
Interviewed by El Mundo
Jason Steinhauer: “Infinite scrolling is the most consequential invention of our time: we are addicted to it and Trump gives us that fix”
A prestigious public historian, he works at the intersection of technology, networks and politics. He claims that we are at the end of the industrial age, of trust in experts, of faith in vaccines. Faced with the end of the linearity of information
You have written that the 5 November elections in the USA were the night that brought the 20th century to a close. Was this just a provocation?
I was very serious about this. Many friends from Europe were asking me for predictions and I wanted time to reflect on everything we had seen, not only in 2024, the election campaign and Biden, but in the run-up to 2024, with the COVID-19 pandemic, all the technological changes we are witnessing, the introduction of Elon Musk into politics. All of that led me to the conclusion that I put into an essay: the 20th century is over.
The essay says it’s not solely about Trump, it’s not just about politics, but what marks the change of era are the interconnected technologies, institutions and ideologies that shape people’s decisions and world events.
When you think about the ingredients that make up the zeitgeist , the spirit of the times, there are certainly the people who form the public sphere or who are the protagonists of politics, with their ideas, their ideologies, their discourses. But they are not the only ones. Institutions also contribute and they have their own cultures, their own missions, their own values. Institutions can have an enormous impact on how we operate, what we think is important, where we focus our attention. And then there are also technologies. I am a great believer in the writings of people like Marshall McLuhan and Lewis Mumford who talk about how the more we use certain technologies, the more we become like them. They have an enormous influence on how we think, how we operate, how we organize our societies. Not to mention music, culture and art.
What is the most profound change?
If you look at the 20th century, with all its particularities and nuances, the dominant institutions, the dominant political figures, the technologies that were dominant all had one thing in common: the belief that cooperation through international organizations could help alleviate global problems, whether it was climate change, hunger, or exploring space. It was a recurring theme in rhetoric, even despite territorial disputes or cultural differences. But if you look at where we are now, I would say that November 5, 2024 may have really put the nail in the coffin. You see a massive distrust of these global international institutions and a real belief that the goal of the nation-state is not to collaborate, but only to put self-interest first. In many ways Trump embodies this better than anyone, pulling the United States out of the WHO, out of the Paris Climate Accords, and doubling down on the idea of America first. There are many happy people in my country, but others of us believe that these international institutions have played an important role in trying to meet global challenges and that we have to continue to defend the role of these institutions in the context of a changing zeitgeist .
What marked the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the long 19th century was not only the violence in the Balkans that somehow ended in the First World War, but also the emergence of the avant-garde, the change in music, the break with figurative art, the new physics…
Much of 20th-century culture emerged out of a reinvention after World War I and the carnage that was there. And the scars that people brought back from those greatly influenced the way the world developed. Sometimes as an escape and as a rebirth to confront what people had just lived through. The interesting thing is that all of those artists and cultural figures back then were human, but the next cultural movements, the next art movements that emerge in the 21st century in the new world that we are creating might not be created by humans. They might be the work of artificial intelligence, or at least of humans working in conjunction with AI. Now you don’t need to be skilled with your hands to make a beautiful painting anymore, you need to be skilled with ones and zeros.
You say that infinite scroll may go down in history as the most important invention of our time.
Totally, and we don’t pay enough attention to how important that’s been. One of the main reasons we’re all addicted to phones is because there’s a constant flow, we can stay connected for 24 hours a day, seven days a week and never get to the end of the feed. That’s very different from a book or a magazine or a newspaper, which by the way doesn’t spy on you or watch you either. Obviously that has huge consequences for people’s time and attention. It has huge consequences for their cognitive abilities and it has huge implications for policy. One of the things that Trump has done brilliantly in his rise to power is constantly creating content for that infinite scroll. We have an insatiable appetite, we’re addicted, cruising toward doom. He gives us what we’re looking for. He gives us that dopamine hit with an increasingly wild statement or executive order or rally or speech or meme or YMCA dance . He and his team have become very sophisticated. It is the best example of how the technology we use combined with the political environment in which we operate creates very powerful outcomes that dictate the course of politics and the direction of an entire nation.
Accuracy, truth, doesn’t matter, only visibility, shock , subversion. Have Trump and others changed behavior or have they just gotten really good at reading the zeitgeist ?
I’ll give you the historian’s predictable answer: It’s a dialectic. The more we use technologies, the more technologies tell us how to behave. And then the more we learn those behaviors, the more influence we have on how the technology evolves. As early as 2016, Trump was very good at understanding how to triangulate social media with live television, with press releases and controversial announcements so that all of this would reach people at once. He would speak at a rally and then his team would post excerpts on social media and kick off a feedback loop. And as you learn what kinds of content become more visible, you’ll behave more in that way. Accuracy, veracity don’t really matter because they’re not a factor when it comes to how many of these algorithms work. Attention shocks, shock, surprise, and other hyperbolic emotions are rewarded.
