You’ve probably come across content online that seems real but is actually fake. And that experience is becoming more common with the proliferation of AI generated content. Our guest this week points out that the mental gymnastics of this starts to take a toll. Jia Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote a piece all about this aptly titled, “My Brain Finally Broke.” She joins WITHpod to discuss how AI is changing our perception of the world, how online content can make us more likely to detach from reality and more. Note: this episode was recorded on 6/11/25.
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Jia Tolentino: Why is there this mass de-skilling experiment at a time when with the skills we have, we’re already not doing very well, like living in contemporary reality. Like, we are already kind of psychologically unequipped to live in this contemporary reality. And our response to it is like further de-skill ourselves by handing over basic kind of questions of comprehension of reality to ChatGPT.
It just seems like, yeah, on a very pragmatic level, all of this aside, it’s like on a selfish level, I can’t de-skill myself any more than I already am because I’m already not doing well.
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Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. In the last, I would say like week, I’ve had three interactions with unreal portions of the internet that have really kind of shaken me. The first was a TikTok video fed to me by the algorithm of homeless people in Chicago pitching tents on buses. It was like photorealistic. It looked like a local news package. And at first I was like, what? And then as I watched, I was like, the physics don’t actually work here. None of this works, but it took me, I had to watch it, then I watched it again to be like, oh, this is an AI-generated image that looks a lot like a local news package that doesn’t look rendered and surreal. It looks crisp and like it would actually look like the tents had cinder blocks at the corners to like weigh down the place that the posts would have gone into the soil.
And I was like, well, that’s weird. Like this doesn’t exist. Someone is trying to make it as if it does exist to get engagement, I guess. Then I had another video I saw that was like this crazy incident happening on a plane. And it was just, it looked real photorealistic as a person like holding their phone and they’re like to sort of see other people on the plane gasping and someone’s getting thrown out and it’s like this big scene. But there’s something off about it. And then it turned out it was generated by some content farm that like makes these scenes on purpose to go get engagement.
And then the third thing that happened to me was that someone that I love in my family, we were just talking, he’s like, oh, did you see Nikola Jokic’s press conference after they lost that game, the Denver Nuggets MVP and star and center who’s Serbian. And I was like, oh no, and he played it for me. And it was very funny. It looked exactly like Jokic. It sounded exactly like Jokic. I know what Jokic sounds like. But it was clearly AI-generated and it’s him kind of starting off talking normally, but then starting to like slag all his teammates.
Jia Tolentino: Right.
Chris Hayes: And I had to be to this person like, no, that’s AI, but I understand why you don’t. And I just think the line is getting very thin, very quickly between what is real and what’s not. And then at the same time, what is real, the images we see of parts of the world, particularly, the images that come out of Gaza come to mind the most, sort of acutely feel surreal, like are horrific and hyper real in a way that feels almost like it can’t actually be of this earth. And the distinction between the two is getting harder and harder. And this brain breaking aspect of the modern internet was a subject of an essay that has really stuck with me that was published like a little more than a month ago by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker called “My Brain Finally Broke.” Much of what we see now is fake. The reality we face is full of horrors. More and more of the world is slipping beyond my comprehension.
And as someone who just wrote a book about the attention age and about the information environment we live in, this really resonated with me. And I thought as things have only gotten more insane, it would be a good time to talk to Jia. So Jia, welcome to the program.
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Jia Tolentino: Thank you for having me to talk about my favorite subject, the incomprehensibility of the world, yeah. And my broken brain, yeah. It’s not gotten better.
Chris Hayes: Have you had any moments like that recently of the, “Is this real? Oh, it’s not real.”
Jia Tolentino: Well, I don’t even know really. I mean, I will say when I was writing this piece, I was further into the valley of the, you know, homeless people pitching a tent on top of city buses in Chicago. Like I have since, I was like, okay, let me try to see less fake things. But it’s still, the fake things that I see right now, I think I wrote in the piece that my, like it’s mostly just Instagram and it’s like AI images of celebrities, just AI people that look, you know, and it’s mostly semi-benign things. Like it’s like fake beauty influencers or whatever. But I thought the images coming out of the protests in L.A., they’re real. The real sort of watermarked, you know, newswire images coming out of them. I have the like, wait, is this fake news?
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Jia Tolentino: But they are real, but yeah, it’s like you were saying, the things that are fake look extremely real. The things that are real are almost unbelievable. And then the result is this slurry in our mind that causes this kind of, like when I was writing about it, it felt like a permission structure to detach from the material reality of the world. Like it all adds up to, you know, you see the sort of the literally starving children in Gaza, but there have been viral AI images of starving children in Gaza on Facebook for a year now.
And one thinks that some people —
Chris Hayes: That are not real, right, yeah.
Jia Tolentino: That are not real. Right. That are engagement farming. Just like there are images, you know, there’s the whole sort of AI slop category of engagement farming images on Facebook where it’s like emaciated children next to like birthday cakes, hooked up to ventilators like on a beach. And it’s like, like, because it’s my birthday or whatever. And then a lot, you know, and it’s like these very–
Chris Hayes: It’s so dark.
Jia Tolentino: Some of the children have eight legs, and it’s, but you know, and then alongside of those are AI-generated images of starving children purportedly in Gaza. And then there are real ones. And it all just kind of, it felt when I was writing it, it was like, I realized that it was unnerving to me to feel like there was a permission structure to detach from reality when, you know, the entire felt purpose of my existence is to cleave to it harder. But there was something about this year where I started to feel like, uh-oh, you know, like I’m not only having the response of like, wait, I’m feeling a slackening of my reflexive, like, wait, is this true or false? Like sometimes I don’t even ask, which is terrifying. Like sometimes I’m just like, well, I’m not going to look at that any longer, you know? And that’s terrifying to me. And then sometimes just to not know is, yeah.
