Video Essay: “Look up.”
On Saturday as the snow fell outside, I met with a small group of people in Wolfeboro—Republicans, Democrats, younger and older—for a conversation addressing the question: “Can democracy survive social media?”
One woman wants to know: if she’s not on social media, how can she stay connected to people suffering in Minneapolis right now?
A twenty-year old man tells the group how internet subcultures offer community and draw people towards groups so extreme that after forty minutes on his phone, he can barely order sauce packets at McDonald’s.
A teacher tells a story about watching murmurations of starlings with students who look around and realize every one of their classmates is staring down at their phones.
Something is happening in our country. As people wake up to rising authoritarianism and the systems that concentrate power in the hands of a wealthy few at the expense of the rest of us, many are also recognizing how spending so much of our lives online serves an insatiable profit-generating system that feasts on our conflicts and our cruelty—an algorithm that incentivizes the absolute worst and most extreme impulses in each person—at the expense of the trust, hard conversations, coalition-building, relationships, and compromise that are critical for our democracy.
In the first few months, I didn’t find anyone working in politics who didn’t agree that social media is terrible for democracy, but they all insisted that it was a “necessary evil.” To that, I had a simple question: “why would I do something evil?”
When people ask why I’m not on social media, I sometimes struggle deciding where to begin. Do I share my personal story as a parent and the kinds of lessons I want to teach my kids? Do I tell them that I’ve struggled to hold my community together as a local official as these platforms turn my neighbors against one another and spread incorrect information faster than we can correct the record? Do I tell them how being offline has freed me to meet people in their homes and in their communities and hear what they have to say without the noise and the worry of turning our vision for the future of our democracy into a meme?
I often start with a question about Big Tech, monopolies, and trust and anti-trust regulations. I talk to people about how the right-wing billionaires who own social media companies and their platforms—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the phalanx of Trump sycophants currently lining up to buy TikTok—are facilitating Trump’s authoritarianism.
In the end, though, this is really about relationships—our relationships to one another, to the common good, and to our democracy. It’s about the kinds of connections I want to build in this campaign from one neighbor to another. I made the choice to campaign social media-free because I believe that there is a better way to do politics. We don’t have to settle for simulacrums of human connection or representation because we all deserve the real thing.
So can our democracy survive social media? Our democracy has survived slavery, segregation, and war. Of course, this democracy can survive social media. But whether our democracy survives social media is up to us.
That’s why I invited my fellow candidates here in NH-01 to join me for a month offline. It’s an invitation to look up from our phones and into the eyes of the people we want to represent. It’s an opportunity to connect what we’re fighting for with who we’re fighting alongside. It’s a chance to break out of this connection-starved era and build a new one where real connections and progress are possible. I hope you’ll join me.
