The Show Can't Go On

Unless we change how we engage with technology and the world, people like Trump will continue to dominate our politics, with disastrous consequences for our society.

Photo by Matoo.Studio on Unsplash

Technology isn’t neutral. In just a few generations, we’ve moved from a society rooted in in-person communication and leisure to one that is mediated and dominated by screens, fundamentally transforming how we engage with the world and each other in the process. Our screen-first world is what allowed Trump to win the Presidency a second time, and that’s just the start. If we don’t understand and change how we live and leverage technology, we will amuse ourselves to death in a future that resembles Brave New World or WALL-E, pick your dystopia.

To avoid that future, we need to understand why we’re here, and what each of us can do to prevent it. Our lives are a collection of connected experiences, and each experience is shaped by our role and the type of engagement.

There are two types of engagement: active and passive. Active engagement is defined by physically experiencing something; passive engagement happens when your experience is mediated by a technology such as the television, phone screen, social media app, or the radio. In the former, you are present; in the latter, you are distant.

The second factor is our role in the experience, which can be that of a viewer or participant. A viewer watches and receives the action as it takes place, while a participant is part of the action, a shaper of experiences.

These forces combine to create a 2x2 with four quadrants: Active-Viewer, Passive-Viewer, Passive-Participant, and Active-Participant. The quadrant we’re in shapes every experience. When taken together, the quadrant(s) we’re in most often define our goals and expectations for how the world will respond to us, which informs our worldview and goals.

To make all of this more concrete, let’s consider the four quadrants for music:

Listening to music at home or sharing a playlist with a friend is great, but it doesn’t compare to the experience of seeing your favorite band live or playing an instrument, either on your own or as part of an ensemble. Music is just one example. In every type of experience, you can slot your experiences into one of the four quadrants.

Dividing experiences into a 2x2 isn’t particularly novel or interesting. The critical insight here is that your goal for an experience is shaped and largely defined by the quadrant you’re in. The more time you spend in a quadrant, the more that way of being will become your default mode and set of expectations for the world. The transition from our default way being that of an Active-Participant to that of a Passive-Viewer is the root cause of many of our societal ills.

Being an Active-Participant is the best because it provides you with an opportunity to experience “flow”, that elusive and wonderful feeling where you become so absorbed in a task that time bends; seconds can last forever for athlete, while jamming for three hours can feel like the blink of an eye for a jazz musician.

Active-Viewer is how we watched and engaged in the world when we were Active-Participants before the advent of modern technology. If you wanted to see a baseball game or an opera, you needed to be there in person. If you wanted to hear the Lincoln-Douglas debate, you had to show up. And if you wanted to see a great bird, you had to be there, in real life, waiting for the moment when it would reveal itself to you. Your presence defined your experience. You’re not the protagonist, but you are part of the crowd, and that can be magical.

Next on our list is the widest category and the one that’s changed the most with the rise of social media and a phone-based life: Passive-Participant. Technology has made it easier to be in this category–it’s where we respond and feel a part of the experience, though our participation is remote from the Active-Participants in time and/or space.

I’m old enough to remember getting mixtapes and burning cds. When you share music with a friend, you’re trying to broaden their tastes; it’s passive-participant because you aren’t creating the music, but you are curating it. The goal of that mixtape is to inform and educate a friend. As our society has become technology-first, the goal of passive-participants is no longer to inform or educate, it’s to entertain. To troll. To get a laugh. The most valued passive-participants are influencers who monetize their entertainment value to others in short bursts that bring the LOLZ and require no context or critical thought.

Watching television is the canonical example of a Passive-Viewer experience. When we watch television, we’re present, but the active part of our brains is shut off. It’s a flow-like state where the hours meld together without the benefits of flow. This is why kids (and adults) become zombies when they watch tv for too long. And because the passive-viewer mode stays with us once the tv is off, there’s a post-watching moodiness and agitation that stays with us while the active part of our brains slowly turn back on—if we ever decide to turn them on.

Democracy Dies In Memes

Living in the Passive row is corrosive to our society because democracy requires active participation. Think back to Tocqueville, civil society, and the political organizing of the past. Before we started bowling alone—or, worse than that, bowling on an app on our phones in our rooms alone—we actually joined bowling leagues where we mingled and formed friendships with those like us and those who differed. Those social bonds were the foundation of our democracy.