Chris Hayes: The not knowing to me, like one of the things that I’ve been struggling with, and I think it’s like a, it’s sort of a generation and age thing, which is that I was, obviously there’s been fake stuff on the internet forever. And I’ve always been like the people one generation older than me had a harder time telling it apart. And I always knew what was fake and what was real. Because it’s one of the skills you build being on the internet.
And feeling my own ability to make that distinction, like, I don’t know if it’s age and younger people are better at it, but I don’t think they are. Like, that’s the thing is that, I think if you look at the data and you look what people are posting and stuff, like they’re not any better. And in fact, it’s partly that the technology is just getting better and journalism is shrinking enough such that the way that I used to orient myself to is this real or not, have gotten, it’s gotten harder and harder to orient myself.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, and there’s also, right, I mean, it’s like everything you wrote about in your book. It’s like, none of the dynamics are new, none of the like vectors are new, but there is kind of meaningfully new, there are meaningfully new aspects to the technology. And the fact that like with images and with words and with video, there was this thing like 404 Media does really good reporting on the sort of this realm. And there are like —
Chris Hayes: The slop realm.
Jia Tolentino: The slop realm. And there are scammers that can deep fake in real time. They can change their age, race, gender, and, you know, they can pose as, and speak in real time through these filters. I mean, that’s like, like I remember two years ago being like, well, AI doesn’t interest me. And now it’s, you know, it’s not just inescapable, but it is like palpably rapidly, like whether we like it or not, whether we consciously engage it or not, it is reshaping the entire texture of lived reality for many, many people. And I think there is something to the fact that like, I mean, I still don’t really understand this fully. I’m still like, because my brain is so broken, I’m thinking through this out loud, but it’s like, there is now like an unprecedented possibility to have no human hand, almost no human hand in, you know, that like ChatGPT generates the prompts that are then used to prompt the AI video makers, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jia Tolentino: And so there’s a human hand, but it’s so far back. And like that human hand in generating the prompts that then generate the video, like probably came from like this ecosystem of like web seminars, teaching people in, you know, Southeast Asia to just, you know, farm more. And it’s the, any sort of human touch on it is so far removed from the actual thing in a way that is world historically new that I think this bounces back onto the realm of the real, where these things such as like ICE raids, you know, all over Los Angeles, all over New York, in the subways, at clubs and restaurants, like the very real human hands in all of that that cause the actual structural reality of our world, it’s almost like we lose our sense of the fact that actually much of the world, there are human hands on it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jia Tolentino: There are like real material chains of people making decisions that can be broken where the sort of endless realm of the machine can’t really be stopped in any way.
Chris Hayes: And that’s because to me, the line, so there’s two things happening here, I think, like IRL, what we used to call IRL back in the day, quaintly, right, in real life and online, there’s not really a distinction anymore, partly because the way that we understand and live IRL is through our phones.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So, and so because of that, what I’m hearing you say is there’s like a weird displacement that happens where it’s like, it all feels like content or everything feels like a thing that started in the phone, right? Like as opposed to a thing in the world where the phone is the device that’s transmuting a reality in the world, that it all just popped up from in there. And I do think that’s partly the experience of the algorithmic feed where you’re just going through, it’s like AI slop, celebrity influencer, ICE raid in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where a desperate employer is pleading with armed agents who are in masks to let her employee go. And that’s all just in the exact same cycle of in the content carousel.
Jia Tolentino: And I also think, you know, this, I started to feel like, like 2016, I was like, okay, the internet got Trump elected, you know, like the worst parts of the internet. And then in 2021, it was like January 6th, I was like, okay, this, like, I have like high watermarks in my head of like when the phone enlarged to eat the world kind of. And like the election in 2016 was one of them. January 6th, I felt like, I was like, oh, you know, a conspiracy theory jumped out of the phone and stormed the Capitol. You know, like that felt really, you know, that felt like, oh, like something. And this, in this year, you know, there’s some quality to it, like the Houthi PC small group thing, right? Like it’s like the, we’re like —
Chris Hayes: The Pete Hegseth Signal chat that accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.
Jia Tolentino: Yes, yes. And like, you know, Trump tweeting like an, obviously, Photoshopped photo of Kilmar Albrego Garcia’s like fake, you know, and it’s like, he’s tweeting it and it’s obviously fake and it’s justifying like all of these, like it’s the, I think what I called in the piece is sort of like cognitive tendrils of phone-based insanity are, feel like the thing that are, it’s like increasingly driving policy in so many ways. Like, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and that idea that it, right, that the phone, that the world sort of comes from and goes into the phone. And that also that like, yes, that the most powerful person in the world is also just as addled and pickled. I mean, Elon Musk being another example, like that this is actually shaping the reality of the people that actually do have the force in their real life. I mean you saw this, we talked about, you and I are speaking in the second week of June, there’s protests in California over ICE raids. The president has called, has federalized the National Guard over the objections of the governor, which hasn’t been done since LBJ did it to George Wallace in Alabama to integrate the University of Alabama. There are 700 Marines that are deployed there, all for what basically was about five Waymos that got lit on fire in a one block radius of downtown L.A. And there were like two stores, I think, that got their windows smashed and people stole some stuff. That’s like the sum total, like far less or fewer arrests than say, the parade after the LA Kings won the NHL title. Like this is a true drop in the bucket.
