If we look back about one hundred years, we see the Spanish Flu sweep a world riven by political turmoil, the second industrial revolution, and a cataclysmic war. That pandemic brought a fatality rate many times that of the coronavirus, taking the lives of mostly teenagers and young adults with its cytokine storms. Even by the metrics of the near past, it’s safe to say that 2020 wasn’t the worst year for humankind, anywhere.

Yet, we don’t experience life as statistics. As Author Will Self noted, “doctors say in medicine there are no such things as statistics, only individuals,” and individually, 2020 was a terrible year. For many, personal losses made it their worst. For all, it was a march of crises. Some—those connected to the climate crisis in particular—are ongoing. Others, like the Black Lives Matter movement, are crises of flux in MLK’s ‘long arc…toward justice.’ Still others, the pandemic and the violent attack on the Capitol following Trump’s defeat, are more immediate. But was accident-prone 2020 really a matter of bad luck?

It’s worth wondering, where these crises aren’t linked by kind, how they might nonetheless be connected, and arguably worsened, by the new environment in which they unfolded. I do not mean the natural landscapes or the local communities where they lived, but rather our new digital society, which, though only a few decades old, encroaches year by year on those physical societies and has begun not only to reflect our lived experiences but to shape and drive them. So is it making our real world worse?

To grapple with this question, we first dial back to the year 2000; that’s when Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam published his seminal work on civil society theory, “Bowling Alone.” According to the theory, ‘civil society’—that layer of society made up of people’s informal networks, things like neighbourhood associations, bowling leagues, sports clubs, and community centres—acts to mediate between the microcosms of our households and the organized superstructures of governments and private businesses that act on us as citizens and consumers. The interpersonal relationships we form when we meet up in our local communities around shared endeavours build social trust. These relationships reinforce norms, mediate our views, broaden our horizons, and strengthen our participative democracy. According to Putnam, however, since the arrival of television, Americans have begun to spend much less time talking to our neighbours at block parties and much more on our couches, passively consuming media. What, he asked, might this decline cost us?

When Bowling Alone was published, we were only at the start of the ‘digital revolution,’ which starry-eyed utopians promised would strengthen our societies and deliver vast knowledge to the masses. Twenty years in, we find ourselves, perhaps, in the ‘Gilded Age’ of this revolution—attempting to reign in the consequences of new technologies as they reshape economies and societies in real-time while worrying about the effects on human brains of corporatized media with little regulation and growing monopolistic power. Do the conditions and imperatives of our new digital society add to our ancient social problems?

In February, a report from the Lancet Commission concluded that Americans had seen 40% more fatalities due to the coronavirus than would have occurred given a coordinated approach to public health. By laying the blame squarely at the feet of former President Trump’s bigotry, the editorialists overlooked the networks which facilitated the spread of disinformation. Contra to the free knowledge utopia internet boosters prophesied, during the pandemic, digital platforms actively pushed on users a flattened out theoretical free-for-all. For instance, inaccurate medical information pinged directly onto the screens of millions of Trump’s followers in tweets. University of Washington researchers showed that on Amazon, of the top ten book results returned to customers searching for vaccine information, eight were authored by fringe anti-vaxxers. They concluded that medical misinformation was widespread and boosted all over the shopping site. The same study also showed that users rarely searched beyond the top ten results.

Fans of the digital society might respond that, on the whole, the internet also makes solid, peer-reviewed information widely available to a broad audience. Perhaps. However, it is difficult to discount how, in the places where users spend most of their time, consensus and spurious theories are promoted as equally credible. Far from passive consumption, disinformation is pushed into the way of users by algorithms that select content with no societal imperative beyond keeping eyes on screens as long as humanly possible. As frightening as this is with our current health crisis, the proliferation of unscientific theories becomes more terrifying still in light of the global climate crisis, where any hope of mitigation will require deep understanding and a broad consensus incompatible with the business imperative of holding users’ attention.

But, it might be countered, America’s coronavirus disaster was down to Trump. A good leader would have guided better outcomes. Before agreeing to that, we should note the role of digital society in choosing our leadership. In Trump’s case, a senate intelligence investigation concluded that Russia and Wikileaks cooperated to help secure his 2016 victory using digital media, namely by hacking, then leaking, democratic party e-mails. This, in addition to the well-documented work of a virtual army of Russian users who, deploying with fake accounts, sewed dissent and circulated disinformation via social media ahead of the election. How instrumental they were in Trump’s victory is unclear. What isn’t is the fact that, in the digital society, barriers once posed by physical geographies and the requirements of transparency in publishing have evaporated by design. Direct, anonymous, and open to the world, social media platforms, Wikileaks, and fake news sites gave Putin’s team access to the hearts and minds of American voters on par with, or beyond, what their own local leaders, neighbours, and papers could manage. This access is a new feature of our political landscape, and it didn’t disappear with the election. Once in office, Trump used social media to speak misinformation directly to millions of followers, whether to tell them the coronavirus would end spontaneously or to retweet a comparison of mask-wearing to “slavery,” or following his election, to insist on vast election fraud and his own victory against all truth and evidence.

