This is basically the thesis of the book I just linked. Its probably one of the more important politically oriented pieces I've ever read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

It's ironic that people are arguing that books are a waste of time - on HN.

There are certainly too many one-idea books, but there are also many extraordinary, irreplicable works: A Pattern Language, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Landscape of History, The Modern Firm, The Diffusion of Innovations, Bowling Alone, The Life You Can Save, And the Band Played On, and on and on.

Finding solid evidence that loneliness is increasing is a problem. I believe that it is but it is something that's simply hard to demonstrate. I think Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone was one of the most convincing arguments for the breakdown of community in the US but even that careful, well documented study had it's significant critics. Equally, one could point to the epidemic of suicides and opioids but again, one could frame doubts.

Anyone know other arguments.

This is sad for more than sentimental reasons, as the article mentions. The "Economics of Trust" is important for easy dealmaking, credit, and other things. More here:

http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/software-programming-...

I could see that being true. Do you mean businesses like Facebook and Twitter with their substitution for socializing?

I fully agree with the rest of your post. If you're interested in the subject, I would suggest reading Robert Putnam's research on Social Capital. Bowling Alone is a good synthesis (but I'd personally pass on his other books, which lean more toward polemics).

Why, what makes you think that nurturing more viewpoints leads better outcomes? You've just agreed with me that recent experience tends to say it doesn't. Why do you think that part of the adaptation to this new world we find ourselves in might not be a bit more control. I think exposure to views is fine, but it seems likely to me that social media doesn't just expose it converts. It gives people the impression that their niche viewpoint is widely supported and our brains are hardwired to go with consensus so when presented with one they hop on, but because it fragments that consensus we're left with hundreds of fractions each lapping up a nice densely connected graph of agreement.

On institutional failure. I agree that institutions have failed us. It's hard to look around and argue, but not all institutions and not all the way. The vaccine is getting out. The US is in top handful of countries in terms of distribution and well ahead in terms of total doses administered. While the death of the single provider household is partially to blame Bowling Alone a book about the decline in social capital in the US credits a lot of the fault with TV with some interesting natural experiments to back it up (it came out in 2000 so social media wasn't really a thing yet). Burning institutions to the ground basically never happens and is incredibly destructive when it does. Like great leap forward levels of destructive. I for one am not ready for that to happen.

While one of the changes we think about is that, the more positive one is that we now know SO much about how the young brain develops. We want parents to have access to that in a meaningful way. I often use the healthcare analogy; when someone wants support with their health (whether proactive wellness or reactive treatment) they'll often go to a doctor which is great (and why it's so bad when people don't have healthcare). Raising a child is of course different in many ways, but the internet is awash with generic, impersonal advice whereas we hope to bring back the human connection. We're excited to be able to bring this growing field of expertize to parents in a way that is deeply human at it's heart.

But yes... changes in communities are still depressing.

Morris Berman discussed it to a degree in 2000.

Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam (2000) hinted to it. Heck, there are countries now with restaurants that cater to solo diners. That seems really depressing.

The late Chalmers Johnson predicted it convincingly in 2006 and during a few interviews.

America: The Farewell Tour by Chris Hedges (2018).

When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present by Nick Bryant (2021).

Most civilizations tend to last an average of 250 years until corruption and other factors causes their effective collapse. I think there is often a combined gradual decline and more sudden decline into effective collapse when civilizations lose their "critical mass" to maintain basic infrastructure and services. There are numerous failed states in the world that perpetually operate on the edge of this condition. Healthy civilizations needs lofty aspirations that don't lead to insolvency.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-08-10/four-reasons-c...

Wow, it is amazing to see how many people have come to this incredibly pessimistic view (I say this from other hn posts as well as this one).

It's been a long time since people lived in villages where each person's propensity for lying or not could be easily discerned. And it indeed took a while for people to reach the point that they could relate to strangers without either attacking them or allowing them to take advantage of them.

This progression has been necessary for the civilization that we know (for all it's goods and ills).

