In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, both Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend lame-duck President Donald Trump from their platforms. He had encouraged violence, the sites reasoned; the megaphone was taken away, albeit temporarily. To many Americans horrified by the attack, the decisions were a relief. But for some conservatives, it marked an escalation in a different kind of assault: It was, to them, a clear sign of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias.

That same year, Florida and Texas passed bills to restrict social-media platforms’ ability to take down certain kinds of content. (Each is described in this congressional briefing.) In particular, they intend to make political “deplatforming” illegal, a move that would have ostensibly prevented the removal of Trump from Facebook and Twitter. The constitutionality of these laws has since been challenged in lawsuits—the tech platforms maintain that they have a First Amendment right to moderate content posted by their users. As the separate cases wound their way through the court system, federal judges (all of whom were nominated by Republican presidents) were divided on the laws’ legality. And now they’re going to the Supreme Court.

On Friday, the Court announced it would be putting these cases on its docket. The resulting decisions could be profound: “This would be—I think this is without exaggeration—the most important Supreme Court case ever when it comes to the internet,” Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a senior editor at Lawfare, told me. At stake are tricky questions about how the First Amendment should apply in an age of giant, powerful social-media platforms. Right now, these platforms have the right to moderate the posts that appear on them; they can, for instance, ban someone for hate speech at their own discretion. Restricting their ability to pull down posts would cause, as Rozenshtein put it, “a mess.” The decisions could reshape online expression as we currently know it.

[Read: Is this the beginning of the end of the internet?]

Whether or not these particular laws are struck down is not what’s actually important here, Rozenshtein argues. “What’s much, much more important is what the Court says in striking down those laws—how the Court describes the First Amendment protections.” Whatever they decide will set legal precedents for how we think about free speech when so much of our lives take place on the web. Rozenshtein and I caught up on the phone to discuss why these cases are so interesting—and why the decision might not fall cleanly along political lines.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: How did we get here?

Alan Rozenshtein: If you ask the companies and digital-civil-society folks, we got here because the crazy MAGA Republicans need something to do with their days, and they don’t have any actual policy proposals. So they just engage in culture-war politics, and they have fastened on Silicon Valley social-media companies as the latest boogeyman. If you ask conservatives, they’re going to say, “Big Tech is running amok. The liberals have been warning us about unchecked corporate power for years, and maybe they had a point.” This really came to a head when, in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, major social-media platforms threw Donald Trump, the president of the United States, off of their platforms.

Nyce: Based on what we know about the Court, do we have any theories about how they’re going to rule?

Rozenshtein: I do think it is very likely that the Texas law will be struck down. It is very broad and almost impossible to implement. But I think there will be some votes to uphold the Florida law. There may be votes from the conservatives, especially Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, but you might also get some support from some folks on the left, in particular Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor—not because they believe conservatives are being discriminated against, but because they themselves have a lot of skepticism of private power and big companies.

But what’s actually important is not whether these laws are struck down or not. What’s much, much more important is what the Court says in striking down those laws—how the Court describes the First Amendment protections.

Nyce: What are the important things for Americans to consider at this moment?

Rozenshtein: This would be—I think this is without exaggeration—the most important Supreme Court case ever when it comes to the internet.

The Supreme Court in 1997 issued a very famous case called Reno v. ACLU. And this was a constitutional case about what was called the Communications Decency Act. This was a law that purported to impose criminal penalties on internet companies and platforms that transmitted indecent content to minors. So this is part of the big internet-pornography scare of the mid-’90s. The Court said this violates the First Amendment because to comply with this law, platforms are going to have to censor massive, massive, massive amounts of information. And that’s really bad. And Reno v. ACLU has always been considered the kind of Magna Carta of internet–First Amendment cases, because it recognized the First Amendment is really foundational and really important. The Court has recognized this in various forms since then. But, in the intervening almost 30 years, it’s never squarely taken on a case that deals with First Amendment issues on the internet so, so profoundly.

Even if the Court strikes these laws down, if it does not also issue very strong language about how platforms can moderate—that the moderation decisions of platforms are almost per se outside the reach of government regulation under the First Amendment—this will not be the end of this. Whether it’s Texas or Florida or some blue state that has its own concerns about content moderation of progressive causes, we will continue to see laws like this.