But the reality refracted, and here we have to say that this is actually anterior to the phone, like on Fox News, good old fashioned cable news, the medium I spent a lot of my time in, the reality is full RoboCop, like Verhoeven film, dystopian L.A. on fire. And that is not just scrolling online and not just on the television sets in the White House, it is how the president of the United States, I think genuinely understands the reality. Like when he talks about L.A., he says, “We saved it from burning.” And maybe that’s a cynical lie, it might be. But also I think he probably thinks that’s right because the place that he’s getting his information is the distorted refracted reality of what is the most dramatic image and the most intentionally grabbing.
Jia Tolentino: This is a really bad analogy for this, but like in six years ago, I wrote about this thing called Instagram face for the New Yorker, which was where like, women would digitally alter their faces to look more whatever perfect. And then they would go to plastic surgeons to get the alterations to match the digital face. And then they would further digitally alter the physically perfected face and then go, and it was just this back and forth.
Chris Hayes: I still remember that essay.
Jia Tolentino: And it’s why everyone looks the same now. Like it’s why everyone was like, but there’s something about what you’re talking about where Trump perceives RoboCop reality in L.A. And then he has the ability to produce it adversarially. Right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jia Tolentino: Like the sort of, like he can create that. He can bring the National Guard.
Chris Hayes: He’s his own plastic surgeon.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, like he can send in the people to trample protesters underfoot on horseback and then people will, you know, like, and then he can produce the response and it’s, yeah, and he, it’s what he wants, you know.
Chris Hayes: That and the idea that what we will get, like the, you know, the images we’re seeing of the protests, for instance, or the images I saw, you know, I just referenced it before about this sort of desperate employer in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, pleading with these ICE agents or federal agents, I don’t know which, they could have been from the constellation of agencies and DHS, you know, to let this person go, who’s been a gardener working for over years, who is not a criminal and not suspected of anything is just there working. And the uncanny, like the visual grammar of that moment through the phone is also so much of a structuring visual grammar for how we understand the world, that to go back to the point we started with, if you put something in that shaky vertical video, I’m like immediately inclined to believe it, even if it’s fake.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So like, there are these visual cues of authenticity that were produced by the shaky camera of the handheld witness, like I just grabbed my phone, that signal authenticity so reliably or had until now.
Jia Tolentino: Right.
Chris Hayes: That it’s very hard to overcome my visceral desire to believe what I’m seeing if you just put it into that framework.
Jia Tolentino: But that video was real, right?
Chris Hayes: That video was real, that video was real, but this is treacherous territory. I run like a news program, you know, like we’re constantly doing this, like, is this real, is this not? And we have, luckily we have resources and we have a staff and we could take time and like burrow down, but average citizens don’t. Like what is being asked of people now on this front to me seems totally impossible for a person who doesn’t do this professionally like I do to begin to sort through.
Jia Tolentino: Right, right. You would just simply detach. You would simply like be like, oh, I have to text my children and go back to work. That’s the thing that I have found so scary about this year. Like the spidey, the instinctive sense of real or fake that we have people in our field have from combing through real or fake for so long, or in my case, being like vaguely young enough to sort of feel like I understood the latest vagaries of the internet. I’m like, I’m just perhaps like aging out of, you know, of, but you’re right. I don’t think younger people, I think younger people perhaps have even a less like, I think the fact checking impulse might seem kind of old fashioned, you know?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jia Tolentino: Like you would perceive the entire world as sort of surreal, not just surreal, but almost like at an arms, like that it’s all just like a flat plane of indistinguishably like untouchable madness, you know? And I think that plenty of people do experience it like that.
Chris Hayes: And you think that has a politically, I think, you know, there’s a politically enervating effect to that, right? That like —
Jia Tolentino: Massively.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, you think that’s happening? Or you’re feeling it yourself or–
Jia Tolentino: Well, you know what I was thinking recently? So I was at the ICE protest yesterday, like in Foley Square, this is June 11th, the one on June 10th. And I was there with my little kid who’s almost two. And today I was texting with a friend of mine who is a public defender, who had to bring, like she has a client who she had to accompany to immigration court and she had her client bring her three-year-old daughter in the hopes that the presence of a very young child would hold off the detention, the sort of the scooping up of her by ICE, like in her court appearance. And all of that, and I was just like thinking about this and how we are processing, because it’s interesting in New York, the protest response, it has, you know, for a variety of reasons. And I think it’s been indicative of the way that I think like the court system and the subways both are kind of rendered in the minds of the average New Yorker kind of almost invisibly lawless spaces. Like there’s something, like ICE has been sweeping subways for a while now here, but there’s kind of, the protests here have just not been as militant in the same way that they have been in L.A. And I think they probably will turn into that at some point because the sweeps will get more intense here.
But I was thinking part of this is because for since October 7th, 2023, we have been, you know, there’s been this really unprecedented like tsunami of images and videos of what is fundamentally U.S. state sponsored violence. Like I would say, you know, funded by us and like unbelievable, suffering in front of us.
Chris Hayes: The worst things you’ve ever seen.
Jia Tolentino: The worst things you’ve ever seen filmed on shaky video, you know, and there’ve been plenty of fakes about Gaza too, but you’re like filmed on real shaky video by humans transmitted on platforms directly to our phones. And it has had an effect. And like taking that all in as the web fills up, you know, as we fill up to our necks in fake images and fake text also has had a real effect on how many people, maybe myself included, have processed what is happening with these ICE kidnappings.
You know, like I think there’s been a deadening effect of just like, oh, a horrific thing on my phone.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jia Tolentino: A horrific thing on my phone. A horrific thing is happening to a family on my phone, you know, and I think that there has been this, I mean, certainly it’s had an effect on me in terms of like, you know, watching everything in Gaza happen and watching like very, very few members of Congress even say anything about it really. Like that has had a really alarming effect on my understanding of the civic process. But yeah, I think that the images have something to do with it too.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I think you’re right. And I think it’s had a really pernicious deadening quality on people. And I think the instinct behind it is the opposite. It’s to produce like empathy. And I think instead, it has produced some empathy, but I think largely one of the main effects, and it has, you’ve seen it, you see it in the politics of, particularly younger people who are on algorithms like this the most, are the most sympathetic to Gazans and to Palestinians and the most opposed to Israel’s conduct there.
