The Extinction of Experience: Christine Rosen on the Impact of Technology on Society

>> Peter Robinson: Do we spend too much time looking into our screens and too little looking into human eyes? Christine Rosen on Uncommon Knowledge now.

>> Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor at the New Atlantis, a regular contributor to Commentary magazine, and a cohost of the daily Commentary podcast.

She holds a doctorate in history from Emory. Christine Rosen's most recent book, published this autumn, the Extinction of Being Human in a Disembodied World. Christine, welcome.

>> Christine Rosen: Thanks for having me.

>> Peter Robinson: Christine, your argument. Let's lay out the basics of the argument from the Extinction of Experience, I'm quoting here.

Our understanding of experience has become disordered in ways large and small. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. What do we lose when we no longer talk about the human condition, but rather the user experience? What do we lose?

>> Christine Rosen: Well, I think we lose an important part of our humanity and an understanding not only of ourselves as individuals, but of our role in communities and families, in culture. And the title, although it sounds a little bit portentous, Extinction of Experience, actually comes from a naturalist, Robert Michael Pyle, who worried about children growing up in a world where they didn't actually experience nature.

They didn't get muddy, they didn't run around in forests, they had no interaction with wildlife. And then when they grew up, if a species, for example, went extinct, would they care? Because they wouldn't even know what they were missing. And that essay really stayed with me because I started realizing, looking around, and this includes myself.

So I'm indicting myself here, too, that I was having experiences throughout my daily life and watching others have experiences via a screen. So I was having look down experiences, not look up experiences. And it was transforming the way we all interacted whether you.

>> Peter Robinson: I'm sorry, but could you tell that story that you tell in the book, there was a rainbow.

You're in New York.

>> Christine Rosen: Yeah, here, actually, yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Sorry, go ahead.

>> Christine Rosen: So, no, I had seen a performance at the Kennedy center.

>> Peter Robinson: That is, it exactly.

>> Christine Rosen: And it had been pouring rain, and we all went up to the lovely roof terrace and this gorgeous rainbow over the Potomac River.

And I was admiring it. Every single person pulled out a phone and was taking pictures. And I completely understood that impulse because it's a really beautiful rainbow. But they weren't just first stopping and experiencing the rainbow with the people they'd come to the show with, and they were all immediately sending the pictures and that moment, which for, it's fleeting, right?

A rainbow is a very fleeting and beautiful, spontaneous thing. They didn't pause to savor it. And I wondered if that meant anything. I think some people would argue, no, who cares? And now they have a permanent memory in the digital cloud of this thing, which they instantly could share with millions of their friends and followers.

But I think we do miss something when we don't pause to savor those moments, because it makes us slow down, makes us think about what we can appreciate. Doesn't have to be a rainbow. It can be almost anything. And it's getting harder and harder to do that because the default now is always to have the phone, always have the screen, always have something to occupy our minds and occupy our attention.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, again, from the extinction of experience. This struck me as especially fascinating. The philosopher Robert Nozick asked a simple question. If we could create a machine that would offer us the illusion of a life of constant pleasure while also erasing from our memory any inkling that we were hooked up to such a machine, would we choose to plug in?

The assumption has always been that most people will choose no. We want to do certain. Now you're quoting Nozick. We want to do certain things and not just have the illusion of doing them, Nozick argued. And then Christine Rosen adds, I'm not so sure. And why do you add I'm not so sure?

>> Christine Rosen: Well, I think this really struck me because Nozick's experiment assumed a certain number of things about what people valued in their embodied human form. Meaning, if you give someone an opportunity to do something in simulated form, they might want to try it. But they would still want to have that experience, ideally in an embodied human form, for it to be quote unquote real.

And I say quote unquote because I think a lot of our sense of reality has shifted dramatically because of the way we can mediate experience. An update to that experiment was really worrisome because they tweaked it a little bit. But one of the things that the people who updated Nozick's original experiment was.

>> Peter Robinson: Nozick's original experiment is what, the 80s?

>> Christine Rosen: Yes, I think it was in the early 80s.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> Christine Rosen: Was to say, well, what if we gave you a pill and basically made it easy? You don't have to step into a machine and remove yourself physically from reality maybe it would just be.

You take a pill and it's very Matrix like, right? If you've seen the movie the Matrix, this is the idea. Would you plug in? If you didn't, once you were plugged in, you didn't realize you were plugged in. And more people, several generations on, said, well, I guess I would consider that.

I would consider living in a virtual reality rather than experiencing an embodied reality. And that is the option for a lot of us throughout our daily lives. Now we can forget that we have physical bodies, we can live online, we can live in virtual worlds, have conversations with people all over the world and never leave our homes.

So is that bad? Well, if you look at rates of loneliness and how much time, particularly young people, spend physically alone, not with other people, I think there are some concerns and some drawbacks to that trade off. But to Nozick's point, I think it's worrisome that people will now understand their own reality differently if they don't tie it to being in a physical body.

And a lot of folks in Silicon Valley would argue, yeah, that's great, we're gonna extend life. We're gonna upload your consciousness when you die, we're gonna live forever. There are all these sort of schemes that argue you shouldn't be limited by your physical body. But if you're conservative, which I am, I think our bodies teach us some humility and lessons that we should attend to, even if we do have these tools.

