, and Jaques Ellul. These people who, when they were thinking about the ethics of technology, were really interested in the way that technologies modify us. So technologies all start out as tools, but then some of our tools have this kind of interesting feedback loop mechanism, and the world gets changed in a way that's kind of suited to the operation of those technologies, and then we modify our behaviour to get along in that world that's kind of reformatted for the technologies.
So I think any technology can do that. It can have this kind of whip around effect where it starts modifying us, but it's not the case that every technology, in fact, does that. And it's also not the case that every time a technology does that, it ends up being worse for human beings generally.
So I think that's the kind of thing we need to worry about. Are these tools reformatting how we live so that we then have to reformat our behaviour as humans to live in the world that the tools have made for us in a way that cramps us, distorts our cognition, et cetera.
Though, that's the kind of thing I'm worried about, what I wanna say is that these networks that connect us in a way that's very mass, very algorithmified and yeah, that have has a kind of emphasis on quickness and bite-sizedness, I think that has this sort of whip around effect where we end up thinking and relating to people in ways that, uh, that fit themselves to what the technology wants to do, and that's kind of anthropomorphising the technology. I don't mean to say that the technology really wants to do it, but I think that metaphorical way of speaking gets at something about why these things are killing us.
[00:10:14] Emily McTernan: Social media, absolutely terrible. Terrible epistemically, terrible for our social relations. And yet much of your paper is about an an ethical objection to quitting social media.
[00:10:22] Rob Simpson: Yeah.
[00:10:23] Emily McTernan: The privilege based objection. So could you tell our listeners a bit about that objection. Then we'll get to why you think it doesn't work.
[00:10:27] Rob Simpson: Yeah. Good. So this objection has a kind of pre-pandemic-ishness to it. A lot of the pieces that were written in this direction that I talk about in the paper were published in around 2016, 2018 or 19. So it was the, the, the kind of dialectic of this went, like something like the following: a person writes an op-ed in, you know, the Guardian or the New York Times or something saying social media is bad for us, I encourage you to quit. And then over the following week or month, there are these kind of counter replies of people saying, that's all well and good for you to say, but.
Then various things come after the, but some of what comes after the but is if you think that's about undermining the power of these companies, good luck. It's only gonna be a drop in the ocean. Some of what comes after the but is look at the trend line. More and more people are using this stuff. What would be the point of quitting? Like the world has changed to get on board. Fine.
There was this other kind of argument which I kept seeing, you know, which came up seven or eight times over the course of a couple of years when I was, you know, reading all of the op-eds and punditry about this. Where people saying It's all well and good for you to say, Hey, let's quit. But that's easy for you to say because you are a privileged person. The cost of you quitting is going to be, maybe it's a little bit more difficult for you to keep in contact with some of the other people that you're interacting with on there. Maybe you lose some opportunities to, I dunno, get influence. But it's not gonna cost you your job. It's not gonna cost you your access to a community.
And for some people, that's what social media is. They need to be online in order to do their job. They need, maybe they're, you know, they're in an industry where they have to, uh, advertise what they're doing through social media channels or maybe there's someone who's isolated because of disability or old age or some other form of social life. Maybe it's a young person who's in a very repressive small town and the only way they can talk to people who have a similar kind of social sensibility to them is by going on, et cetera, et cetera.
So if you're a roundly privileged person saying you should quit social media because it's bad for your welfare, it's a little bit like saying, don't eat any processed food, only eat organic food. Well, if you've got the time and money. To invest in your health in that way. Great. The problem is most of us don't, and similarly, so this argument would say, most people just can't afford to voluntarily step outside of the access to a community and communication and information that social media gives them.
So telling those people to quit social media when you're a privileged person is an act of privilege in the kind of ethically pejorative sense of that term. You know, check your privilege, mate.
[00:13:14] Emily McTernan: This is in substantial tension to all the stuff you've just been telling us about the, it's bad for you, it's bad for you socially, it's bad for you epistemologically, and yet you take this quite seriously in the paper and your response is that there's no good here to be had, I think. Is that fair?