That said, I think it has had a kind of deadening effect on people. It’s so much, it’s so constant, it’s so awful that there’s a part that people turn off. And then the other thing that I constantly wrestle with, specifically on this, ‘cause I think you’re right to pinpoint like this specific barrage of images from Gaza since October 2023, as a kind of key part of this experience of online life and sort of horror and seriality. I have to tell myself that in the same way that I look at Fox’s depiction of L.A., and I’m like, you Fox viewer are being totally misled and snookered about what’s happening in L.A. There are millions of people who think I am being misled and snookered by the images on my phone of Gaza.
Jia Tolentino: Totally.
Chris Hayes: That this is propaganda, and I have to constantly get myself to figure out how to touch back home base because I need to retain skepticism of my own reality in this respect. And it’s like, again, I have talked to people that have been in Gaza who are not making content, who can tell me, yes, it is as horrible as what you’ve seen. I have been there, I just came back. Like, I have the ability to do that. I’m a reporter, I talk to folks. But most people don’t have that. And so, again, like the sense that you’re getting the reality stream to your eyeballs with the danger of the fact it’s not actually reality and the inability to have the resources to do the thing that I get to do.
Jia Tolentino: And still feel fucked up about it.
Chris Hayes: And still feel, yes. And to constantly be doing the checking in. Like, I do need to do that. I do have to remind myself when I see an image, I don’t know where this came from. I don’t know who took this. I don’t know the context. I don’t know what happened before this image. I don’t know who came after it. Like, this is the thing that we like drill into producers on the show, right? Because like sometimes, you know, everyone is like, you know, the viral shark image that’s swimming around after every flooding. You know, Ted Cruz posted it and so on and so on. People fall for it every time there’s a flood or a tornado. It’s like, no, that’s not actually what you think it is. I feel defeated by it. And I have to work full time to keep me touching reality as my full-time job.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, right. And I think like, it all amounts to like, this can’t be real. Like, I think that sort of horror shoe that we were talking about at the beginning, it’s like, it can’t be real because it is so unbelievably horrible. It just can’t be real. One’s brain flinches away, swipes to the next thing. It’s like, this can’t be real. And then it’s like a video of a guy in Antarctica riding a Ski-Doo. And I’m like, this can’t be real. You know, and then it’s an image, we’ve talked so much, all of us who have written about the internet, it’s like, we’ve talked so much about context collapse, about like individual pieces of information. But there’s also something to me about, there’s kind of context collapse that’s happening with like a simple idea, like this can’t be real. Like there are two different ways to think this, this can’t be real because it is obviously fake. And this can’t be real because it is so horrible, that my moral and civic sense cannot allow that this is being produced by the same political system that like I am purportedly invested in.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jia Tolentino: That those just kind of collapse on one’s phone into just like, this can’t be real, this can’t be real, this can’t be real, this can’t be real, you know? And that really scares me. Like, I feel like the indistinguishability of two very separate emotions and ideas that are all just flattening into this can’t be real is, I think maybe more than anything, like that was this alarm. Like if I myself, someone that kind of, like I feel like I write a lot about like currents of emotion and like, and if I can’t even clearly distinguish those two things in my own self, that scared me in the same way that not being able to fact check, whether this is a real person in an advertisement for a baseball hat that I might buy, you know?
Like it’s the deadening effect of like, yeah, it’s like, oh, I’m going to buy like swim goggles for my child to wear to the YMCA. And I’m like, is this a real child wearing the swim goggles? You don’t know, you click, you know? Right. And it’s like, what? And there’s overall that accumulates into something.
Chris Hayes: And amidst it all, like there’s also the fact that, like the sort of seriality and the deadening, there’s also like the fact, and I think to, like this has been particularly true in the Gaza context, but it was true in the Ukrainian context before that, like where it does still retain this ability to produce this sort of sense of human closeness, intimacy, and connection. Like there was a, you know, there was this meme that started during the Ukraine war that was like this sort of Italian American song that was in the Godfather wedding scene. And it’s people like being like, things in my Italian grandparents’ house that just make sense, right? So it was like this sort of like Italian American New Jersey meme. And I saw a young woman from Ukraine, being like, things in our bomb shelter that just make sense. She’s doing the same meme because she’s watching the same content, right? Like, so she’s getting fed like Southern Jersey Italian American memes too. And she’s doing it. I felt so close to her in that moment. Like it’s so funny to me. She’s in a war zone, she’s a bomb shelter.
There’s another guy who’s like, who’s like a workout nut who lives in Gaza, who does like these incredibly funny posts about like, got my 30,000 steps in today because I had to go get clean water from the NGO. And like sort of doing these very funny sly send-ups of like influencer culture, because he’s also, like the other side of the seriality is like, this dude is living in a war zone. On his phone is this portal of a world being like, you got to get your protein in. And it’s like, we’re all looking at the same little box feeding us the same insanity.
Jia Tolentino: Right. Yeah, it’s nuts.
Chris Hayes: But that ability to me is like the thing that I want to preserve or that I cherish about it. You know, I think that the reason I first fell in love with the internet is like, when you do feel like you have moments of human connection across geographical distance, which is really precious. And like both of those, like the gym influencer guy and the girl in the bomb shelter, like it did give me empathy or insight for a sliver of a moment into the human experience that they were going through in a way that like a news report on the BBC wouldn’t have, you know? Like it just did. And I think there is inside of all this madness and seriality there, it does retain that ability.
