Sign up to the economist for in-depth

expert analysis of world events

and topics ranging from business and culture

to science and technology.

You'll get the weekly digital edition, online only articles,

curated newsletters on politics, the markets, science, culture and China.

And full access to The Economist Podcast Plus.

The Economist is independent journalism for independent thinking.

Go to Economist.com and get your first month free.

This is honestly. Perhaps you've noticed that the thing that we call social media is in fact deeply antisocial.

These platforms that were pitched as ways to unite us have instead done precisely the opposite.

You can see it everywhere you look, in the rise of political polarization, in the mobs that

form to call for people's jobs or to ruin their reputations.

And you can see it in the historical rise of distrust in just about everything, including

the deep distrust and paranoia that we have about one another. A lot of people have tried to explain what exactly is happening

here, how we got to this point. They blame Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or the

attention-st stealing algorithms.

Some of blame capitalism, others human nature itself.

But the best explanation I have read to date

was just published in the Atlantic by my guest today Jonathan Hight.

You might know him best from his book The Coddling of the American Mind,

which he co-wrote with Greg Luciano,

...