This is just the beginning of a new phase in American history where, rightly, it is recognized that because these platforms are so important, they should be the subject of government regulation. For the next decade, we’ll be dealing with all sorts of court challenges. And I think this is as it should be. This is the age of Big Tech. This is not the end of the conversation about the First Amendment, the internet, and government regulation over big platforms. It’s actually the beginning of the conversation.

Nyce: This could really influence the way that Americans experience social media.

Rozenshtein: Oh, it absolutely could, in very unpredictable ways. If you believe the state governments, they’re fighting for internet freedom, for the freedom of users to be able to use these platforms, even if users express unfriendly or unfashionable views. But if you listen to the platforms and most of the tech-policy and digital-civil-society crowd, they’re the ones fighting for internet freedom, because they think that the companies have a First Amendment right to decide what’s on the platforms, and that the platforms only function because companies aggressively moderate.

Even if the conservative states are arguing in good faith, this could backfire catastrophically. Because if you limit what companies can do to take down harmful or toxic content, you’re not going to end up with a freer speech environment. You’re going to end up with a mess.

Here’s just a sample of group chats that have been messaging me recently: college friends, housemates, camp friends, friends I met in adulthood, high-school friends, a subset of high-school friends who live in New York City, a subset of high-school friends who are single, a group of friends going to a birthday party, a smaller group of friends planning a gift for that person’s birthday, co-workers, book club, another book club, family, extended family, a Wordle chat with friends, a Wordle chat with family.

I love a group text—a grext, if you’ll permit me—but lately, the sheer number of them competing for my attention has felt out of control. By the time I wake up, the notifications have already started rolling in; as I’m going to bed, they’re still coming. In between, I try to keep up, but all it takes is one 30-minute meeting before I’ve somehow gotten 100 new messages, half of them consisting of “lol” or “right!” I scroll up and up and up, trying to find where I left off, like I’ve lost my place in a book that keeps getting longer as I read.

For better or for worse, we might be in the Age of the Group Chat. WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service worldwide, gained more than two and a half billion active users from 2012 to 2023, and is projected to grow 18 percent more by 2025; one study found that less than 2 percent of participants had only one-on-one chats on the app, and concluded that “the group chat feature is used frequently by nearly every WhatsApp user.” Of course, you can also group-chat with SMS, iMessage, GroupMe, Messenger, WeChat—or some combination of these and other platforms. In a recent survey of roughly 1,000 Americans, 66 percent said they’ve felt overwhelmed by their group messages, and 42 percent said that group chats can feel like a part-time job.

Just a few years ago, we might have done more of that chattering online. But with X (formerly known as Twitter) in a state of disarray, Facebook falling out of favor, and Instagram taken over by ads, social media is feeling less and less social. Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication professor at the University of Kansas who studies technology and relationships, calls this the “twilight of the social-media era,” in which “the distance between using it for talking to your friends and what we have now” is bigger than it’s ever been. He believes that although those sites aren’t fostering real connection—advice, inside jokes, updates, memes—nearly as much anymore, people might be reclaiming it with group chats.

[Read: Zombie Twitter has arrived]

That connection is a wonderful thing. Talking in a grext around the clock can feel like you and your fellow group members are facing the world together—and reaching out to everyone individually about all the stupid little details of your day would simply be impossible. But being kept constantly in the loop can feel unsustainable. I’m starting to learn that once you begin moving through life as but one humble node in a dense network of messagers, it’s hard to get untangled. To borrow from Dungeons & Dragons, the Age of the Group Chat seemed like it would be Chaotic Good—but it’s verging on Chaotic Evil.

Group texts are hardly the only demand on our time and attention these days. And yet, the researchers I spoke with agreed that they can be uniquely unwieldy. They both contribute to and reflect the complexity of our social worlds, Kate Mannell, a digital-media researcher at Deakin University, in Australia, told me. Creating a grext is so easy that you can end up with a separate chat for nearly every iteration of any group, each with its own particular dynamic. You might start with one chat, and then create another without one member who moved away, and then another to bring in a friend of a friend. (When I want to text my high-school friends in New York, I actually have to stop and think: Should I use “Big Juicy Apple” or “The Actual Big Apple”?) Compared with a one-on-one thread, in which the other party will typically pause until you respond, group chats aren’t so easy to manage. Messages can flow in all day, whether you’re free to reply or not—and if you aren’t on your phone when a particular conversation is going down, you might miss it entirely.