[00:13:26] Rob Simpson: So the way I set the paper up is, I think there are, you know, as we were talking about a moment ago, I think there's a tonne of. Really persuasive arguments and evidence to suggest that using social media is bad for you. But it would also be a bit loopy to think that it's all bad and that there are no benefits.
So I'm trying to say like there's a net, uh, harm to you as an individual using it most of the time for most people. Some of the folks who make this, uh, privilege objection that I just summarised, some of them don't believe that. They think that those arguments are just empty or there's a lot of doom-mongering, and blah, blah, blah.
Some of them think there's a bit more to it than that, that there really are harms that come with using social media, but they just wanna say that, hey, if you're a person who's isolated in these ways, or who needs social media to do your job well, uh, or to get ahead in your career, or whatever it might be, then what you are facing is a trade off, a package of costs and benefits.
It's like, you know, buying a lot of your food as quick ultra-processed meals from Tesco. It's probably nutritionally, not doing you a tonne of good, but it's cheap, it's quick, it's available. So there is a really good reason to buy it. And then, you know, you see how the analogy works. The person who's really wealthy, who has lots of free time because maybe they don't have to work all time, got an inheritance, whatever it might be, they say everyone should eat organic food all the time.
Well, for the person who's having to make these difficult trade-offs. You know, buying processed food from Tesco so that they can have quick and easy stuff to eat for dinner is, you see why they're doing it? It's not crazy. So that's, that's sort of how I'm thinking about the relationship between these first set of questions: is this good or bad for you? And then this objection that I'm troubled by, that I'm really focusing on in the paper that, that it's privileged to be a quitter.
[00:15:16] Emily McTernan: Great. So why doesn't it succeed? Why isn't it privileged to be a quitter?
[00:15:20] Rob Simpson: Good. Well, I think. That's actually quite difficult to say quickly. So I'll try not to prattle on and on, but that's why I wrote this paper because I had this quite strong sense that this argument is sort of BS, but the superficial version of the argument, I, you know, there is a logic to it.
Uh, here's another, like an analogical representation of the argument just to show why this is a hard question. So in America, you know, they have these ways of funding school districts where it's based on, um, taxes for a particular geographically bounded community. So if you move up a few, uh, rungs on in your career and you're earning a lot more money, it's really in your interests to move to a more affluent community because the government-run schools in that community, typically, will be much better resourced because the residents in that neighbourhood pay more tax, et cetera.
So if you're the kind of person who, as you're becoming more privileged, earning more money, able to buy a house in a fancier neighbourhood, et cetera, et cetera, if your first move is like, right, we're moving to the more affluent neighbourhood, so, so that our kids can get a better education.
On one level, that's obviously attractive, individually rational behaviour, your kids probably will get a better education as, as a result of that. But if we all did that, what we would expect to see. Uh, over a period of time is a greater and greater concentration of privilege and symmetrically a greater and greater concentration of disadvantage among the people who just can't afford to do that.
So, by analogy, if all of the people who kind of can stop using social media because they realise it's bad for them and they don't have to use it, evacuate the scene. And the people who are left are the people for whom this is a lifeline to having community communication. This is how they can get information efficiently, et cetera. It sort of ghettoises the social media community and I, and I do think that's something to worry about.
So why do I think it's a problem? The argument I try to make in the paper is really about trying to show the dis-analogy between that school district example that I just sketched out for you and what people are doing when they leave social media and to give you a sense of why I think it's different let me give you another analogy.
Think about people, and this is in the paper, think about people in, I don't know, the 1970s or eighties or early nineties, buying the early generations of cars that had better safety features, like airbags or, uh, I forget the proper term for it, but the kind of crumple technology so that if you, um, hit something hard in front of you, you don't fly through the windscreen, but the front of the car crunches up.
All these technologies that when they were introduced, made cars much more expensive because the first generation of them, you know, they were new technologies and they were technologically, uh, complicated and expensive. And okay, so if in 1985 you bought a car with these kind of crumple zones and airbags and other things like that, when it was a lot more expensive to do so, okay, you are buying an advantage for yourself that maybe the person down the road can't afford, and that is obviously an exercise of your privilege. But you've gotta think about the larger ecosystem within which that act is happening, right?