>> Peter Robinson: So this is so interesting. I don't recall any passage in your book in which you're explicitly theological. But this is the old gnostic heresy, isn't it?

>> Christine Rosen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: That we're spirits trapped inside this body and if only we could free ourselves from the physical.

>> Christine Rosen: Right.

>> Peter Robinson: And that's not Judaism and orthodox Christianity both insist that the human being is both physical and spiritual, that we of all of the creatures are both. That there's something extremely profound about that. Am I right about that?

>> Christine Rosen: That's correct and in fact, I wrestled with. I had a draft of a chapter about faith.

It became a little too complicated perhaps actually, that's been one of the main requests for when it comes out in paperback. But it was really difficult. It became very theological. But I found it extremely useful in guiding even the secular argument about what it means to be physically embodied human beings.

Because there are certain things that we cannot control about our own bodies. And coming to terms with that is part of becoming a whole person.

>> Peter Robinson: Right, okay, so what is the, you mentioned a moment ago, the rising rates of loneliness. Beyond that, what are your fears? Okay, so some young people are taking a little longer to get married and have dates and so forth.

Tell me something I don't know.

>> Christine Rosen: I worry about the lack of face to face communication. That to me, that was sort of the motivating chapter in the books. First chapter in the book, I guess the second chapter officially. But I was noticing in my own life and in my children's lives that people were taking for granted that having an interaction with another human being means being physically present and looking them in the eye and trying to read their signals.

And there is a huge amount that we know, but we don't know why we know it as human beings, we're evolutionarily to this point because we learned how to read each other's faces. So if you cross your arms and glare, you might just be pondering something, or you might be angry at me, but I know I can probably tell now.

>> Peter Robinson: You can tell somehow, instinctively, immediately.

>> Christine Rosen: Yes, but we're raising generations of young people now who actually don't read the signals that, well, I think the lockdowns during COVID where a lot of people had to mediate through screens. Suddenly brought this to the attention of a lot of parents when kids were trying to do school online and things like that.

But this is a problem for everyone, adults included. It's much easier and less risky not to deal with people in embodied form. And again, this is, it's hard to, I can't cite data about this. But I can tell you I've talked to lots of people who work in public facing roles, whether that's in diplomacy, in business, in education, and they all say the same thing.

Younger generations are having to be taught these skills that earlier generations took for granted. So those of us who grew up without these technologies, I'm Gen X, so I'm the perfect hybrid. I didn't have it as a kid, had a great Gen X childhood where I drank out of a hose and rode my bike around and was never tracked by my parents.

But I had to adapt to the technologies when I became an adult. Kids these days start out with these things, and they live their worlds on a daily basis through the technology. And they don't practice other skills, those soft human skills, learning to look at each other and interact with each other and negotiate with each other without that sort of mediation.

And those are important, too. And so, part of the book is a plea to remember that when we embrace technology for some of these human interactions, there's an opportunity cost. We do lose something, now, it might be worth it, but it's not always.

>> Peter Robinson: Something is gained, but something is also lost.

>> Christine Rosen: Exactly.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, so I just wanna push this a little bit further because I'd like to, I'm trying to figure out how far you're willing to go. You're being very, in fact, you say at one point in the book, this book is a modest argument, or modest, I can't remember quite with the phrasing, but you're charming, and modest, and reasonable, and so forth.

>> Christine Rosen: Most of the time.

>> Peter Robinson: Most of the time. I'm trying to see if you're gonna say this is responsible for the polarization and screaming matches that we saw in the last election. Or I'm trying to see if I can get you to say that you're angry about the effects, or do you not wanna go there?

>> Christine Rosen: Well, I'm very worried about the effects on the broader culture. And it's not just because we don't know how to interact with each other like decent human beings. It's that we're really impatient as a culture because we have become habituated to a life where we just have to tap or swipe or push a button and get what we want on demand.

This is sold to us as our right, now, if you read the advertisements that come out of Silicon Valley. And while there's nothing wrong with convenience, I think when we start to apply it to other areas of life where it's difficult to master and improve life through convenience, like say, politics.

Which is actually about negotiation and compromise and difficult long-term questions, where you have to come up with policy responses to problems that you won't ever reap the benefits or rewards from the policy you're creating. That's where I worry because I think it's very easy to just demonize and get into a very comfortable position being a moral grandstander.

If you're a politician, for example, get a lot of positive feedback from people on your side for doing that. And there really there's no risk involved, but our politics suffers. So I do think we're bringing into Congress in particular a lot of people who are there to be performative, who are really speaking not to their constituents but to their followers.

And that is a very different thing in a democracy. We do not, our government-

>> Peter Robinson: Yuval Levin, didn't he say that his phrase is that they're using-

>> Christine Rosen: It's a platform, not an institution, yes-

>> Peter Robinson: That's exactly right.

>> Christine Rosen: So the institution's supposed to form them and teach them how to behave, but instead, if you use it as a platform, institutional history, knowledge, there's no need to respect that you're performing.