Those features aren’t all bad. Grexts are good at mimicking the casual back-and-forth of in-person dialogue, and the result can be more dynamic and fun than a two-person thread. Having a chat going also means you have a space to share mundane little updates throughout the day. Studies have found that group chats can contribute to group cohesion and shared fun. A group text can be a refuge, and a reminder that you’re part of something.

Some researchers call this “ambient virtual presence”: Even when you’re alone, you’re not alone. Annette Markham, a digital-culture researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, in Australia, has compared this phenomenon to echolocation, the process that some animals, such as bats and dolphins, use to locate objects: They produce a continuous sound and use the resulting echo to sense what’s around them. Humans might use technologies such as group chats in a similar way—as a call-and-response, taking in information about their social networks and locating themselves within those webs.

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to kids]

But taking in too many signals can be overwhelming. Joseph Bayer, a communication professor at Ohio State University who studies mobile technologies, told me that group chats can create a “waterfall type of effect,” where messages keep flooding in and adding up. Eventually, you’re underwater. Adding to the chaos, Katharina Knop-Hülß, a mobile-media researcher at Hanover University, in Germany, told me, different chat members all bring their own personalities, communication styles, and expectations for group norms. (“There’s a lot going on.”) Mannell noted that those norms haven’t been settled, in part because group-chatting—and texting in general—is relatively new, and its features are constantly changing. (Updates to iMessage, for instance, have granted the ability to reply in a thread to specific texts, to tag people into a message, and to “react” with a symbol such as a heart or thumbs-up.) She’s found that without a standard etiquette, people have very different ideas about what degree of responsiveness is required—which can cause real tension.  

Fear of that tension can make muting or even leaving a chat feel daunting. And anyway, you might not want to miss out, even if you are overwhelmed; the desire isn’t to exit the room so much as to crack a window. I left my friends’ Wordle chat once because I’d stopped playing, but I had to rejoin when I learned that someone had used it to share a life update; never again would I be left in the dark. Now I usually just lurk silently in the chat, occasionally reacting with an exclamation point to a good score. If group messaging is like echolocation, then disconnecting can be disorienting—like losing the “I am here” dot on a giant existential map.

Grext anxiety is hard to resolve because it isn’t really just about the group-chat form or even mobile technology in general; it’s about the eternal tension between individual and collective identity, between being our own person and being accountable to others. Ultimately, most of us do want connection, even if it involves some obligations; we’ll take an avalanche of messages when we’re busy if it means we can reach out when we’re hurting.

[Read: America is in its insecure-attachment era]

Still, we’d do well to notice when our chats are giving us more dread than joy, or when they’ve multiplied to the point that we don’t even associate them with intimacy and connection anymore. If we’re turning to group messaging as social media starts to feel less social, we should be holding on to the group chats that really help us talk to people, and perhaps relinquishing the ones that feel as simultaneously crowded and empty as my social-media feeds do now. Hall told me that of all the different ways you can use social media, the evidence suggests that actively talking to people you care about—about subjects you care about—is what’s likeliest to contribute to your well-being.

His general advice is this: Let go of “zombie” groups—grexts that are carrying on but that don’t really interest you. Turn your attention to the ones you most value. When you can, see people in person or give them a call instead.

But when you can’t, you’ll just have to accept that belonging takes some effort. “Those responsibilities often come with annoyance and interference and frustration,” Hall told me. “But that’s the nature of relationships, right?” Between “The Actual Big Apple,” “Lonely Hearts Club,” and “Wordle Warriors,” I’ve wracked up dozens of notifications while finishing this story—and ultimately, I’m happy I got them.

This past December, Elon Musk’s extended family gathered for Christmas. As was their tradition, they pondered a question of the year, which seemed strategically designed for Elon to answer: “What regrets do you have?”