Jia Tolentino: It retains that ability person to person. But I think like there’s a, I think we’re kind of experiencing that there’s a quite a hard line between that person to person, democratized, we are fundamentally the same people watching the same things in my house that just makes sense video. And then, but it doesn’t, the person, like if anything, like you think about, you know, especially let’s say like in November, December 2023 and early 2024, there were all these videos of children being like, like, you know, delivering these heartbreaking pleas for their life and them thinking quite reasonably, I think like, if surely if they see us, if they see that we’re here in our school, that we just want to not be bombed, like, and that we just want to like eat and live, like surely if these people will see us on their phones and it will do something and people watch those. And there was like an enormous, you know, like I feel like you know the videos that I’m talking about. Like there were, like the one specifically, the earliest one where it was like, they’re literally children pleading for their life on camera. And they thought, they hoped that it would do something.
And it didn’t, it enormously, I think there were many people that were moved by that video that it’s lodged in their brains in the same way. Did it do anything to decrease or end the amount, the billions of dollars that were going, you know, no. And so it’s like those things have to, like it almost makes it worse in a lot of ways because our hearts are cracked open and the system is as whatever as it always was. And I think that’s part of what is giving everyone that feeling of madness, like where it’s like there’s connection and then where do we put it? We, you know, put in GoFundMe is to bribe Egyptian border guards. Like what else do we do, you know?
Chris Hayes: But I also think that what you’re identifying, I know exactly that the videos you’re talking about, again, to go back to that sort of Fox News example, it’s like, there also is just this enormous, vast cultural distance between the people who’ve been experiencing those videos nonstop since October and those who haven’t.
Jia Tolentino: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: And it’s almost unbridgeable.
Jia Tolentino: It’s totally unbridgeable.
Chris Hayes: So the U.S. senators have not been, you know, people that are in my life who I love, who have very good politics, even on this specific issue or politics I agree with, I should say, and are empathetic people. I know people like that who haven’t been experiencing it the same way. Like that specific experience is so distinct in the same way that like, you know, the distance between how people who are just getting, and again, it’s not the same because I think it’s like the reality is different, but what is the same is that there’s an unbridgeable distance between people watching Fox 16 hours a day about what they think’s happening in Los Angeles.
Jia Tolentino: And us, yeah.
Chris Hayes: And us, like, it’s just like–
Jia Tolentino: Well, maybe, yeah. Well, I think, yeah, this was also, I don’t think it was, like, maybe it was 2020 when I started to think, like, there was a point within the last five years where I was like, there is no chance that I could convince anyone that something I am seeing on my phone is real, that if what they see on their phone is a different mix of fake and real things.
Chris Hayes: They have a different mixture of fake and real than I do.
Jia Tolentino: They have a different equation. But, you know, like, I was like, there’s no, like, there was a time, you know, like, I’m from Texas. I grew up around, actually, exclusively around people who believe things that are, like, antithetical to the things that I believe. I feel pretty skilled in the, or I did feel pretty equipped to —
Chris Hayes: Bridge those gaps or have conversations.
Jia Tolentino: Bridge, like, a totally different reality, totally different set of priorities. Like, a friend of mine in Houston who might be like, well, what about the kitty litter in schools for the trans cats or whatever? And I’m like, ah, you know, and I would, like, have an ability to say, like, okay, let’s walk. But there came a point in the last five years where I was like, actually, like, the language itself, like, there’s an unbridgeable divide. I could not convince someone that is even five shades more liberal than left than I am that, like, something I’m seeing on my phone is something they need to pay attention to, which, again, is like quite alarming, given, like, the profession, you know, that I, like, am in and believe in.
But yeah, it’s like, there’s the, in 2020, I think, was when I started to feel the real palpable absence of a shared civic reality. And it does feel like, even like someone would say something that’s very important to them, the way that, you know, the things we’re talking about are important to us. And I would be, like, looking at them, you know, like, it would feel, they’d be like, oh, but did you read this latest study about, like, vaccines and seed oils, you know? And I would just be like, what? You know, like, what?
Chris Hayes: Yes, I know exactly, like, there, a stray sentence from someone in your life that opens a portal into the, what kind of videos they’ve been served on the algorithm, you know?
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, and like, and maybe there’s some truth in whatever they’re saying, and I would just be like, I would just be like, like, you know, be like a tin can, me to the person directly in front of me. And it would feel like I was speaking across like a mile long rope bridge over a chasm, you know? Like, I’d just be like, well, we’re just going to go live in our phones, you know, like, let’s just go back to our respective phones, you know?
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
(Break)
Chris Hayes: To me, you mentioned the fact that, you know, the profession that you’re part of, I mean, we’re, I think we’re both, we’re both journalists, you know, in different ways, different relationships to it, but we both came up as writers, and, you know, you work in a magazine where like, famously there’s fact-checkers, and I’ve worked with New Yorker fact-checkers, and they’re like —
Jia Tolentino: They’re hard-asses, they’re amazing.
Chris Hayes: They’re hard-asses, man, it’s like wild.
Jia Tolentino: It’s amazing.
Chris Hayes: It is amazing, I mean, it’s like a really great painful massage, is how I feel.
Jia Tolentino: I love it, oh yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s like when someone’s getting a knot, you know?
Jia Tolentino: It’s agonizing, yeah.