But I also think it means that you're speaking to your followers, not to your constituents.

>> Peter Robinson: Right, Christine, as I read your book, I thought to myself, there is a pre-existing condition that Christine is not going into here, fair enough. It's outside the scope of this book, but it comes to mind.

And so, if I may ask, this is a flyer, because these are questions not based on your book, but just on the thinking that your book prompted in my head. And the notion that, kids who are raised on technology, the rising rates of loneliness, that the kids are not just picking up these iPhones.

The American family has already been under enormous pressure. So this extinction of experience is happening at a moment when all kinds of bonds have already been broken and frayed. And if I may, I'd just like to see you're mom, you're historian, you're a journalist, you're a writer, you will have given this some thought, I think.

>> Peter Robinson: But if I may, so in a few statistics, less than 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced. Since 1970, the rate has been about 50%. The proportion of American children under 18 living in a two parent home in 1960, 88%, in 1980, 77%, today, 71%, steady decline.

The out of wedlock birth rate, this one is dramatic. And here instead of raw figures, let me give you the famous 1965 Moynihan Report. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was concerned about, well, I'll quote it to you, the fundamental problem, he's talking about a crisis in the black family, the urban black family.

The fundamental problem is that of family structure. The black family in the urban ghetto is crumbling. So long as the situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself. The out of wedlock birth rate among the black family in American ghettos inner cities, when he wrote that report that startled him in 1965 was 25%.

The out of wedlock birth rate today among whites is 27%, among Hispanics 53%, and among blacks is 69%. So I have just, these statistics describe a catastrophe, and it is into this catastrophe that these devices are being introduced. What caused that catastrophe? What caused so to speak, the pre existing condition?

>> Christine Rosen: Well, it's a tough question because there's, and it's-

>> Peter Robinson: The dawn,, I thought you'd have an answer.

>> Christine Rosen: I do not have a very simple answer to this, but I have some ideas which I'll offer.

>> Peter Robinson: And let it be noted for our viewers that I'm attack.

This is an ambush, this is not in the book.

>> Christine Rosen: You're pouncing.

>> Peter Robinson: I'm pouncing, yes Republicans pounce in real time.

>> Christine Rosen: No, I think a couple of things have happened. I mean look, the feminist movement and the rise of women's education and movement into the workforce was a very destabilizing thing.

It was positive in many, many, many ways, but it did place a new strain on the family. And I think that, if you look at family breakdown in particular, you have to look at communities and at the community level. And one of the things, if you remember Jane Jacobs and others who talked about eyes on the street.

So even if you're a child in a broken home in an urban setting, for example, you had people, you had adults in your world who were looking out in general for the kids in the neighborhood. And that also disappeared fairly rapidly. So you had people, cuz people worked.

People had to go to work, people were not on the street. They were going into offices. And so, you had a whole bunch of, Of kids who needed tending to, but there weren't adults to do that job. And enter first, television, then video games, and then now you can take it with you everywhere else.

>> Peter Robinson: Television is sort of the first. Television is different from radio, isn't it?

>> Christine Rosen: It is.

>> Peter Robinson: Somehow or other, television, we begin to get this argument taking very embryonic form.

>> Christine Rosen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: And it's with television, not radio.

>> Christine Rosen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Radio, somehow, when you're listening, there's some part of your brain that's more active.

Anyway, that's my theory, but okay.

>> Christine Rosen: Well, and early technology critics like Neil Postman were worried about the impact of television in the home. But television, at least people did for a long time gather around it together as a family, right? Cuz it was expensive at first, so people couldn't afford more than one television.

But I think for kids in these environments, technology became a very cheap, useful babysitter. And for lots of kids, it's actually safer to be in their house playing a video game away from the streets than it is to be unattended in the streets. So there are a lot of things that I think helped contribute to this crisis.

But I do worry about what we were promised with some of these technologies too. If you think about the early days of the Internet, it was, we're all gonna come together, we're gonna learn so much about people all over the world and this will make us better human beings.

And some of those promises were fulfilled. There's a great vast amounts of information that we now have access to. I'm a historian, I had to travel to archives to actually read people's letters. And now a lot of those things are scanned and it makes it easier to do research.

But at the end of the day, it very quickly became a substitute for a lot of things rather than just a tool, if you will. And this is where the smartphone in particular very rapidly and very detrimentally impacted our private worlds. Because suddenly, you could be with your family all together in the home, but you could all be completely apart from each other mentally in terms of where your attention was.

And you're also inviting into the private sphere a lot of influences that perhaps you might not have chosen otherwise. They're all there on the phone. And I don't wanna sound like a fear monger, but it places a new burden on a family situation that as you already described is feeling a great deal of strain.

So it adds to that burden.

>> Peter Robinson: So if we could stick with this. Well, this is fascinating to me, because 80% of the questions I ask, I think I already know the answer, but these are real questions. I can't figure this out myself. A couple of quotations. These are both a little long, but I think they'll pay off.

