When I think of the world’s ills, social media goes right to the top of the list. That’s actually a pretty startling thing to say given what’s happening across the world at the moment. The truly existential and long-term risks to the world should start with climate change and the documented, slow-moving crisis that it portends. The physical consequences like rising seas, intensifying storms, prolonged droughts, ecosystem collapse, and mass displacement are already underway and accelerating and impacting every aspect of modern life day-in and day-out. Then there is the old saw of nuclear weapons and the “fast path” to civilizational destruction that we’ve lived with in the background for my whole life. The Cold War may have warmed and the near crises have been averted so far, but it would be hard to deny that the threat is still on the table and as Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi and the other five nuclear states (especially combative Israel), not to mention the wannabes like Iran make you wonder how long our luck will hold out. Suddenly, we have to add artificial intelligence to the existential risk list as it is quickly transforming the world faster than institutions can adapt. The near-term problems of mass displacement in white-collar labor, AI-generated disinformation at scale, concentration of AI capability in a handful of corporations and states and all the costs and burdens of the data center infrastructure are already vexing us every day…and that even ignores the pop culture T2 battle of the machines scenario.
Before turning to social media and because I am on a gloomy and doom roll, let’s not ignore the overall issue of geopolitical security. The great power competition between the United States, China, and Russia has reasserted itself after the post-Cold War interlude, and while Trump likes to think he’s in charge, that is far from being the case. What Trump has done is make matters worse by undercutting the rules-based international order that governed trade, security, and human rights norms since 1945, putting the whole system under serious strain. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the most significant European war since 1945. With his nose clearly in Netanyahu’s hands, Trump has reignited the Middle East to a degree not seen in our lifetime. And China’s military build-up, assertiveness in the South China Sea, and pressure on Taiwan represent the most consequential geopolitical question of the next decade. The risk of miscalculation is on any of these fronts has become VERY real. That isn’t helped by the erosion of multilateral institutions that Trump has spearheaded. The United Nations, WTO, WHO, and other international bodies are increasingly paralyzed by great power disagreement. The coordination mechanisms the world built to manage pandemics, climate, trade, and conflict are failing at exactly the moment they are most needed. Regional conflicts are showing the strain and state of fragility. Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, and Yemen represent ongoing catastrophes receiving insufficient international attention. State collapse in the Sahel, Somalia, and an increasing array of parts of the Middle East creates ungoverned spaces that generate refugee flows, terrorism, and human suffering at massive scale. My Modern Revolutions training has its spydy senses sounding a DEFCON 1 alarm.
The level of economic and social inequality within and between nations has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age. The top 1% of wealth holders own more than the bottom 50% combined globally. This inequality has both economic consequences like demand suppression, political instability and fundamental moral ones as well. The toxic cocktail of growing debt levels, aging populations, pension obligations, healthcare costs and even public health fragility (pandemics anyone?) will drive all of this economic and social dislocation into total disarray if not better managed very soon.
On a more subtle level, but nonetheless destructive is the democratic backsliding and growing political dysfunction everywhere you look. Authoritarianism is advancing globally. That’s not even a debate any more. Freedom House has tracked declining political and civil freedoms in every major region for 18 consecutive years. Hungary, Turkey, India, Israel, and other countries (like, say…the U.S.) have experienced significant democratic erosion from within. Elected leaders increasingly use democratic mechanisms to consolidate power and undermine checks and balances, taking their lead from you-know-who. Polarization and institutional delegitimization in the world’s democracies, (especially the United States), has reached a point where basic factual agreement, a prerequisite for functional collective decision-making, has broken down. When a significant fraction of citizens disbelieves election results, scientific consensus, and institutional authority, the capacity for democratic governance to solve collective problems is severely impaired. Disinformation is at industrial scale. And guess what’s at the root of all of that…yep…social media platforms, optimized for engagement and demonstrably accelerating polarization, conspiracy theories, and political violence. AI-generated content is poised to make this dramatically worse. The collective common ground of shared facts and shared reality is under genuine threat. And without that we lose the ability for genuine communication and problem resolution.
A few things stand out about the current configuration of problems. Most are simultaneously global and local. Climate change cannot be solved by any one country. Neither can AI governance, pandemic preparedness, or nuclear proliferation. Yet the political institutions humanity has built are almost entirely national and, unfortunately, becoming more nationalistic. The gap between the scale of the problems and the scale of the governing institutions is the central challenge. Many of the problems are interconnected in destabilizing ways. Climate change drives food insecurity (exacerbated by fertilizer shortfall due to Strait of Hormuz closure), which drives migration (and resultant mass deportation), which drives political backlash (No Kings, and Gen Z everywhere), which undermines the international cooperation needed to address climate change and the other problems. AI accelerates disinformation, which undermines the democratic governance needed to regulate AI. These feedback loops are poorly understood and potentially irreversible. And at the core of it all is…yep…social media.
The speed of change is outpacing institutional adaptation, and now, more than ever, we need to have trusted sources of information, facts and reality. Technology, particularly, is developing faster than law, governance, ethics, and education can absorb and nowhere more than in social media, where the massive global adoption of these platforms has fueled the economic incentive to make them even more economically compelling argue than more socially responsible. This is not new — the printing press, steam engine, and nuclear bomb all created disruption before institutions adapted — but the pace today is exceptional, and the need for reform, especially of the main driver of social media is overwhelming.
Meta and Google are now being held liable in a landmark legal case that found social media platforms are designed to be addictive to children, opening up the tech giants to penalties in thousands of similar claims filed around the US. The jury in the Los Angeles trial on Wednesday returned a verdict after nine days of deliberation, finding Meta’s platforms such as Instagram and Google’s YouTube were harmful to children and teenagers and that the companies failed to warn users of the dangers. The jury awarded a paltry $3 million in compensatory damages to the 20-year-old plaintiff who claimed that a social media addiction during childhood harmed her mental health — including by leading to anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia. This builds on the growing trend in countries like Australia where restricting social media among children is becoming solid social practice…just like what happened with cigarettes a few generations ago. We are starting to hear the “Tobacco Moment” comments about social media and none too soon. My generation lived through the fall of Big Tobacco and now my kids get to live through the fall of Big Social Media…just as Big AI stands behind it…so all we can do is keep hacking and wheezing.