So part of how we got from that world where only a few very expensive makes of cars have those safety features to the world we're in today. Well, one of the ways we got there is through a transformation of consumer behaviour where more and more people who could afford to buy that stuff did. Now, that's not the only way we got there. We also got there through government regulation. We also got there through kind of ordinary democratic processes of people lobbying for policy change, et cetera, et cetera.
So I'm not trying to tell a a very kind of reductive story. All I'm saying is those people who bought the cars with those safety features way back when. How do we interpret their behaviour? Do we interpret them as just blithely, exercising privilege and thinking, I'm doing this thing that's good for me and I don't care about anyone else? Or do we interpret them through this sort of slightly more charitable generous lens where they're saying, this is what cars should be like if we're gonna drive these contraptions around the road, they should be the sorts of machines that don't risk your life if you slip up.
We need to get to that world, and I'm taking us a little step just within the, the sphere of that world that's within my control to get us there. I'm moving us more towards the kind of world that I think we should be living in. I'm not trying to kind of run away from a problem and just leave everyone else stuck with the problem. I'm trying to change the system. I'm not in charge of the system, but I do have control over what I do, and so I'm gonna do the thing that's within my control that moves us.
It's, it's like a vote, right? In these sort of systems where voluntary individual behaviour, where the system is the result of a whole society full of people making voluntary individual choices. The choice you make is a bit like the vote you have in an election. It is one, you know how many people can vote in Britain? How many people are on the electoral rolls? 45 million or something like that. It's 1/45,000,000th of the collective choice that's your choice. So you can do that in a referendum or an election, and you can do that with your behaviour in these systems that are constituted by all of our voluntary behaviour. So it's not just blithe exercise of privilege, it's casting your vote towards the kind of world you wanna live in.
[00:20:48] Emily McTernan: But the school still isn't, this is your thought.
[00:20:50] Rob Simpson: Yeah.
[00:20:51] Emily McTernan: So social media looks like the car example and not the school example.
[00:20:54] Rob Simpson: That's right. Yeah.
[00:20:56] Emily McTernan: Because it's not pooling privilege in the same way. Because you might say, well look, I can move to a nicer school district because I think everyone should have better education.
[00:21:04] Rob Simpson: Yeah.
[00:21:04] Emily McTernan: So as the government and the local authorities realise that I keep moving for the better schools, everyone will be motivated to think about how to shore up neighbourhoods by pumping money into their schools, right?
[00:21:13] Rob Simpson: Yeah.
[00:21:13] Emily McTernan: You want to gentrify, make your school really good.
[00:21:16] Rob Simpson: Yeah. So it could conceivably apply to the education example as well. It depends a little bit on how you think about the, the kind of the value that education delivers. So, there's a way of understanding that, this is not my area of expertise so if there are any education theorists listening, apologies if what I'm about to say sounds really, uh, naive.
But there's a way of understanding educational goods as positional goods. So where what you're trying to get is not measured relative to some standard of an absolute attainment, but it's rather, I want to be at the head of the pack. So that's, you know, to the extent that that's true of education, that it's trying to sort of put us in a line of most achieving, to least achieving, it seems really different, right? You can't have everyone escape the bad system because the point of the system is to kind of rank people from top to bottom.
Now, there are ways to have different educational systems that aren't just about a kind of arms race for positional goods. But moving from the disadvantaged school district to the affluent school district, it's not clear how that move makes any kind of change to the education system.
[00:22:29] Emily McTernan: Okay, so we've got this vision where what we've got is a way of trying to move us towards a better world. There's one more, dis-analogy I think, between the car example and the social media case that maybe is worth pulling out, which is that in the car case, what we need is a new set of technology. But interestingly in the social media case, you are saying quit. So you're not saying leave X and go to Bluesky.
[00:22:50] Rob Simpson: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:50] Emily McTernan: Lots of academics are like, I'll do the ethical thing.
[00:22:52] Rob Simpson: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:52] Emily McTernan: I'll leave the terrible site for a better one.
[00:22:55] Rob Simpson: Yeah.