The late sociologist James Q Wilson, he gave a very famous talk at AEI in 1997. When the Department of Health and Human Services studied some 30,000 American households, it found that for whites, blacks, and Hispanics, and for every income level save the very highest, children raised in single-parent homes were more likely to be suspended from school, to have emotional problems, and to behave badly.

Another study showed that white children of an unmarried woman were more likely than those in two-parent family to become delinquent, even after controlling for income. Even after controlling for income, that's important. Second quotation, sociologists Bradford Wilcox and Robert Lerman. We estimate that the growth in median income of families with children would be 44% higher if the United States enjoyed 1980 levels of married parenthood today.

Further, 37% of the decline in men's employment rates can be linked to the decreasing number of Americans who form and maintain stable married families, close quote. Children need families. And we know this. This is not a sectarian fact. This is a human fact. We know it. Whatever our faith, Democrat, Republic, everybody knows this.

So why have we let this happen? I mean, and these are the questions that are real questions. Why have we let this happen? And why did we just go through an election in which neither candidate for President of the United States breathed a word about strengthening the American family?

It is madness.

>> Christine Rosen: Well, really, it was interesting to me that this is the first election in which religious faith wasn't mentioned at all, except for the fact that Kamala Harris didn't attend the Al Smith dinner. No one asked them about their faith. No one talked about faith.

No one talked about religious practices. They talked a little bit here and there about the religious vote, depending on which swing state you're discussing. But that is new. And I would add to your list of questions, or perhaps-

>> Peter Robinson: No, no, I ask and-

>> Christine Rosen: The beginning of an answer.

>> Peter Robinson: You answer.

>> Christine Rosen: Let me try to give you an answer. One of the other things that's deteriorated as the family structure has deteriorated, leading to all these second order problems, is that parents now mistrust their own judgment about a great many things. So you have this rise of a parenting expertise class which changes its advice left and right.

And you also have parents second guessing their own instincts because they do not have perhaps, cuz they're having children later and fewer in number. And so they don't have this, again, a community of family members and extended family whom they can rely on for advice and everything. So they turn to so-called professionals, some of whom have good advice.

You should listen to your pediatrician. I think that's always a good idea. But the anxiety over parenting as family size shrunk is so intriguing to me. And I think if you add technology into that mix, what you get are a lot of anxious parents thinking, we're not doing what we're supposed to do.

All the experts are doing X, Y, or Z. Maybe we can give our kids a leapfrog learning device because that's like a computer. And they need to know how to use computers.

>> Peter Robinson: I wonder if we could track this. You're about a generation and a half, maybe two generations younger than I am.

So as you're describing the neighborhoods and the eyes on and so forth, I'm thinking of the house I lived in when I was a little kid. We lived there. We moved when I was seven. But I can remember that neighborhood. All the moms stayed home. Every single one.

All the fathers went off to work. No family on our street had more than one car, which meant that there were arrangements made about-

>> Christine Rosen: Carpools, yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Carpools, and who was going to go do the grocery shopping. And babysitting was very thin on the ground. So you went grocery shopping with your mom.

And when you went out to play, the door got opened and off you went. And I remember no anxiety on my parents' part as long as I didn't go beyond the end of the block in that direction or the end of the block in that direction. And every mom in every house on that block knew me.

Now, there are all kinds of things about that world that we don't want to return. In particular, there must have been, I think back on it now, there must have been a lot of highly intelligent, capable women who-

>> Christine Rosen: A lot of wasted talent-

>> Peter Robinson: Yes, exactly.

>> Christine Rosen: In some of those kitchens.

>> Peter Robinson: So this is not an argument for returning to 1959. All right, so what was it like for you? Were things different by the time you came along?

>> Christine Rosen: Well, I'm 51, so I was born in 1973 and-

>> Peter Robinson: You child.

>> Christine Rosen: I was such a baby. Yes, thank you.

But we were raised pretty free range. We were free range kids and so we had a lot of freedom. I knew everyone on my block. I knew most of the neighbors. There were-

>> Peter Robinson: So there was, again, trust in the neighbors.

>> Christine Rosen: Trust in the neighbors. But a lot of the moms worked at least part time, maybe a little more, because they had to, including my own.

So we had a fair amount of freedom, but there was also a sort of thrown together thing. Most of the babysitting came from relatives. I'd go stay at my grandma's when my parents wanted to go out. But the real distinction, the huge shift, I think, from even that childhood, a Gen X childhood, to millennial childhood.

And now for the Gen Z ers and Gen Alpha coming up behind them, is that they are more likely. And this includes their parents now too, they're more likely to know the name of a YouTube star or an influencer than they are to know their own neighbors. And I think the isolation that we see among Americans, we see it in the loneliness data but there's also other ways that I think it comes out. The enthusiasm for living one's life online comes from this too, connecting to people in your neighborhood used to be a given. And now it's really not so much of community life that used to happen in person. Whether it was the old Robert Putnam bowling leagues or any of the other ways in which we measure social cohesion, though a lot of those things did move online.

If you look at how we played games, we had one kid whose parents could afford an Atari. So we'd all go to his house and take turns playing Pong, I mean, if any of you know Pong, it's rather.

>> Peter Robinson: I remember Pong.