How can democracies sustain this?
Democracy is an extremely complex thing, involving long deliberative processes, debates between people who may disagree. Voting, advocating, arguing for and against. And in an era of diminishing attention spans and three-second audio clips and videos on social media, long deliberative processes are at a disadvantage. I think that’s a big challenge and no one has really solved that question. I also think that democracies have to look in the mirror and realize that in many cases they haven’t kept the promises that we’ve made to the people, so it’s not surprising that people are demanding something different. There are inherent contradictions and people have been frustrated.
Democracies, which are an anomaly in historical terms, how can they adapt without giving up their principles?
I certainly hope they can. There are many reasons to be pessimistic when we look at the future of institutions, but just because something is an anomaly doesn’t mean it’s doomed to extinction. The future is not yet written, we must not assume that the return of authoritarianism around the world is inevitable. We can act and create that future through debate, discussion and making our case. So if we think that democracy, individual freedoms, human rights, the security of all species on this planet are important and valuable and worth defending, then we have to fight for them. Now, the arguments we made in the 20th century, the techniques we used, the institutions we trusted, are probably not going to work in the 21st century. We need different kinds of institutions, different kinds of leaders, different kinds of voices. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.
Whatever happens in the next few decades, do you think it will be more like the world we both grew up in or fundamentally different?
Well, I think it will probably be a combination of ideas and values that we have inherited from a previous era with new ideas and values that emerge in our current era. One of the shortcomings that I see in the American political system over the last ten years, as all these dramatic changes have been unfolding, is that certain political and cultural leaders have been constantly appealing to the 20th century to try to make arguments in the 21st century. And I don’t think that’s going to work. One example is the Green New Deal , the Green Deal , taking a 20th-century idea from the New Deal and trying to bring it forward into the 21st century and somehow connecting it to a new operating system. They existed in a different time, they were based on a different set of values and assumptions. They invoked a different set of institutions. I don’t think that’s going to work in the 21st century. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t find new operating models. We have to create new structures within which people can do that. And maybe those structures involve blockchain , maybe artificial intelligence, or leveraging some of the things that social media does well.
How does history help us understand or navigate the present?
There’s a definition of history that I really like. It’s from a British historian, John Arnold, who said that history is an argument and a constant discussion. So when I look back at history, I look for the arguments that people made. And I’m inspired by the different ways that people argued to fight for their ideas and what they thought was important. We can’t take something from 1937 or 1947 and just take it out of time and put it in 2027 and think that’s going to work. But I think we can look at the arguments that people used for democracy, for human rights, for individual freedoms, for collaboration. And we can borrow from those arguments and make them our own in the 21st century. Because those ideas are still important. Even if we have to execute them and convey them in a different way.
We are leaving one world behind, starting another… Is it the time of monsters? Something hybrid like a Frankenstein taking shape?
Well, in some ways it’s always been a Frankenstein, hasn’t it? There are many different isms competing at any given time: populism, communism, capitalism, neoliberalism, liberalism, globalism, internationalism. Ideas can coexist and that’s why I think we sometimes oversimplify. The reality is much more complex. Sadly, what we’re seeing in some parts of the world is the suppression of debate, of intellectual thought and of the kinds of voices that we need to be reflective, analytical and critical about the current state of affairs. So whether I’m right or wrong is in some ways almost secondary to making sure that civil society and the public sphere continue to have the space where this kind of thinking can exist and flourish. That’s ultimately what helps make a democracy thrive.
America’s most revered president, Abraham Lincoln, did not hesitate to suppress free speech and imprison critics during the most difficult period in the country’s history.
It is so. Questions around free speech and liberty are always complicated, they are always dictated by historical circumstances and we have to think very critically about when and how we make decisions to suppress free speech if we intend to do so. While it may seem like repression can work sometimes in the short term, ultimately in the longer and larger struggles, the ones that matter, liberty is often what delivers the decisive blow. And if you look at communism and the end of it, the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the Civil War here, the end of the American Revolution, what ultimately was the cause that delivered the decisive blow was the cause of liberty and breaking free from the shackles of repression and oppression. So I think it’s important for us to think about that at a time when we are suddenly very eager to suppress free speech in all kinds of different ways, whether it’s on different social media platforms, whether it’s in our universities or in our libraries, banning books. Ultimately, while repression may work in the short term, freedom almost always triumphs in the end.
What are you afraid of?
I look at my son and ask myself every day: how can I raise him to be a critical thinker in this world where we continually delegate much of that activity to algorithms, machines and artificial intelligence? I am very afraid that we will lose the ability to think critically and analytically about the world, something essential for society and democracy. That is something that keeps me up at night.