By that point in 2022, Musk had personally intervened in Russia’s war by controlling Ukraine’s internet access; had failed to tell his on-and-off girlfriend and co-parent Grimes that he had also fathered twins with one of his employees, and had been forced by a judge to follow through on a $44 billion purchase of Twitter; then fired most of its staff and alienated most of its advertisers. His main regret, he told his family, according to an account in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, “is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.”

In Isaacson’s study of the world’s richest man, the reader is consistently reminded that Musk is powerless over his own impulses. Musk cannot control his desperate need to stir up drama and urgency when things are going well, Isaacson explains. He fails to show any kind of remorse for the multiple instances of brutally insulting his subordinates or lovers. He gets stuck in what Grimes has dubbed “demon mode”—an anger-induced unleashing of insults and demands, during which he resembles his father Errol, whom Isaacson describes as emotionally abusive.

To report the book, Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years, answering his late-night text messages, accompanying him to Twitter’s office post-acquisition, attending his meetings and intimate family moments, watching him berate people. Reading the book is like hearing what Musk’s many accomplishments and scandals would sound like from the perspective of his therapist, if he ever sought one out (rather than do that, he prefers to “take the pain,” he says—though he has diagnosed himself at various moments as having Asperger’s syndrome or bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder).

Choosing to use this access mostly for pop psychology may appeal to an American audience that loves a good antihero, but it’s a missed opportunity. Unlike the subjects of most of Isaacson’s other big biographies, including Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci, Musk is still alive, his influence still growing. We don’t need to understand how he thinks and feels as much as we need to understand how he managed to amass so much power, and the broad societal impact of his choices—in short, how thoroughly this mercurial leader of six companies has become an architect of our future.

What does it mean that Musk can adjust a country’s internet access during a war? (The book only concludes that it makes him uncomfortable.) How should we feel about the fact that the man putting self-driving cars on our roads tells staff that most safety and legal requirements are “wrong and dumb”? How will Musk’s many business interests eventually, inevitably conflict? (At one point, Musk—a self-described champion of free speech—concedes that Twitter will have to be careful about how it moderates China-related content, because pissing off the government could threaten Tesla’s sales there. Isaacson doesn’t press further.)

The cover of Elon Musk shows Musk’s face in high contrast staring straight, with hands folded as if in prayer, evoking a Great Man of History and a visual echo of the Jobs volume. Isaacson’s central question seems to be whether Musk could have achieved such greatness if he were less cruel and more humane. But this is no time for a retrospective.

[Read: Demon mode activated ]

As readers of the book are asked to reflect on the drama of Musk’s past romantic dalliances, he is meeting with heads of state and negotiating behind closed doors. Last Monday, Musk convened with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; on Tuesday, Israel’s prime minister publicly called him the “unofficial president” of the United States. Also, Neuralink, Musk’s brain-implant start-up—mostly discussed in the book as the employer of one of the mothers of Musk's 11 known children—was given approval from an independent review board to begin recruiting participants for human trials. The book does have a few admiring pages on Neuralink’s technology, but doesn’t address a 2022 Reuters report that the company had killed an estimated 1,500 experimented-on animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, since 2018. (Musk has said that the monkeys chosen for the experiments were already close to death; a gruesome Wired story published Wednesday reported otherwise.)

Isaacson seems to expect major further innovation from Musk—who is already sending civilians into space, running an influential social network, shaping the future of artificial-intelligence development, and reviving the electric-car market. How these developments might come about and what they will mean for humanity seems far more important to probe than Isaacson’s preferred focus on explaining Musk’s abusive, erratic, impetuous behavior.

In 2018, Musk called the man who rescued children in Thailand’s caves a “pedo guy,” which led to a defamation suit—a well-known story. A few weeks later, he claimed that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share, attracting the scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Isaacson covers these events by diagnosing Musk as unstable during that period and, according to his brother, still getting over his tumultuous breakup with the actor Amber Heard. (Ah, the toxic-woman excuse.) He was also, according to his lawyer Alex Spiro, “an impulsive kid with a terrible Twitter habit.” Isaacson calls that assessment “true”—one of the many times he compares Musk, now 52, to a child in the book.