>> Christine Rosen: It's a very slow moving game by today's standards.

>> Peter Robinson: By today's standards.

>> Christine Rosen: But again, it was a communal thing we were all physically in the same space that's not how anyone games. Now they're talking to each other on their headsets, but they're alone in their own home in different places. So we've just shifted how we socialize and a lot of that is now mediated.

So setting aside the privacy issues of the amount of data being collected on our private activities. When we do that, which is a whole other debate, I think it's also led to a very fragmented sense of community for a lot of young people. And this is why when they are thrown into their first jobs or go to college for the first time, they struggle, how do I make friends, how do I find my group?

It's not true of all kids, but I think we've seen enough of a generation raised with these technologies that they will acknowledge the struggle. I see it in young employees I work with and in my kid with my kids friends.

>> Peter Robinson: So, James Q Wilson, one more time, I'm sorry, I'll bring you right back into the book-

>> Christine Rosen: Please James Q Wilson trumps me I heard that speech, by the way.

>> Peter Robinson: You were there for that.

>> Christine Rosen: Wonderful.

>> Peter Robinson: You were only 13, by the way.

>> Christine Rosen: 97.

>> Peter Robinson: James Q Wilson, I think this is from the same speech throughout the Western world. Political and intellectual Elites have abandoned interest in or acquired a deep hostility to the force that has given meaning to Western life.

To a degree, this was understandable, we have done more than end religious warfare, he's talking about religion.

>> Christine Rosen: Mm-hm.

>> Peter Robinson: We have tried hard to end religion itself, thereby subjecting much of mankind to a new form of warfare. The hopeless struggle of lonely souls against impulses they can neither understand nor control.

Now, the speech was about the breakdown of the American family, and he put religion right at the center of it. So these two things that just baffle me, why doesn't we all feel it?

>> Christine Rosen: Mm-hm.

>> Peter Robinson: Nobody's as articulate as, very few people are as articulate as you, but we all, we see isolation.

We are all nervous about what is happening with our kids and grandchildren picking up. I don't understand why this doesn't make its way into politics, and you raise this point which hadn't occurred to me, but again, religion is now no longer even spoken of, so why not?

>> Christine Rosen: We've lost the ability to even speak in the language of virtue, because what we're circling around here is virtue, character formation.

That's what gives people a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a sense of understanding where they belong in the world that they live in. And I think what you see and technology has offered the promise of that in digital form to a lot of people. Your daily life is isolating and alienating, find community online, you can game with your friends, you can do all these things.

But I think we've experimented with the alternative, with technology long enough to say that the simulation is not the same thing, qualitatively, it's different. It doesn't actually inculcate the kinds of virtues that we want, it inculcates habits of mind that actually undermine virtue because they reward impatience, a sense of the now.

There's no respect for historical norms, there's no respect for how things can take time to really develop. Talk to anyone who online dates, they will tell you this, the time and space it takes to really get to know another human being has disappeared because now we have to do it through an app.

Now, of course, not everybody, it's a choice. But it becomes the norm, it became the norm very quickly, and that's where I think technology is a very useful and powerful thing in a lot of ways. But when we invite it into our most intimate relationships and it starts to teach us habits of mind that develop certain character traits, then we are using it to inculcate very different things from virtue.

>> Peter Robinson: So we know that a little kid the first things, not the first things, because it takes a lifetime in some ways to learn them. But when children are children, in teaching virtue, basic character, and so forth, you need to learn two things above all. Impulse control and how to get along with other people, and you will learn neither of those in the digital world.

>> Christine Rosen: Right.

>> Peter Robinson: I've got the argument.

>> Christine Rosen: Yes There is not an app for either of those things, and I think both of those things are also what is lacking in our politics. Politics is fueled by impulse control and an inability to get along and compromise, because those are not rewarded in our culture these days.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, now, Christine, there's a counterattack, this is Marc Andreessen, and it's his concept, by the way. I have to stipulate that Marc Henderson is actually, a friend of mine.

>> Christine Rosen: Okay, so sorry, it passed legal vetting.

>> Peter Robinson: I'm sure, in fact, he will be flattered to hear you take him.

>> Christine Rosen: I'm not sure he'll be flattered by how I characterize his argument, but let's hope so.

>> Peter Robinson: So he writes about reality privilege, and I'm quoting you quoting, this is in your book, you take him on in the book.

>> Christine Rosen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich.

Even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, to work with, and to date. And not dating, you're already a mother, but everything else is a fellow at okay? Everyone else continues, Marc Andreessen, the vast majority of humanity lacks reality privilege.

Their online world is or will be immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them, in the quote-unquote, real world. Your real life may be rich enough to satisfy you, but there are a lot of people whose lives would be better online.

The answer to the problem is not less digital, not more real experience, but more digital. Supplanting real experience with richer, better, more beautiful, more pleasant digital experience, and Christine Rosen says.

>> Christine Rosen: So now you'll see the rage come forth, this bothers me to my core for a number of reasons.

First of all, I'm sure Marc Andreessen is a very nice person who has a very lovely life, and good for him, he's earned it. But the argument-

>> Peter Robinson: He's a very nice person.

