Welcome to ‘the silent society’

“It’s really bad for you … we know better than to drink all night.” “I just like to go home after class, relax, maybe go on Twitch or Stream.” “Cost of living, man, I have to go out and grind.” These are some of the reasons given by students at my local university, when asked why they no longer frequent the campus pub, which used to close at 1 a.m. and now has its last call around 7:30 p.m. But the real reason was apparent; as soon as they stopped speaking, they turned their heads back down to their phones and went on their solitary way, apparently without the least interest or curiosity in each other. One young woman opened up a bit more: “it’s an anxiety thing. … We don’t really like to talk to strangers.”

With every new innovation, the digital universe continues its conquest of the social world, assimilating everything from high politics to the most personal and intimate aspects of our lives. And there is one consequence that seems to correlate perfectly with this trend: the steady contraction of the real world itself. The relationship between the stagnation of our natural and built environments and the growth of the “bits economy” has been noted before . But what we are now only beginning to understand in depth is how decades of offloading our daily interactions to online spaces has made a desert out of the in-person environments where human beings congregated and conducted the customs, norms, and rituals of shared existence.

The term “ third space ” was coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg to refer to these sites where people meet to socialize beyond where they live and work. Such places have been in decline for years before Covid, work-from-home, and delivery apps supercharged the trend. Now, food inflation is accelerating the pace of collapse and changing generational preferences around diet and drink are entrenching it.

The statistics confirm a bleak outlook for the service industry: “nearly 40% of Americans are dining out less frequently,” reports YouGov , while Gallup finds that “the percentage of US adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend.” Momofuku chef David Chang calls the situation an “ existential threat ” to his profession. Fast-food chains like Subway and Wendy’s are closing hundreds of locations, and mid-tier and mom-and-pop restaurants are vanishing even faster. One may celebrate the broad turn away from intoxication and greasy food, but people, especially the young, aren’t replacing the bars and diners of old, and are instead forgoing the prosocial dimensions of classic third spaces. Putting on an old episode of Cheers , “where everyone knows your name,” or Friends , with its Central Perk coffeehouse, feels like watching footage from a lost civilization.

Another set of figures completes the picture: crashing global fertility can be attributed to the introduction of smartphones in 2007, according to a new University of Cincinnati study . Time-use data shows that smartphones “halved face-to-face socialization” from 12 to six hours or fewer a week, with the result being that young adults fail to meet and hook up, never starting on the path to reproduction that once began at a bar, cafe or equivalent place for social interactions. What this suggests is that beneath the impacts of exogenous shocks like the pandemic or affordability crises, the antisocial pull is endogenous to the smartphone era. The hollowing out of third spaces, as it turns out, presages nothing less than the extinction of the species.

And thus, what passes for the “new normal” is, in fact, a mass screen-induced distortion of our basic human nature. The only alternative is to actively resist and fight back. But how can people be persuaded to do something? Just as Rachel Carson kickstarted the modern environmental movement with her haunting prediction of a “silent spring,” where birdsong ceased due to the mass die-off of birds from the (hitherto uncontroversial) use of toxic pesticides, so too should the public today be galvanized out of apathy by the image — already a stark reality — of a “silent society” characterized by a social die-off. For the silent society is one drained of organic life and human voices, populated by successive, shrinking generations of dead-eyed youths who no longer know how (nor even desire) to talk to each other, foster friendships, seek partners, or build families and communities beyond what exists as simulation on screens. It is, above all, silent quite literally because the everyday sounds of conversation, laughter, argument, romance, and spontaneity have been snuffed out and surrendered to total digital intermediation.

Of course, the firms of the attention economy have no problem with the silent society and are, in fact, responsible for it — the industry is built on encouraging addiction to its products. A world where people can’t communicate except through phones and AI assistants is one where the rule o…