The people whose perspectives Isaacson seems to draw on most in the book are those whom Musk arranged for him to talk with. So the book’s biggest reveal may be the extent to which his loved ones and confidants distrust his ability to be calm and rational, and feel the need to work around him. A close friend, Antonio Gracias, once locked Musk’s phone in a hotel safe to keep him from tweeting; in the middle of the night, Musk got hotel security to open it.

All of this seems reminiscent of the ways Donald Trump’s inner circle executed his whims, justifying his behavior and managing their relationship with him, lest they be cut out from the action. Every one of Trump’s precedent-defying decisions during his presidency was picked apart by the media: What were his motivations? Is there a strategy here? Is he mentally fit to serve? Does he really mean what he’s tweeting? The simplest answer was often the correct one: The last person he talked to (or saw on Fox News) made him angry.

[Read: What Russia got by scaring Elon Musk]

Musk is no Trump fan, according to Isaacson. But he’s the media’s new main character, just as capable of getting triggered and sparking shock waves through a tweet. That’s partially why Isaacson’s presentation of the World’s Most Powerful Victim is not all that revelatory for those who are paying attention: Musk exposes what he’s thinking at all hours of the day and night to his 157.6 million followers.

In Isaacson’s introduction to Elon Musk, he explains that the man is “not hardwired to have empathy.” Musk’s role as a visionary with a messianic passion seems to excuse this lack. The thinking goes like this: All of his demands for people to come solve a problem right now or you’re fired are bringing us one step closer to Mars travel, or the end of our dependence on oil, or the preservation of human consciousness itself. His comfort with skirting the law and cutting corners in product development also serves a higher purpose: Musk believes, and preaches in a mantra to employees at all of his companies, that “the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

By presenting Musk’s mindset as fully formed and his behavior as unalterable, Isaacson’s book doesn’t give us many tools for the future—besides, perhaps, being able to rank the next Musk blowup against a now well-documented history of such incidents. Instead of narrowing our critical lens to Musk’s brain, we need to widen it, in order to understand the consequences of his influence. Only then can we challenge him to do right by his power.

Twitter has never been a huge hit with advertisers. But under Elon Musk’s ownership, marked by a name change to X, a rollback of site rules, prioritized engagement for paying users, and Musk’s own edgy persona, the social media company’s outlook is bleaker than ever.

Read more...

In an effort to combat bots, Musk says the company is moving to having a small monthly payment for access.

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Social-media platforms’ attempts to break into commerce have largely flopped. Will TikTok Shop fare any better?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The young conservatives trying to make eugenics respectable again The very common, very harmful thing well-meaning parents do The real issue in the UAW strike The Senate’s deep and dirty secret

“Silicon Valley Math”

A chamoy-pickle kit for $17.98; 352 sold so far. An ab roller wheel for $24.29; 8,592 sold. A one-piece professional V-shape-face double-chin-removal exerciser for 89 cents; 81 sold. Such is a sampling of the items featured on my TikTok Shop tab on Wednesday morning.

Earlier this week, TikTok Shop, a feature that allows audiences to purchase a baffling array of items through a stand-alone Shop tab and from videos on their feed, rolled out to TikTok users in the United States. Now many of the app’s livestreams are “QVC-like places where sellers are nonstop pitching products to live audiences,” as my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce recently wrote. TikTok’s latest move is an attempt to shift the app’s identity—and a sign of the company’s confidence in the loyalty of its users. Yes, we can riddle feeds with often-ludicrous product promotions, the Shop feature seems to be saying, and people will still keep coming back for more.

TikTok is the latest in a series of prominent platforms that have tried to pivot to e-commerce. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and even Google have tried to launch shopping functions, with varying—though generally low—degrees of success. “Every advertising company tries its hand at commerce, because they think that there’s some huge prize to be had if you can actually own the transaction and know what people are purchasing,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, told me. But though the potential gains are tantalizing, it’s hard to pull off: Instagram booted its shopping feature from the navigation bar and shut down its live-shopping feature earlier this year. Facebook similarly shut down its livestream-shopping function last year. Live-shopping services on YouTube have also struggled to gain traction.