Chris Hayes: And all of this is, I’m curious if you feel this way, I have ended up in a, and I think it’s partly age, I mean, I’m 46 years old, so I think this just comes with the territory of aging, in this kind of fuddy-duddy, fusty place of like, a lot of this old-fashioned technique craft stuff about the professional ethos of the thing that we do that I care about, which is like, it’s really important to me that I get things right, it’s really important I not show videos that are decontextualized or not right, or, you know, it’s really important that we are the ones that touchdown in reality, has become more and more and more important to me. In the work that I do professionally, it’s always been important to me, but also if I have any hope of anything civically, because like, when it comes down to, when I do see a viral video, or I do see something, what I do start to do is like, oh, was there a local news report about this?
You know, did some reporter go to the door of that employer in Great Barrington who took this video, and did they talk to a local, and it’s like, oh, yes, they did. Oh, okay, this person exists, this person is real, this is not AI, this, like, I can now read the reporting, I can read the journalism, and that ends up being the only anchor left, like, that’s it.
Jia Tolentino: I think that matters, like, on a, like, it matters on a literal, material, structural sense that, like, you need human hands on something.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jia Tolentino: Like, you need human hands on something to ensure that it remains real, and something real is produced by, like, this is just a thing that is true of, like, anything that you could possibly think of, like, a pillow, a bed, a piece of food, a news report, like, it’s, human hands are really important, but I think it’s also, and it’s, like, insane to even be having this conversation, it’s like, it’s important for people to do that, but I think emotionally that’s also true, like, I think, I don’t think anyone really likes the sense that we have that we don’t know that the text that we’re reading, like, no one wants that. Everyone wants the experiences that are maximally, that are entirely contained within the realm of the human, the literal, physical human, and, you know, I was thinking of, did you see that thing where, like, some Chicago paper published an AI list of books, like, summer books, and they were all–
Chris Hayes: They were all hallucinated.
Jia Tolentino: You know, it’s like, you just can’t, you actually, you need the human fact checker to call the person and say, “Did you say this thing?” Because if they, and if someone is doing the quick shortcut and being like, “Hey, ChatGPT, like, is this quote from this book real?” ChatGPT will say, like, “Hey, genius, like, it is real,” and it won’t be, you know? It’s like, we physically, you know, like, and there was that whole thing where, you know, for, like, a couple of weeks, ChatGPT was like, you’d be like, “Hey, ChatGPT, like, “I had an amazing business idea to, like, cut off my head and sell it for $2 million,” and they would be like, “Fam, like, you know, many people in this world are afraid to take risks, but not you,” you know?
And it would just, like, if you asked it, should I stop taking–
Chris Hayes: Yes, they had to basically, just, the story was that the model was too flattering. What had happened was basically, like, the training data had shown that, like, users liked that the most, and so the model had gotten too flattering, and they had to, like, go into the guts of the model and, like, turn down how flattering it was.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, like, people would ask it. Like, there were screenshots, like, all over of people being like, “ChatGPT, like, should I stop taking the lithium that I’ve been prescribed for 25 years?” And it would be like, “Girl, absolutely,” you know? And it’s like, it’s really funny, but it’s also like, oh my God, you know? Like, someone probably murdered their whole family because of, like, a system update in ChatGPT. And it is funny finding myself, like, it does feel kind of fuddy-duddy, but it also, I don’t know, it, like, makes sense. Like, you simply need people rather than–
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jia Tolentino: — you know, machines trained on endless loops of increasingly incorrect data to determine your world.
Chris Hayes: I think this idea, this sort of ethos that I think is like an emerging ethos that I do think is kind of exciting to me, an exciting sort of, I think, political and ideological movement of, like, the primacy of the human. And again, like, has real resonances with the Industrial Revolution and, you know, Brian Merchant has a book called “Blood and the Machine,” which is sort of about the origins of the Luddite movement.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, they were right. They were right.
Chris Hayes: And he writes a lot about this and he’s got a sub stack that’s very good, I recommend to people, but this idea, and Ezra’s talked about this and D. Graham Burnett, who’s a attention theorist who I really respect and activist on this, like, as the kind of machinification of intelligence happens, as we sort of, the sort of, the industrial, the industrialization, like, reaches into our very consciousness and minds. Like, reasserting the primacy of human, of humanness and humans doing stuff, I think is actually a kind of emerging priority, politically, personally, spiritually, ideologically.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, right. I mean, it’s like, like, sometimes there are posts on Reddit that are like, “Wait, before Google Maps, what did people do?”
Chris Hayes: Yeah, how did they, no, I saw that one the other day.
Jia Tolentino: How did they get around?
Chris Hayes: How did they navigate?
Jia Tolentino: Right.
Chris Hayes: How did people get to an address?
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, and like, and it’s like, you know, like, there are so many things that I’ve outsourced to the phone, such as like the storage of visual memories, right? And, you know, like, there are plenty, but it’s, yeah, it’s like, I mean, the thing about, the whole thing, it’s like, I think I wrote about this in the “Broken Brain” thing. It’s like, why is there this mass de-skilling experiment at a time when, with the skills we have, we’re already not doing very well, like living in contemporary reality? Like we are already kind of psychologically unequipped to live in this contemporary reality, and our response to it is like further de-skill ourselves by handing over basic kind of questions of comprehension of reality to ChatGPT.
It just seems like, yeah, on a very pragmatic level, all of this aside, it’s like on a selfish level, I can’t de-skill myself any more than I already am because I’m already not doing well.
Chris Hayes: I do think, because I think that there is some light at the end of the tunnel, where I think there’s some reasons for optimism. I also think that the experience, the experience of online life, which again is life, again, it’s not like, this is not some other quadrant of life, right, is generally understood to have gotten worse, and people don’t like it more and more. And I do think there’s a huge, the 404 piece that you referenced before about AI slop, there is a huge spam problem coming for all of these platforms, which is we’ve all experienced both email and tech spam making both of those mediums harder to use and less enjoyable to be on. There is now spam at scale for content, and you could just automate it all, like you were saying before, like the chain of like a ChatGPT prompt to a mid-journey video to a Google VO, all can be automated. And you’re going to have more and more slop and more and more spam, which is going to make the user experience worse.