In the digital society, Trump’s disinformation disseminated uncritically through fansites was bolstered by extremist groups and evinced on fake news outlets. This is critical because the counterargument to these critiques tends to be that social media is nothing but a neutral purveyor of information—no guiltier than the old telephone lines were for words spoken across them. However, in a broad study, researchers at Princeton found that Facebook directed its users to untrustworthy news sites more than twice as often as it did to valid ones. Studies of YouTube by the Anti-Defamation League determined that auto cueing of videos determines at least sixty percent of the content viewed on the site. And for nearly a quarter of YouTube viewers, that content includes videos from extremist ‘alternative’ channels touting QAnon theories, white supremacist ideologies, and other extremist content. The appropriate analogy, then, would have digital platforms work more like a landline in your house that rang ten times a day—six of the times it would be the company calling to tell you something it guessed you wanted to hear, and a quarter of the calls would try to convince you of something outright crazy.

Ultimately, rather than bringing disparate people together on the basis of shared activities and common interests, as with Putnam’s bowling clubs, AI and algorithms, operating for profit on the basis of keeping our attention fixed on screens as long as possible, actively push users into contact with the most extreme and provocative versions of their views or interests. The de facto guide them into contact with fringe believers who share their beliefs. This organizing principle was undoubtedly helpful to Donald Trump who, after losing the 2020 election by an overwhelming margin, was nonetheless able to galvanize a dispersed collective of followers, hammer them with an alternative reality, in turn, supported by unreliable websites and news outlets, and subsequently direct them from the four corners to converge on the capital, where they made a deadly attempt to overthrow the government.

In some ways, the Black Lives Matter protests show us the flipside of social media. Though horrendous (and some argue unethical) to watch, videos of racist violence and police killings of Black citizens have forced American society to confront the anti-Black structures built into their country from its inception. Furthermore, social media has helped activists to organize demonstrations, increase visibility for marginalized communities, and find affirmation for realities that have long been aggressively ignored. Inasmuch as traditional civil society worked to promote norms and consensus, those norms and consensuses were often racist, sexist, and discriminatory beyond. At its best, social media can work to undo those norms.

However, even there, it is not without its shortcomings. In the BLM movement, for instance, questions arose with the advent of the ‘defund the police’ hashtag. The slogan blew up in online discourse but empirically did not represent the perspective of the Black community in real life, where Gallup polls carried out in August of 2020 showed that eighty-one percent of Black respondents (and eighty-six percent of the population overall) wanted to see the same or increased police presence in their neighbourhoods. Adding to the dissonance, house majority whip, James Clyburn—a democratic veteran and long-time activist in the Black community of his home state—speculated that the slogan had hurt democratic candidates at the polls. It is worth noting, in this, that strong, bipartisan support for police reform existed due largely to the work of BLM activists. The slogan, however galvanizing on social media it was, transferred into real life, was so unpopular that the right was able to weaponize it to their advantage.

Though perhaps a small example, this dispute is arguably emblematic of the problem with social media activism. The reductive, trending, extreme nature of a hashtag, however understandable in light of videos of police violence and murder, does not translate well into practical social change. Video clips and slogans, divorced from any deep history or education, upset viewers justly but also lead them to easy attribution errors. In this case, the idea that the police are the cause, rather than a terrible effect, of systemic, anti-Black racism. It is simpler to overlook the vast structures undergirding systemic anti-Blackness. Reforming the school-to-prison pipeline, historical discrimination in housing, in higher education, in the job market, and in the judicial system (far beyond policing) will take much more than a hashtag and shell game with public funds. And yet, real redress and reform requires on-the-ground work over time, pressure, campaigns, and consulting with communities themselves, not just progressive activists.

This brings us to the universal problem of social media activism: though well-intended, it is still fed through algorithms that favour provocation, punchy slogans, the drama of conflict, call-outs, and cancel culture. Its attention spans are short and thirsty. Reality is nuanced and complex to change. And the modes are poorly received by the audience activists need to persuade. In offline society, forty percent of Americans report being harassed online—shamed, threatened, or even doxed. Sixty percent report witnessing such behaviour. While much of that is down to trolling, the modes of activism online are too often not experienced as enlightenment but as harassment and alienation. As satisfying as calling out does feel, public humiliation is a poor tool of real persuasion. Worse, such methods have no practical effect on actually bad actors. The powerful racists, sexists, and bigots of the world revel more than progressives themselves in this model, correctly deducing that call out and cancel culture will never work on them, and operate, primarily, as a circular firing squad for the woke.

This isn’t the fault of activists. It is prescribed by the business model. The deep goal on social media is not social change but attention-getting and attention-keeping. The great victory for users is going viral, but it is a victory with no reward. The work of educating people, building intimacy, showing humility, mustering generosity might profit society but doesn’t make online platforms money; thus, virtual community members in these profit machines masquerading as communities will always be pushed away from deep relationship-building towards its opposite: the provocation, the simple statement, the harsh judgment. Regardless of intent, when the goal is only approval, and not persuasion, when idealism is used to score points without pragmatism, the result is unlikely to be more than self-congratulation.

If this seems like a screed against technology, it is not. The role of technology in human thriving has been great. This is about nothing more than the sly colonization of civil society by digital businesses, professing to bring us closer while building a world where everything that binds us together is cast into doubt, and the relationships that have brought us through are undermined for likes. Without intervention, that world could become the worst yet.