It's worth noting social media arose in the US at the point that a lot of immediate associations were decaying (see Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone). Social media has fullfilled a lot of the functions of things like the bowling leagues whose decline Putnam documents. Certainly social media has been problematic but it has essentially been where the socialize part of society is going (not to mention a lot the problems that the article and the parent imagines comes from social media in particular are actually problems of society in general). In anything, of the social medias, Facebook has done the most work in creating an interface to your friends in particular rather than the world at large (does the parent know he can keep non-friends from seeing or commenting on his feed? It might solve some of the problems he rails about.)

The thing is I suspect that the today's Facebook haters don't share an urge to return to the 100-person band societies that the primitivists I once knew idolize. Instead, I think they imagine a society where socializing will simply generally stop and people will give up the idea of friends entirely or that some small bubble they're can be exception to this.

In the 60's everyone was casting off (often shitty) cultural restraints, but it was an overcorrection that was almost completely narcissistic. Suddenly you have no fault divorce and a culture that increasingly doesn't view that as a problem. Fast forward 40 years and my generation is largely self-serving paxil-popping automatons. :-)

Facebook brings us together but it ultimately doesn't make us really sacrifice for each other. That's an infinitely harder problem that technology will probably never solve.

Americans have significantly fewer close friends than previous generations[1]. They're much less likely to know their next-door neighbors[2]. Church attendance (which has traditionally been a major source of social capital) is way down, especially among young people[3]. Membership in civic organizations like the Masons and League of Women Voters has virtually disappeared among young people[4]. Adult sports leagues have sharply declining participation[5]. Even family reunions are disappearing[6].

These trends all started in the 1980s, well before social media and clickbait headlines. Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone in 2000. In a lot of ways I think modern Internet culture is a reaction, not a cause, of our social atomization and anomie. People are lonely and searching for human interaction in any form, even if it's just culture war bickering with strangers on the web.

Of course the problem is its a poor substitution for real-life relationships. Online interaction offers a temporarily relief of loneliness without conferring any of the long-term mental health benefits of actual social interaction.

[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=550938...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/daily-digit-americans-dont-kn...
[3] https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christ...
[4] https://prospect.org/infrastructure/strange-disappearance-ci...
[5] https://www.athleticbusiness.com/Recreation/slow-pitch-softb...
[6] https://www.wyso.org/post/family-reunions-tradition-decline

We have seen a decrease in US median income over the last however many years [1]. The way rent tends to be excluded from this underestimates the increase in impoverishment here imo also. There are also the frequent articles concerning how many people are $500/$1000/etc away disaster.

For increased social isolation, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone is the classic (Note, Gates is neither an economist nor a sociologist. Putnam is a well recognized sociologist).

Note that the Average American's life span decreased for the second year in a row. This is notable since increases in medical technology tend to increase this life expectancy even when nothing else changes[2]. A big factor in the reduced life expectancy is what's termed "deaths from despair".

[1]https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/01/20/who-is-the-middle...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/21/health/us-life-expectancy-stu...

> Dozens of painstaking studies... have established beyond reasonable doubt that ... [t]he more integrated we are with our community, the less likely we are to experience colds, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, depression and premature death of all sorts...

> ... the positive contributions to health made by social integration and social support rival in strength the detrimental contributions of ... risk factors like ... smoking, obesity, elevated blood pressure, and physical inactivity.

> ...as a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.

Putnam was surveying a large number of studies, not just the Harvard one.

[1] Putnam, Robert D, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community; https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commu...

The trend of declining participation in religious organizations, civic organizations (like the League of Women Voters), fraternal societies (like the Elks or Masons), volunteer associations, labor unions, and sports leagues has been happening since at least the 1970s. Surveys of Americans have found a consistent decline in the number of self-reported close friends since as far back as the 1980s. Same for those who reported being friends with their neighbors. Indicators of social capital like the percent of people who donate blood have been falling since the 1970s.

The point is increasing levels of isolation and misanthropy is a manifestation of a broader trend towards declining social capital. And that trend has been ongoing for probably 50 years. Social media may have accelerated it, but I don't think it would have anywhere near the same impact if Facebook was introduced to the American society of 1960.