Have Our Screens Made Us Too Distracted For Democracy?

Offline with Jon Favreau

Crooked Media

Society & Culture, News

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ben Rhodes—bestselling author, Pod Save the World co-host, and fellow Obama administration alum—joins Offline to explain how America is being torn apart by short-term thinking and the technology that stokes it. Ben recently wrote a piece for the New York Times on the topic, and he and Jon connect the dots between big tech, the attention economy and domestic dogmas, drawing on fifty years of foreign policy to explain how we got to a place where no one can focus on the worst of what Trump’s doing—let alone agree on a national narrative.

Transcript

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1:30.9	I honestly think that in 2011 at the height of the Arab Spring, that the autocrats were like,
1:38.5	we can't let this happen.
1:40.8	We got to figure out how to make this tool work for us. Because we can't just shut it down.
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1:52.3	these companies, which is more clicks equals more ad revenue, was seen as just the opportunity
1:58.7	that it is by the far right or by the autocrats, that if we can just
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2:08.9	and we can also kind of divide, demoralize small D-Democrats everywhere.
	...

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