Democracy is the ultimate form of engagement with the real world; the stakes are the highest, and we have the most agency, for good or ill.

Unfortunately, there is mismatch between the passive speech that dominates society today and the active speech required to maintain a healthy democracy. People haven’t changed; what’s changed are the technologies that shape how we experience the world. FDR and Lincoln couldn’t have been elected in the television era, which required politicians who could connect in short soundbites and visuals like Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton.

We’re now in a phone-based era where the goal is entertainment, and content comes in an endless stream that lacks context and depth. We no longer have the attention spans to engage with complex points of view or reasoned debate. In a world where Steve Bannon and less nefarious actors have succeeded in leveraging AI, podcasts, and social media to flood the zone with shit, people can no longer distinguish fact from fiction. Distrust for authority has increased, with know-nothing influencers usurping the role of experts. Each of us lives our own truth.

You know who understands this better than anyone? Trump.

Trump experiences the world through the prism of how it will play on television and how he can leverage it as a passive-participant on social media. His actual day job as the most powerful Active-Participant in the world doesn’t excite him, but television ratings do.

Consider who Trump ended the Oval Office meeting where he bullied Zelensky: “This is going to be great television.” I’m sorry, but the man just knifed our ally and the alliance of democracy we established and nurtured for the 80 most peaceful and prosperous years of modernity in favor of the authoritarians and his first response was that it’ll make great tv. And you know what, damnit, he was right.

Trump knows how to make great television. A few days later, Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress. He claimed that the start to his Presidency was the most successful in history (George Washington was second), boasted about terminating the “green new scam” and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, crowed about renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and referred to Senator Warren as Pocahontas.

A recent Democrat and one of the six Americans being followed by the NY Times thought that the speech was impressive. “Listen, he understands the media, he understands TV,” she said. “He tried to say things here and there to break the seriousness of the speech,” she added, noting that there were a few times when she found herself laughing out loud. She found herself laughing out loud. The World is being remade in the image of dictators, but the guy is entertaining as hell.

What makes Trump so effective is that he knows how to simultaneously entertain people by making great television and shaping the online discourse as a passive-participant. He’s the protagonist as an active-participant, but always with an eye towards the television audience, providing entertaining commentary as a passive-participant from the sidelines.

His ability to entertain the masses with a whirlwind of bullshit, grievance, braggadocio, and unscripted turns entertains his base and makes him too slippery for opponents to pin down. The show and promise that things were and will be better under him is what caused low propensity voters to vote him back into the White House. None of this was rational if you approach politics through the lens of how it will improve lives, but those of us living in the passive state don’t want to be rational, they want to be entertained.

After four years of competency under Biden, we’re back to politics as a reality show—only this time, he’s surrounded by sycophants and can actually implement his policies. The problem with politics as a reality show is that it's the most deadly serious business we have on this planet. Bad decisions don’t lead to a website going down, they can lead to war, death, and needless human suffering.

A Society Reborn in the Real World

The path back is as obvious to me as it is hard to imagine: a return to the real world, with all of its risks, unexpected joys, and challenges. Just this week I saw an article about how fewer young people are getting into the most life-affirming type of Active-Participant experience: romantic relationships. It’s the ultimate set of experiences that push us to learn, grow, evolve, and flow—even when the end result can be the pain of a breakup or the sting of rejection. Nothing wagered, nothing gained.

Romantic relationships aren’t everything, of course, and you can’t manufacture them on your own. But there is something special about actively engaging with those you love in the real world. Playing with kids at the park, reconnecting with an old friend over a coffee, playing music as part of an ensemble, making art—there are so many easily accessible ways to be an Active-Participant in the real world.

For me, the deepest and most meaningful type of Active-Participation that I can experience by myself is time in nature. Nature connects me to the present and my physical existence. It fills me with a sense of awe, and makes me feel more connected to the rest of the planet.

The future of our lives, our democracy, and our society will be shaped by how we choose to engage with the world, and the role that emerging technologies like AI have in shaping that experience. Will we cede our purpose and agency to a few Silicon Valley edgelords who lack a moral center and don’t know, value, or care about us? Or will we summon the courage to demand something better, something more humane, something more real?

The first step in creating a better society is to put down our phones, open the door, and step outside. While a walk in the woods won’t solve the problems of the day, it will, I believe, over time and at scale, begin the healing process and rebalancing that needs to happen for us to go back to being an active, informed, and engaged society.