[00:22:55] Emily McTernan: You are saying not the site. So in a way you're saying you don't need new technology, we need to go back. Is that fair?
[00:23:00] Rob Simpson: Yeah. Uh, wait. What I'm saying is that these technologies are not serving our purposes. I don't want to completely rule out the possibility that, uh, online technologically mediated communication systems could be devised that serve our communication interests in ways that maybe enhance our underlying capacities.
You know, it goes back to what we were saying before about what is the actual problem with social media. Is it the fact that it happens through screens, that satellites are involved, or is it something more about the particular, you know, one way you can, this is a kind of very crude, analogical way of thinking about it, but is it the ingredients that are used to make the communication system or the recipe that those ingredients are combined into?
So I'm not sure. I'm pretty down on the social media recipe. Could those same ingredients be recombined in a different way? Maybe. I am really sceptical about the thought that if we just hacked the best way to use WhatsApp groups or Signal groups or whatever, or Bluesky or, that, that we would enhance our communicative abilities in a way that would be better for our welfare, better for our po. I, I'm so sceptical about that.
So, yeah. In the world as it is today, I think if you wanna look after yourself and be a good citizen, yeah, it's not find the new technology, it's go back to the old technologies, right? Face-to-face conversation, all this kind of dorky stuff that you sound like, uh, a real conservative, if you talk about, I, I think we have a. The sort of, uh, symbolic alignment between being pro communication technology and being politically progressive. I want to cleave those two things apart. I, I think that that sort of symbolic alignment came about for perfectly intelligible reasons, but I don't think it holds.
[00:24:58] Emily McTernan: One of the things I like about your paper is that you've got quite, you're clear that some people are gonna think you were a Luddite, right? They're gonna think this is a kind of smash the tools go back to the previous era. And you have this nice description that I wondered if you could talk to our listeners a bit about, about how it's not inevitable that there's this sort of picture that we're just stuck here.
[00:25:16] Rob Simpson: Right.
[00:25:17] Emily McTernan: Nice way of saying that's not right. Is that right?
[00:25:19] Rob Simpson: Yeah. Yeah. I think the kind of discourse of an inevitability is, uh, well, I want to, what do I wanna say about it? I think it's false. I think it's really manipulative. I think it's, yeah, it's ideological in the pejorative sense. If you, if someone ever says to you, this is just the world we're living in, this technology is here to stay, so don't question it or critique it, just accept it, I think you should be profoundly suspicious of what that person's saying, uh, because we make the world, right?
I know that sounds kind of really corny and romantic to say, but it's true. So, analogise it to, uh, low traffic neighbourhoods or other kinds of, uh, innovations in how we think about transport. Say, yeah, we could just keep trying to get 1% more efficiency and user friendliness out of cars, or we could try to reimagine what transport should be in a city or a town, or whatever it might be.
At a certain point, 30 or 40 years ago, particularly in my home country, Australia, that would've been such a preposterous suggestion. The idea that we should dramatically reallocate space on the roads towards bicycles and people on scooters and people walking would've sounded, I mean, not just like a form of Ludditism, but a form of madness. And here we are doing it, right? We're doing it because it's up to us what we do with the roads and, and the space that the roads take up.
So, yeah, I. In these articles that I was, that prompted me to write this piece, these where people were talking about why it's so privileged to want to quit social media, this other thing that I noticed authors saying, often in, you know, the same authors who are saying that is, and in any case it's kind of pointless and moot to talk about it. It's, it's 2017 or whenever that, right, it's 2018, we're in a world that's organised around social media nowadays. Why do you want to take us back to 1997 or what, you know, whatever you imagine the Prelapsarian era being.
It's like, no, I want you to realise that the future is made by humans, right? And it's, I don't want to have a really kind of goofy, naive version of that like we could just somehow click our fingers and will a different world. But the world we end up in, we will end up in because human beings took us there. So, for goodness sake, let's at least, it's a very existentialist thought, let's recognise that the world we live in is a world of our making and face up to the burden of freedom and agency that that places on us to say, well, this is just the way the world is and there's an is actually, there's something, I mean, if I wanted to be really kind of coy about it, there's a way of interpreting that as an expression of privilege, right?
