Once you lose your hope, once you become sort of cynical and allow yourselves to see the world

in the way that the despot, that the regime wants you to see it, you've essentially given up,

right? Like there's no way really that a democracy in a meaningful sense can happen at that point

because you are just so unable to sort of have a hope for a better

future and to see the best in people and everything just becomes, you know, Lull, nothing matters,

right? And everything is just a game just to show everyone's a character or a non-player character

or whatever it might be. It's despair. Like that's what that is. And yet it's so natural for us to want to take refuge in that because, you know, the reality of things hurts.

I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest, Megan Garber.

Megan writes about the intersection of internet and culture over at the Atlantic,

and last week she published one of the most offline books I've read in years.

It's called Screen People.

In it, she illustrates how we're no longer just an audience for the media we consume.

We're also actors and producers in an endless show of our own creation,

and that of our friends, our colleagues, our political opponents, even of people walking down

the street. The two-way screens we carry around in our pockets make it hard to tell the

difference between living and performing, between ironic and earnest, between reality and illusion.

This isn't just changing the content we're addicted to.

It's changing the entire ethical framework of our society.

Megan makes a very strong case that the medium is no longer just the message,

as Marshall McLuhan argued in 1964,

nor is it just the metaphor as Neil Postman, an offline forefather, if you will, posited a few decades later.

Today, Megan, says the medium is the moral, and it turns out we don't treat each other so well when we're all just extras in each other's shows.

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