I mean, the user experience got worse in email when spam blew up, it’s gotten worse in text as spam has blown up, it’s gotten worse in old-fashioned regular mail.
Jia Tolentino: Right.
Chris Hayes: You know, why do all of us ignore our mail? We ignore our mail. I mean, I’m speaking for myself, but I feel like everyone does this. Ignore the mail because 90% of it is not actually for me. If it was all for me, I would be like stoked to open letters to me, you know, but that’s not what’s happening. And I think if you’re ignoring it, like I do think there’s a real problem. I think they have created a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster for themselves.
Jia Tolentino: You don’t think that we will just like accept the garbage? Like you don’t think that the titration of increased garbage will be slow enough?
Chris Hayes: We’re just like pigs, we’re like feed more.
Jia Tolentino: I think you’re right, but I think, like, I don’t know, like the internet, I mean, we’ve both talked about this with each other and, you know, I think so much of it, it’s like the experience of the internet has lost the sort of, you know, the magic has been diminishing every, you know, and it’s getting less and less funny and it’s getting worse and worse and worse. My screen time hasn’t gone down, I’ll say. Do you know what I mean? It’s never going down. And this is like, again, someone that like over and over writes about how important it is to like —
Chris Hayes: Same, same.
Jia Tolentino: You know, and it’s like, my screen time’s not going down. Yeah. You know? And so I think you’re right, there’s like a huge problem. But I think what is also just as likely to happen is us being like, well, the world’s just worse now. Yum, yum, yum, you know? And arguably I’ve already been doing that.
Chris Hayes: The one thing that I do, I think that’s true. The one thing I kind of, I’ve been circling around this idea about how, because this is an idea that came, became clear to me as I was writing about social media in “The Siren’s Call” about attention. But I actually think it’s sort of broadly true of our version of capitalism.
If your consumer is too satisfied and happy, you are leaving money on the table. Like the optimal experience of the consumer is to be like annoyed and hassled, but still using the product.
Jia Tolentino: Right.
Chris Hayes: It’s like, if the airplane seat is super comfortable, then you could shrink it by an inch and a half. And it will not be that comfortable, but they’ll still probably buy the ticket, right? But it also feels like there is some point at which people are like, I’m not flying that airline, or I’m not using that service.
And it’s a weird thing that businesses are always aiming for. It’s like, how much can we extract out of our customer? How much can we annoy them? How much can we create hassle where they’re still attached to the product? And at what point does it tip over where they’re like, I’m done? And clearly to your point, like they’re still in the, with both of us, and with a lot, you know, at scale across 2 billion users, which is what Meta has, they haven’t tipped over into the, I’m done. But like, there has been steady year over year–
Jia Tolentino: They have kind of, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Declining active users on all these platforms. And there are changing behaviors of younger people who basically don’t kind of use public social media anymore in the same way. They’re all doing sort of private messaging. So like, I do wonder if there’s a, if there are sort of turning points where like people do say, I’m out.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, I think that’s right. But I do, you know, it’s like even something like Reddit, which I think has thrived because it is, for a while it was like relatively, it was, you know, I mean, it’s the fifth, yeah, it’s pretty human. And it’s like famously while like Google did AI on its search and now everyone, you can only find human information if you add Reddit onto any search term, right?
But now already like Reddit is flooding currently with ChatGPT text and that’s, you know, but yeah, you’re right. There is, I mean, I don’t mean to downplay the exercise of human agency that we do every day, but yeah.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(Break)
Chris Hayes: I think that to the degree that you keep seeing these sort of pockets of rebellion with like phones out of schools and this sort of like little bit nascent and burgeoning attention movement and like people, you know, talking about this experience the way they used to talk about air travel or they talk about traffic as like, you know, the like universally bummer aspects of modern life that, I guess what I’m saying is there’s potential there. To me, the discontent produces potential.
The thing that you’re writing about in the essay is like the checking out that happens, which I totally agree, like is also a part of what’s happening. And people are kind of fed up with politics and people feel overwhelmed by it. But to me, on the other side of that, and part of that too is like, I do think just in our lived reality, like the primacy of hanging out with people. This is like a huge thing that I keep coming back to. And I think COVID broke something in all of us. And I think it reset our level for digital companionship way higher. And we’re having a hard time getting it back. But I do think a huge thing to reclaim in contemporary life is people being around other people.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah. I mean, I wonder what you, like, I have wondered how this will be when my kids get older, where this like becomes, are your kids old enough to have phones? No.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, so my, yes, the eighth grader.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah. And it’s like, I mean, I will have to ask you at another time, like, or maybe now, like, I mean, what do you do? Like, I have kind of thought that my, as a person that is addicted to my phone, like the only pitch that I will have, you know, to mitigate all the incentives to just like be an adolescent girl and like lock onto it is just like, your human experience of living in the world will suffer if you are not getting messy face to face. It’s not like an ethics thing. It’s not a virtue thing. It’s not a whatever. It’s like, literally in my, I want you to experience pleasure and contentment in the world. And the only way that we can kind of protect the ability for that to be possible is to like put a guardrail on here, you know?
Chris Hayes: I mean, one of the things I think, I’m not going to speak specifically about my daughter is because I want to like protect her universe of privacy. But one thing that has struck me about kids that age, and I do think there’s a lot of displacement or anxiety about our own phone use onto younger people that happens.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Understandably too. I mean, one thing that is really different about being 13 is that you’re with, you are IRL with your friends all the time.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Which is awesome. And it’s something that adults don’t have. And in some ways, I think that that part of it, this is part of why I think, you know, remote schooling was so brutal for so many kids, 13 year olds do have a thing that is, as far as we can measure it empirically, diminishing for adults, which is just like time with their homies.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, totally.