Just sort of not recognising that you as someone who has a, a voice in public discourse, writing an op-ed in the New York Times, actually have some, you know, maybe a little bit more than just your one democratic vote. You have influence. You have a platform. When you join in with what the tech oligarchs and their allies in government say that like this is just the world stop complaining about it, you are not really taking responsibility for the opportunity. You have to, at at least interrogate that, put some pressure on it, rather than just joining in the chorus of, well, anyway.
[00:28:48] Emily McTernan: Since you once more raised the dates of the pieces.
[00:28:51] Rob Simpson: Oh yeah. I know.
[00:28:52] Emily McTernan: This is interesting. I mean, one of the struggles of being a philosopher at the moment is that the tech is moving so quickly. People write these articles and then suddenly things look quite different on the ground. And it's interesting to think about how their arguments might extend. So in your case, I, I can't tell what you're gonna think about different technologies.
So I guess, AI is clearly worsening the situation in all of the respects you've said. You are nodding. So I take it that you agree, right? We can see it's making it more algorithmically driven, it's taking away the kind of connections that we might have wanted, et cetera, et cetera. So the one I want to ask you about is not AI, unless you think it's doing something other than making it worse. But things like those Google Glasses, you know, like one of our colleagues has, you put it on your face and it's going to mediate your interaction with the world.
[00:29:34] Rob Simpson: Yeah.
[00:29:35] Emily McTernan: You can do social media on screen next to your eye.
[00:29:38] Rob Simpson: Yeah.
[00:29:39] Emily McTernan: You can ask it questions about the world and AI will tell you. How does that go in your story? And I wondered if that might put pressure on whether you think it really is this worry about needing to be physically together.
[00:29:50] Rob Simpson: I don't know enough about what the kind of monetised version of these glasses, spectacles technologies is going to be. So it's hard to, you know, it's not just that I would be speculating to have a take on that. It's that I'd be sort of speculating on many layers, uh, layers at the same time. Because I don't really know how the companies are expecting to make a ton of money out of that technology right now. Like is it a data gathering thing? Are they just gonna make money off the sales of the devices? I'm not sure. So I don't, about that one, i'd just be guessing. I mean, do you have a hot take on those?
[00:30:30] Emily McTernan: I find them troubling and I can't figure out why, and I think it might be because I,
[00:30:33] Rob Simpson: Is it because they're really ugly?
[00:30:34] Emily McTernan: Well, they're very, that's, that's not a good enough reason. There's lots of very ugly things that we wear. Um, no, I think that the reason is something like, I think I buy the story that it really matters that we're physically right, co-located and responsive to the nuances of each other's gesture and conversation, and that we know that having screens out in front of us distracts us from that, right? Putting them literally in your eyes
[00:30:59] Rob Simpson: Mm,
[00:30:59] Emily McTernan: Seems to definitely make things.
[00:31:01] Rob Simpson: Mm, mm-hmm. Yeah.
[00:31:02] Emily McTernan: So my suspicion is this is not good news for the being together, undistracted deeply, learning from one another's stuff that you and I are both sympathetic thinking matters. Um,
[00:31:15] Rob Simpson: Yeah, there's a way of thinking about these issues. I mean, I, I'm not sure if we would flesh it out in precisely the same way. Flesh it out is a kind of,
[00:31:23] Emily McTernan: It's already given away how fleshed [...].
[00:31:26] Rob Simpson: But when you don't have the capacity to become deeply absorbed in what a person right in front of you is saying and just hear them out at great length, I think something profound has already lost. Now, young little children mostly don't have that capacity, so we have to acquire that capacity through the maturation of our perceptual and cognitive abilities and our social abilities. I think we're built to get that capacity. Something has to interrupt it for most of us in order for us to not get there and and stay there for most of our adult life.
I think all of these technologies in their own way function as barriers to that. And exactly how the barriers work is gonna be different between LLMs, smartphones, these glasses. And that doesn't mean the technologies don't have any valuable uses, et cetera, but if what they're taking away from us is our ability to concentrate, to do that deep absorbing interaction with other people. I mean, the, the benefits just can't be worth the costs.