Platforms moving to e-commerce need to build product pages and figure out details such as order fulfillment, secure checkout processes, customer service, and other logistics. That’s a lot for tech companies whose primary expertise lies in other areas. “It’s never worked for anyone else,” Kodali said. “Why would it work for [TikTok]?” (A spokesperson for TikTok told me that there are upwards of 200,000 sellers on TikTok Shop, and more than 100,000 registered creators, but declined to share more information beyond what’s posted on the company’s press site.)

American customers, by and large, don’t seem all that eager to shop on social-media apps instead of on trusted e-commerce websites. In China, where TikTok’s parent company is based, shopping via livestream is a huge trend—an estimated $500 billion in goods were reportedly sold on streams last year. But just because shopping on social media is big in China doesn’t mean it will translate to American audiences; Kodali noted that Chinese e-commerce trends do not have a track record of blowing up in the United States. And TikTok’s own norms may make commercial activity a hard sell. Caroline told me today that, although the app’s culture of authenticity may help some users sell things, “you could see shopping being a bit of an odd fit: This app was supposed to be where I watched relatable videos from everyday people, and now they’re trying to make money off of me?”

Still, Caroline told me, “people spend a tremendous amount of time on TikTok, and I don’t see them quitting en masse over TikTok Shop. I think it’s more of a question of how much users will tolerate, and how successful it’ll be in the long run.” In-app shopping, she added, is a “white whale” for social platforms.

Commerce and social media have long been intertwined: Much of social-media influencers’ role boils down to recommending products. But audiences follow these influencers because they trust them and because these people have a track record of offering useful or interesting information. On TikTok Shop, meanwhile, almost anyone can start selling things. I currently have five followers, and perhaps one dayI too could apply to set up an account to start hawking one-piece professional V-shape-face double-chin-removal exercisers. (I probably wouldn’t do that.) And some reporters have already identified safety and integrity concerns with the feature.

If other apps have failed to grow e-commerce businesses and there doesn’t seem to be a strong consumer appetite for these services in the U.S., why is TikTok trying to get into the retail game? Part of it might be a simple grasp at big numbers, combined with a healthy dose of the hubris that powers the tech world. American retail is a multitrillion-dollar industry: If tech executives are engaging in what Kodali called “Silicon Valley math”—calculating the total size of a market and estimating the percentage of it they can capture—they may extrapolate big revenues. And to large tech companies, it may seem relatively easy and worthwhile to create a checkout module and order pages if it means getting even a small slice of the retail pie. Social-media companies have a long history of foisting new products that they hope will prove good for their business on users who did not ask for them—consider the metaverse.

Tech companies have been throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall for years, seeking out new revenue streams where they can. TikTok Shop may be another such investment: a grasp at revenue just in case it works. Social-media apps are always mimicking features from other apps. Instagram is trying to be like Twitter and Snapchat; LinkedIn is emulating TikTok; Facebook is trying to be like everyone. And TikTok seems to be the latest app trying to become Amazon.

Related:

TikTok is doing something very un-TikTok. The endless cycle of social media

Today’s News

Tropical-storm warnings are in place for millions of people in New England and Canada as Hurricane Lee approaches. In remarks from the White House, President Joe Biden expressed respect for the United Auto Workers strike and emphasized that record profits for auto companies have not been “shared fairly” with workers. Corpses are decaying under rubble in the Libyan city of Derna, where at least 10,000 people are believed to be missing due to devastating floods.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman asks whether we should still read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and discusses the book’s moral complexities with Clint Smith.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Don’t Let Love Take Over Your Life

By Faith Hill

If you have a romantic partner, maybe you’ve noticed that you two spend an awful lot of time together—and that you haven’t seen other people quite as much as you’d like. Or if you’re single (and many of your friends aren’t), you might have gotten the eerie feeling that I sometimes do: that you’re in a deserted town, as if you woke one morning to find the houses all empty, the stores boarded up. Where’d everyone go?

Either way, that feeling might not just be in your head. Kaisa Kuurne, a sociologist at the University of Helsinki, told me she was “a little bit shocked” when she started mapping Finnish adults’ relationships for a 2012 study, investigating whom subjects felt close to and how they interacted day to day. Subjects who lived with a romantic partner seemed to have receded into their coupledom.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by Katie Martin

Read. Why are women freezing their eggs? Many are struggling to find a male co-parent, a new book by Marcia C. Inhorn concludes.