Chris Hayes: So that actually, I do think acts as a little bit of a ballast. Because if you’re interacting with people, like I used to hang out with my friends all day, come home and talk on the phone for three hours. Back, this is pre-internet, right? So I’d like, seventh and eighth grade, I would like get on the phone and I would just talk.
Jia Tolentino: Same.
Chris Hayes: And I think to the extent that kids are using phones in that way, I think is way less insidious than some of the other ways they might use phones. Like when you’re in this world where like your social world is so huge and important and it’s kind of everything, and the phone is one more vector to that, but it’s still all smashed up against IRL.
Jia Tolentino: The primacy of the real world.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I think that that actually weirdly has a kind of a little bit of a mitigating effect on it.
Jia Tolentino: Right, right.
Chris Hayes: I think, I mean, again, I’m sort of projecting here from a sort of sample of one and also not wanting to like get into the details of her life. You know, one of the things I’m jealous of as I look at the life of an eighth grader is like, you do spend a lot of time with your friends and that’s really awesome for your soul. Like, that’s a really, really important and good thing. And as far as we can measure this in America, Americans, we spend less time doing that than other countries. And we’re spending less time doing it year over year.
Jia Tolentino: Totally. That Atlantic piece that was a while back that was like, “Americans need to party more.” And I was like, “That’s right, that’s right.”
Chris Hayes: And even like, I don’t know if you’ve looked at the data on like nightclubs and like, you know, there’s a whole, nightclubs have been, you know, really on the decline. I have a whole thing about, I mean, I’m digging into this tongue in cheek, but the youngest generation needs to drink more, which is a controversial take that I’m sort of saying, like I am joking, kind of, and I understand there are all sorts of people have all kinds of relationships with alcohol. So I am mostly saying that tongue in cheek, but what I am trying to get at is like, I do think more, it doesn’t have to involve alcohol, but I do think occasions for people to be together and partying and congregating, which again, are measurably all kind of on the decline is a real issue.
Jia Tolentino: Yeah, I think, well, I just filed a piece for the New Yorker of like reviewing a couple of books about like, why Gen Z is having less sex and, you know, does have to do with the fact that they’re drinking less. And it was like, you know, these traditional, if like wildly imperfect methods of attempting to establish human connection, which is like getting wasted and taking someone home. It’s like, yeah, it’s not necessarily great, but like what the intention was to stumble in the dark and find something, right? The idea was like, something would be found, maybe not tonight, but maybe the next night, or maybe, you know, and like, it’s not necessarily like a, yeah, it’s not, neither of us is saying it’s an exemplary sort of paradigm, but the idea that human connection was out there to be groped towards, you know, was real. And it feels like that is the kind of end goal that you chase imperfectly is kind of corroding for younger people where it’s, and I think, you know, I mean, back to what I think one of the only ways that we sort of reestablish a neural pathway to the idea that like the world is made of humans that we want to relate to differently, and the world is full of actual situations that we want to change or improve.
Like the only way to reestablish that, instead of the like, that can’t be real, that can be, like the only way to remind ourselves that the world is in fact unbelievably real, you know, like I feel like, I mean, it’s, it sounds like something my dumb ass would say, but it’s like, yeah, maybe fucking going to a nightclub like is an important part of that. So like, it’s, you know, I mean, it kind of is like the reason that going to a protest is useful. It’s just like, it’s just a simple, simple reminder that there are actually humans that care about the same things and that there are humans actually responsible for the things that you hate. And it reorients you to that rather than the like, hyper-mediated, like, you know, untouchable hall of mirror thing. And I do think that hanging out with your homies is a good way of, you know what I mean?
Chris Hayes: Yes. You know, there’s all kinds of different ways that people do this. Like I, you know, was biking home along the West Side and I saw people like in run clubs and playing pickleball. And there’s this group of people that get together in this like big cabin or space somewhere in Brooklyn. They all sing together. Of course I know this because of their social media videos.
Jia Tolentino: The Gaia Music Collective. Yeah. Great social media, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Of course I know because they’re a social media collective, but I actually know someone who’s done it with them. And like, you know, there’s a million different ways to do it that, you know, obviously, don’t need to involve alcohol or anything, but creating the structures and choosing to do that, again, all the incentives push against it, you know? And so, finding ways to reclaim the human. And I think you’re, to end on this point on protest, I mean, that is a huge part of why protest is so important and so powerful because it shows you there are other people who care about the same things and that you’re not alone and that people haven’t all checked out from like, this doesn’t matter, this can’t be real.
You meet people, you feel the sort of physical feeling of being with other people. And that’s like nourishing to your soul and to your politics and to your sense of collective strength. And all that stuff is really important right now, I think, because the sort of sense of individuation and alienation and my brain is broken and nothing is real is so, so overwhelming and powerful.
Jia Tolentino is a writer for The New Yorker. She’s got an incredible book of essays called “Trick Mirror,” which I highly, highly recommend. It’s a really great piece of work that you should check out. And the essay we were discussing in part here is called “My Brain Finally Broke.” That’s available on The New Yorker website.
Jia, thanks so much.
Jia Tolentino: Thank you for having me.
Chris Hayes: You can always email us withpod@gmail.com. You can get in touch with us using the hashtag #withpod. Follow us on TikTok by searching for withpod. You can follow me on Threads, Blue Sky, and what used to be called Twitter with the handle @chrislhays. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Our associate producer for video is Joanne Kong. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio.
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