>> Christine Rosen: I'm sure he is.

>> Peter Robinson: You stipulate it, I confirm it.

>> Christine Rosen: Okay, good, but the argument that what we owe each other, is for the people whose lives are terrible, the only thing we can do for them is to give them this simulated world.

Where they can slap on VR goggles that people whose companies Andreessen will reap great benefits from having invested in will give them everything they want. That is an unfree that is not a choice, and that is a dystopian science fiction novel. It was called Ready Player One, and I think it's dystopian for a number of reasons.

It takes away the idea of moral agency and freedom for the people who you slap the VR headset on, and suggesting that it's a choice that's better for them is condescending. In the extreme, it also would very quickly lead to a world where there were these huge class disparities in terms of who could live their nice reality privilege life and who would live the VR life.

And we do already see glimmers of this in how some of these technologies are being used. So if you don't have great health insurance, you might be offered, if you have a mental health issue, a chatbot to talk to, not a human therapist. If you have good health insurance, you can go talk to another human being and have nice psychotherapy session every week and probably get better sooner.

So this two-tier way, this idea that some people deserve human contact and human attention, and other people should be satisfied with a simulation of it bothers me in the extreme. Because it's the most vulnerable populations who get that first, children, the elderly and the sick and the poor.

Those are the people he's talking about whose realities are challenged but our obligation to each other is to improve their reality, not to give them some simulation of reality. And that's to say nothing about the mental health crises and the physical crises that this would make much worse.

Because if you sit all day with VR goggles on what happens to your actual body? We know rising obesity rates, all kinds of health issues in this country, much of which comes from the fact that we're very sedentary and our bodies are meant to move. So I take issue with nearly every part of what he says there because I think it's a very pessimistic way to see the future of humanity and I don't think it's what he would want for his own children.

A lot of people in Silicon Valley won't allow their kids to use the products that they devise for everybody else and I think there's a truth there that should be acknowledged. So I think that's just way too pessimistic a way forward for humanity, and I would strongly oppose it.

>> Peter Robinson: And I see a new show here, we can get you and Mark to sit down and debate.

>> Christine Rosen: I would love to debate him.

>> Peter Robinson: So what should we do, again, from the extinction of experience, a decade ago, a book about how technology is changing us would offer solutions for a more balanced relationship with our devices.

Such as take a digital sabbath, one day a week, no digital devices, avoid multitasking, and put those phones away at the dinner table. These are no longer enough, we need to be more like the Amish in our approach to technology, well now, what on earth do you mean?

>> Christine Rosen: So I said this a little tongue in cheek, but only a little, so I'm not saying give up your zippers and turn off your electric lights, but the Amish approach to technology is very aware in this sense. They're not against all technology but what they do when something new arrives is sit down as a community and ask a bunch of very important questions.

How will this change family life, what will this do to the private space of the home? Does this open our community up to values and ideas that would undermine what we think is important, and is this something that we really do need, or is it a want? And there are many, many other questions each group asks but I think that very thoughtful way of approaching technology, we didn't do that with social media platforms.

And we're in a bit of a mess now in terms of how they've impacted our kid's mental health, our politics, our culture in lots of ways. And I think we're starting to have that discussion a little more now that AI has come onto the scene, and that's all for the good.

There's a lot of fear mongering, there's a lot of ignorant discussion about AI, and there's a lot of confusion about what AI even is. But I am heartened by the fact that people seem to have learned a bit of a lesson from just uncritically embracing each new thing and this is where I become deeply conservative.

Every new thing is not an improvement, if you study history, you know this. And I think this is one of the things where we have been just absolutely dazzled by what our technologies can do for us and the power and sense of control and convenience they offer us that we've forgotten to ask those important questions about some of these new tools.

And we must do that if we're going to have a flourishing culture and politics and family and community life.

>> Peter Robinson: So if we started with my generation, we went to your generation, if it's not, if I may, your twins who are now in college.

>> Christine Rosen: Yes, they're freshmen in college.

>> Peter Robinson: And did you forbid them from, how did you raise them?

>> Christine Rosen: So they-

>> Peter Robinson: With regard to devices, if I may ask.

>> Christine Rosen: No, you may, and they will bitterly complain about it still, although they're coming around, at zero to five, they had no screens. Because I started studying this stuff more than 20 years ago, before I had kids.

I was studying Myspace and the early social media platforms and talking to early Facebook employees and researchers. And I was very worried about the way they talked about what they were doing cuz they didn't talk about, hey, we want to create this thing that makes life more fun.

It was we want to control human behavior, we want to know everything about you. And their intentions were still good, make a good profit, grow, do all these entrepreneurial things, give people a platform, but their absolute fascination with human behavior struck me as something that was worth following.

And I think it's proven to be a real challenge as they try to explain the harm some of their tools have done. For my kids, yeah, zero to five, no screens, no tv, no computers, nothing. They were, but I guess they were Amish, although they did have zippers.

But once they were five years old, I allowed them to watch children's, I think they watched the Lion King was the first thing they ever saw. But by that point they were reading and when they saw something, what interested me is that with their peer group who watched a lot of stuff much earlier, and no judgment, people have to make their own choices with their family.