[00:32:31] Emily McTernan: Now we're in agreement. We should have got a tech optimist into the room. We'll have to get one on later in the podcast series to talk to us about why these are all such a great idea. I think you and I may be too much in alignment. Um, this term. I've banned all devices from my classroom.
[00:32:45] Rob Simpson: Yeah, I do the same.
[00:32:45] Emily McTernan: No laptops. No. And it's amazing the quality of attention shift. that I'm noticing.
[00:32:51] Rob Simpson: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:32:52] Emily McTernan: And in strongly positive directions.
[00:32:54] Rob Simpson: Do you think you teach better when you have that rule?
[00:32:59] Emily McTernan: I feel more exposed.
[00:33:00] Rob Simpson: Mm.
[00:33:01] Emily McTernan: I don't know if I teach better.
[00:33:02] Rob Simpson: Mm.
[00:33:03] Emily McTernan: What I hadn't realised is the, the, um, the extent to which screens have crept into my class.
[00:33:09] Rob Simpson: Mm.
[00:33:09] Emily McTernan: I'd always been pro fewer screens and when they suddenly went away, I realised just how many.
[00:33:15] Rob Simpson: Can I give you a little tip?
[00:33:17] Emily McTernan: Mm.
[00:33:17] Rob Simpson: I mean, maybe you already do this. So I have strict no screens policy, but I tell them every half hour or so, I'll hit pause and you can look at your phone for a minute to check if you've got messages. So that part of your brain that's going, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I'm worried that I might have got a message, don't worry, it's cool.
And then I feel like the quality of attention that people are able to bring as a result of that is really high because for the, apart from the few minutes that are dotted throughout the thing where I let them look at their screen from, I just don't talk while they do it, it's like, let's just take a, you know, two minute break, stand up, stretch your legs, have a drink of water, and look at your phone. Then when that moment is over, the kind of the attentional feeling of the room. It's such a marked shift and I can get pick up into the next slide and I don't know, I think it's great. I think,
[00:34:04] Emily McTernan: Oh, that's fascinating. I'm gonna be trying this now. This is a great idea. I mean,
[00:34:07] Rob Simpson: Everyone wins. The students have a better time and, and I do a better job.
[00:34:10] Emily McTernan: They're very engaged, but they often are. So yeah, I'm, I'm holding fire on my judgement on it. Interesting. I'm gonna ask them how they've experienced it, but I like the idea of it.
[00:34:17] Rob Simpson: Yeah. It also helps sensitise us to how bloody addicted we are, right? When you realise, oh, thank goodness I got my, you know, I get a little bit of it as well.
[00:34:26] Emily McTernan: It's embarrassing, right? If you can't do more than 30 minutes, but I totally, totally get that. But back to your paper, we've got distracted there, but it was relevantly distracted. I hope that the audience agrees. Um, I wanted to, before we close, just briefly have a bit of a think about the extension of your arguments.
[00:34:41] Rob Simpson: Mm-hmm.
[00:34:41] Emily McTernan: So you've dealt with the privilege objection. You said that doesn't really stand up. You've told us a lot about what's wrong with social media. And so I wanted to know why you didn't write a more strident article in two respects. So the first respect is, why don't you conclude that we, if we can, and unless we're in this kind of small group where perhaps for us the benefits are great enough, so socially extremely isolated for various different reasons, but for the rest of us, shouldn't we think that we must quit?
[00:35:08] Rob Simpson: Hmm.
[00:35:09] Emily McTernan: Both pragmatically, but also morally and politically, given what you've said about other people.
[00:35:14] Rob Simpson: Mm. Yeah, it's not that I disagree with that conclusion. I suppose one of the things I think about when I'm writing, it's not the only thing, but one of the things I think about is where can I value add to the discourse?
So just being another person joining in saying, you know, a lot of the things I said in the first half of this conversation are things that people listening might have heard a dozen times before or more in op-eds and kind of tech sceptical documentaries or podcasts, books, et cetera. So apologies if you felt like I was just singing from a familiar hymn sheet.
