I found this two-year old Atlantic article from Jonathan Haidt Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid via Zeldman's link to it on BlueSky. ( News+ link for those who subscribe.) It's a lot of the same old "social media is everything that ails us" stuff. Haidt does make a unique connection to the Biblical Tower of Babel story, suggesting we're experiencing a similar fall today.
I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.
The "tower" in Haidt's mind is the positive techno-futurist utopia where information and ideas are shared freely across the world. Those days are gone, he says, with fragmentation and incivility now surrounding us. This idea has taken hold in popular culture.
Look, I get it. I've been critical of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter myself. Anything that has such sway over the lives of so many people should be regarded skeptically. Social media is the organized religion of the 21st century. The thing that gets me about Haidt, and this shared belief he espouses, is that it's just too simplistic and largely ignores the positive aspects of social media. What a feat of irony to claim social media is "designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves" while essentially doing the same.
I do think Haidt has good suggestions for practical changes we could pursue:
We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.
Haidt's suggestions are practical ones I largely agree with – ranked choice voting and government regulations on social media's reach and influence. I do also agree with the general premise that social media's reliance on attention and growth is largely what has lead to all the negative aspects of social media. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't learn from the current moment. Of course, we should! Let's just be careful to not mistake a decade or two's trajectory for some permanent erosion to the human condition. That Tower of Babel analogy might be poetic and literary, but it could also be quite the overreaction.