I've become very libertarian about this in terms of the choices people make. But they would watch something scary, and it wouldn't scare them because they were old enough to have like, they'd read stories, had stories read to them. They hadn't seen anything super scary on the screen and so it wasn't that alarming to them in quite the same way, which I thought was fascinating.

They were big Minecraft fanatics as they got into middle school, so they had rules for that, they didn't get smartphones till nineth grade. They were among the last in their group, I really did hold out, and God bless them, they hated every minute of it, but they are able now to really be aware of their use. Doesn't mean they're perfectly good at controlling it but one of my sons spent a month hiking in Wyoming with no phone. They had a sat phone in case a bear attacked, and he came back from that experience and he said, wow, I waste so much time on my phone. And so,

>> Peter Robinson: He admitted that to his mom.

>> Christine Rosen: Totally, of course, I was patting myself on the back, he's like, don't say it. So I didn't, I didn't say I told you so.

>> Peter Robinson: And we'll edit that out.

>> Christine Rosen: No, but I think that their awareness of how much time they spend on it, even though they're pretty disciplined, and it's very different for boys than girls.

I think for girls, so much more of social life happens on social media and on the phone and it's different and more difficult struggle. My friends who, I have a niece, but also my friends who have daughters, talk to me about this. So I was pretty draconian and even still, I am sure that they found stuff on their discord servers and whatnot, where they were all chatting that I would be horrified to know.

I kind of as they get older, they tell me more things about what they saw when they were 12 or 13, and I'm alarmed. But I think, though, I was lucky in that I did a lot of my work from home, and I also had twins. So as my economist friends say, they would start to play with each other at a certain age.

So they entertained each other and in that sense, I was able to keep them occupied without a screen, but that is not possible for a lot of parents. You can't cook dinner and get stuff done around the house without having some way to keep your kids occupied.

>> Peter Robinson: You said, I was very struck about the Amish, the notion that the community makes decisions, so we have a new.

Chief executive about to take office and the 119th Congress is about to take office. Is that even, I have a question here, what would you say to Donald Trump about all of this? If you could tell him anything at all, advise him in any way you wished, and the guarantee was that he would actually listen.

But I'm not sure that's even the right level at which these kinds of decisions should be made yet. Do you want our politicians to do or is there something you'd say to Donald Trump or to the leaders of the incoming Congress?

>> Christine Rosen: So as a conservative, I tend to think most top-down federal solutions are gonna just create more problems.

But with one exception here, and this is actually broadly bipartisan, and you will see legislation co-sponsored by Katie Britt of Alabama and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. These two agree on very little, but they came together to sponsor legislation about enforcing an age limit for social media use. And that is one area where I think policy has, there's enough cultural momentum now and enough understanding of the damage caused when a nine or a ten-year-old spends hours a day on Instagram looking at stuff that was designed for adults and really quite harmful.

And so I think parents have borne this burden for too long because the answer was, well, you're just a bad parent if you let your kids see this. But it is everywhere, it is ubiquitous and it is very difficult unless you can get a very committed group of parents all together to commit not to have their kids have a smartphone till 8th or 9th grade and not commit to use the social media stuff.And that's really a heavy lift when something is damaging to children. This country has generally historically been really good about coming together and saying, you know what, that's where the government has a role to protect. We've done it with alcohol and age limits, we've done it with driving, you have to get a driver's license in order to operate a car, all kinds of ways in which this is something we do.

And it's time to now enforce what's always been on the books but never really enforced against the technology companies. The burden should now be on the technology companies to enforce an age limit and they should be punished if they do not. Just like we would close down a shop that was selling alcohol to minors.

And that is a shift that on both sides of the aisle now in the House and the Senate, there are different bills, but there really is momentum now for this to become the law, the land. So in that sense, I think federal legislation would set a standard that then the companies have to meet.

>> Peter Robinson: And what about at the state level? I'm thinking of, I'd never put these two together before, but I'm thinking now of the school choice legislation. The latest news is that Texas now has enough legislators that Governor Abbott believes that they'll be able to enact school choice. And I'm conscious of reading, not in a systematic way, I haven't studied it the way you have.

But I'm conscious of reading that this school, that school, the other school, has announced either no phone, no digital devices in the classroom, or asking parents to sign digital device bans except on weekends, something of this nature. It feels as though that's gonna be easier in private schools or religious schools than in large public operations.

So possibly school choice might make it school choice legislation that makes it easier for parents to send their kids to schools they want them to attend might dovetail with this greater, greater willingness to say no, really. What it comes to, isn't it?

>> Christine Rosen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Is it really adults saying no, holding the line?

>> Christine Rosen: Yes, somewhat although so much of life now occurs on the phone. I mean, I wasn't able to park today without an app for my phone right? I mean, so much of life is now funneled through apps that you actually can't escape it even if you want to.

And in the educational environment, that's very true for kids. Some kids get, even in public schools will get an iPad when they enter kindergarten.

>> Peter Robinson: And you've given them as part of.