When it comes to writing and trying to put my best scholarship and thinking into some work, I'm looking for the spot where I think something that is relevant to these bigger debates hasn't been said, and so that's kind of the genesis of this paper. People keep making this argument about privilege. And although my spidey senses tell me this argument stinks, it's compelling enough on the surface that it's, if it's not obvious to me exactly why the argument stinks, then there's gonna be other people out there encountering it for whom it's not obvious either.
So something I can do is just try to get into the nitty gritty of that and work out what's going on and, but that means I, I guess my slightly, or more than slightly naive hope in doing that work is that some of these more strident forceful radical anti-tech people who have a bigger platform in public discourse that when they get to that bit in the dialectic, they're like, ah, hang on, someone's gone into the plumbing of that argument and worked out how the pipes all connect up.
So one of the authors that I read and who I felt very inspired by, and also a lot of sympathy with, uh, on this stuff is Jaron Lanier. He's the one time tech, um, company higher up who then became a tech critical author. His, I guess his most widely read book is 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Right Now. That might not be the exact title, but something like that, 10 Arguments. And yeah, I hope that working out the details of something like this, that a person like that can, you know, pick up the argument and, and signal boost it in different contexts.
Uh, but basically I agree with those people. If we were in a position in this country to do what the Australian Government did and ban this stuff for under sixteens, I'd be a hundred percent in favour of it. And, you know, I might want to go further. I think these are really complex policy decisions, so it's not, uh, it's not really in anyone's interests for us to occupy kind of simplistic or extreme stances when it comes to making policy because policy's complicated and there's lots of ways it can backfire. But, if, if I was just exercising my kind of democratic vote and the question was overall gist wise more of this stuff, or less, I'm voting for less.
[00:38:07] Emily McTernan: Fantastic. Final question from me then. Where next for this research?
[00:38:11] Rob Simpson: Yeah. Good. So I've been talking to, uh, a friend, another philosopher who's at the University of Warwick, a guy named Henrik Kugelberg, who's also interested in these questions and Henrik and I are trying to think about those, those sorts of philosophers who I mentioned earlier, Heideger and Ellul, these old fashioned philosophers of technology who, I mean, I've given you two names, but there's dozens of people of whom this is true, who when they were thinking about ethical questions around technology, didn't do the thing that so many people today do and just say, look, it's just a tool.
Tools can be used for good ends or they can be used for bad ends. And so to adopt some kind of strong general stance on should we even have this tool, this kind of misunderstanding, the thing you're talking about, that perspective, uh, I think is so widespread today, and particularly among scholars and writers and intellectuals who write about technology, uh, these particular technologies, but lots of technologies.
It's just a tool. The question is not should we have it, the question is, what should we do with it? Older fashioned philosophers of technology weren't so prone to that way of thinking. Some of them were, but there were more who weren't. So Henrik and I are interested in trying to retrieve and re-articulate that sort of more intrinsic critique of technology and see whether we can apply it to social media.
One of the challenges in doing that is trying to get clear about, well, what, what is the recipe? We can see the ingredients that are combined to make, uh, social media and there is this sort of family resemblance between Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Bluesky.
But surely we don't think, get rid of the ingredients. We don't think blow up power stations and satellites and destroy all smartphones. I mean, someone could take that view, but that does seem extremist even to a techphobe like me. So what are we saying? We're saying there's a particular way of combining the ingredients that the, the thing that you produce, the recipe, that recipe is just irredeemable.
Can we make that argument stick and can we make it stick in relation to social media in particular? We think maybe we can, but it's if, if we can. It's really hard work, right? Is social media just bound to bite us in any world, in any configuration? We think our hunch is yeah. And we're trying to figure out whether we can defend that in a kind of philosophically respectable way.
[00:40:40] Emily McTernan: Fantastic. I'm looking forward to reading that and, uh, furthering my view that perhaps something has gone wrong with social media. Thank you, Rob.
We've been discussing Rob's chapter, the Ethics of Quitting Social Media in the recently published Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. Full details as ever in the show notes for the episode.
Next week we'll be discussing how to defend the Political Constitution with Professor Richard Bellamy. Remember to make sure you don't miss out on that or future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us.
I'm Emily McTernan. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.