>> Christine Rosen: Yes, because the tech companies have given it all to the public schools for free and say, why don't you use all our great stuff so they can also hoover up a vast amount of data on your kids.

All anonymized we're reassured but that's another debate. But I would say this about that, that's actually a perfect example of conservative principles in action. Organically, communities are saying something's not working here. What can we do? What sort of solutions can we have? You have these bell to bell bans that are happening, so from the morning bell.

>> Peter Robinson: Bell to bell.

>> Christine Rosen: Yeah, the bell to bell ban of cell phones, I think that's great. I think though this is, and I'm no fan of the teacher's unions, but this is actually a place where conservatives who care about this, liberals who care about this, should sit down and talk to the teacher's unions and get them on board too.

Because teachers don't like these devices in the classroom either, they distract their students, they're competing with whatever's on the-

>> Peter Robinson: Is gonna get behind you on this one.

>> Christine Rosen: Well, here's hoping. I doubt it because I don't think she really does have the best interests of America's children at heart, despite what she's often claiming.

But parents and teachers all know that this is what would help kids. So I think we see those movements, we see a real effort to make that happen. That's from the bottom up, that's how I tend to prefer this sort of social reforms happening. But I think if you have legislation in place that says these companies are gonna be held accountable when they let underage kids on their platforms that are designed for adults.

And you have this parents' movement, and you've got my friend Jonathan Haidt has written an excellent book, Anxious Generation, about the mental health impact.

>> Peter Robinson: And Abigail Shrier.

>> Christine Rosen: And Abigail Shrier has done wonderful work on this. I mean, people are listening to this now, and so there is momentum.

And so if you have both of those things happening at the same time, I think we will see some, that's how cultural shifts happen, you can't just do it from the top down. And if you're working from the bottom up, you often will butt heads with rules and regulations that are out of date.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so last question Christine, are you optimistic? And I'm not asking a question about your obviously optimistic character, your personality. But do you think that by the time those twins of yours have given you grandchildren, let's put it off in the distance. They just started college, so we're talking about a decade from now, let's say that norms and protocols will have been established and will have become accepted.

Of course, at the same time, on the one hand I'm saying, norms and protocols, well, they have emerged that help control the use of digital devices and ensure that we don't extinguish our own human experience. Of course, at the same time that this decade is taking place, and these norms and protocols may begin to emerge and just the way you suggested, AI is coming at us like a tsunami.

>> Christine Rosen: Mm-hm.

>> Peter Robinson: So are you optimistic or is there just gonna be little pockets of communities like the Amish?

>> Christine Rosen: Mm-hm.

>> Peter Robinson: Who just are able to hold the line against the sort of digital debauchery of the modern world.

>> Christine Rosen: So I would call myself cautiously optimistic for two reasons.

Watching Gen Z move into adulthood has given me some room for optimism.

>> Peter Robinson: It has.

>> Christine Rosen: So they do things like they'll all go out to eat and everyone has to put their phone in the middle of the table, and whoever picks up their phone during dinner to check it has to pay the bill. So they kind of lash themselves to the mast of the ship. And they're doing it because they know how intrusive everyone looking at their phone and how fracturing of attention and camaraderie it is to do that. So they have to deliberately make that choice, and they do make that choice.

They're exploring more analog things. There's this resurgence and kids wanting vinyl records and stuff, which I think is sweet, but not a whole trend. Another thing though, they are wildly independent. They are independent in terms of their registration as voters, and they will move one way or the other, depending on what they believe.

But they also resist being told what to do in a very healthy and skeptical way. So if you think about in the employment space where you're gonna have a lot more monitoring and surveillance of employees-

>> Peter Robinson: Yes, of course.

>> Christine Rosen: They are a generation that brings into, with their experience growing up with digital technology just a healthy skepticism, which hopefully won't curdle into cynicism or nihilism.

Where if a boss says here, put on this badge and you'll get $25 off a month on your health insurance if you let us track what you do outside of work, how many steps you take. I think a lot of Gen Z, look, my generation and millennials were like, okey-dokey, and off they went being tracked.

That is not Gen Z, they are resistant in some ways to that sort of surveillance because they have been watched their whole lives by their parents, by media, by companies that are constantly trying to sell them stuff. So they have a skepticism. My concern is that that curdles into cynicism.

We don't want it to be cynicism, we want them to actually act on that skepticism and to reform these platforms and to make new things. New things that actually reflect their values not that first generation of techno enthusiasm that was uncritical about what it might do in terms of harm and opportunity costs.

>> Peter Robinson: Got it. Christine, may I ask you to close our conversation by reading a passage from your book?

>> Christine Rosen: Yes, if we are to reclaim human virtues and save our most deeply rooted human experiences from extinction, we must be willing to place limits on the more extreme, transformative projects proposed by our techno enthusiasts.

Not as a means of stifling innovation, but as a commitment to our shared humanity. Only then can we live freely as the embodied, quirky, contradictory, resilient, creative human beings we are.

>> Peter Robinson: Christine Rosen, author of the Extinction of Experience. Thank you.

>> Christine Rosen: Thank you.

>> Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox News, I'm Peter Robinson.