Listen. An audio collection of some of last month’s most popular Atlantic articles, presented by Hark.

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P.S.

In another fascinating addition to the annals of Sam Bankman-Fried, my friend and former colleague David Yaffe-Bellany reports in The New York Times that while on house arrest, the FTX founder crafted a set of byzantine documents explaining himself, which he gave to the crypto influencer Tiffany Fong for reasons unclear. Bankman-Fried’s apologia took the form of a 15,000-word, 70-page unpublished Twitter thread, replete with links to Alicia Keys and Rihanna music videos as well as jabs at former colleagues; another file featured a screenshot from the Christopher Nolan movie Inception. A favorite detail of mine from the article: Apparently, Bankman-Fried told Fong that his parents were installing a pickleball court for him while he was on house arrest.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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“Oh,” I slacked my Atlantic colleagues earlier this week, beneath a screenshot of a pop-up note that Slack, the group-chat software we use, had presented to me moments earlier. “A fresh, more focused Slack,” it promised, or threatened. On my screen, the program’s interface was suddenly a Grimace-purple color. I sensed doom in this software update.

Slowly, over the days that followed, complaints about the new Slack started trickling into our chats. “folks I cannot handle this new version of slack and will be taking the rest of the month off,” one Atlantic staffer said. “I am reverting to sending physical memos on personal letterhead,” posted another. “all my slacks are: I hate the new slack,” slacked Adrienne LaFrance, the magazine’s executive editor. (Later on, she messaged me separately to see if I would write about Slack’s terrible new format.)

All change is bad when you don’t think you need it. But this change felt distinctive because it laid bare a difficult fact: Office work is now more like social media than like office work.

The new Slack is not, in fact, “more focused.” It adds a dedicated “Activity” tab, which catalogs every user’s movement in your vicinity on the software, along with a numeral that counts them up: mentions, emoji reactions, replies, thread replies, app notices. These are tallied separately from notifications on the “Home” tab, which light up channels and DMs, and “Unreads,” a collection of every single post I have not yet seen but apparently ought to.

The overwhelm associated with contemporary white-collar work is legendary. Idleness was once the ultimate goal of the rich and powerful, but over time, even they would embrace workism. Being endlessly on call produces misery but also signals consequence. “How are things?” a colleague from another department asks in the workplace kitchen. “Oh, busy,” you say. The rat race is a source of meaning. Without you, the whole place would fall apart! (It wouldn’t.)

[Read: Slackers of the world, unite!]

Technology has strengthened this illusion. The ring-ring-ring of an office, the ping-ping-ping of arriving emails, the ability to access those messages from home (or the train, or the toilet): All of these innovations converged on the same effect. Office chat software is nothing new—I used ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger at work in the 1990s. But Slack offered a distinctive product at an opportune time, emerging from the corpse of a failed video game just as the internet took over everyday life. It exuded a “casual, effortless culture,” as my colleague Ellen Cushing wrote in 2021, that pervaded companies—especially tech and media companies—during the second Obama administration. Slack was everything that email wasn’t: soulful, fun, energetic, young.

Another flavor of software from that time felt the same way: social media. As the smartphone matured, Twitter and Facebook, as well as Instagram and LinkedIn, buried boredom behind an infinite scroll of content. Email and then blogging had begun that process, but social media massively increased the quantity of posts and posters. To finish drinking from the fire hose was impossible, but dipping into it offered instant gratification—something to love or hate, two emotions that seemed to fuse in life online.

[Read: What Slack does for women]

Social media made individuals into a burlesque of themselves, an “online version” that spoke or acted independently from their whole being. As the private domains of social networks—friends, family, co-workers—grew into the global commons of social media, performance overtook all other goals. Clever quips, suggestive photos, funny memes, viral videos all said whatever they said, but they also fashioned people into online caricatures, constructed or evolved to garner more attention. Eventually, posting became its own end: pursuing likes or shares, growing a following to monetize, transforming into an “influencer” or a “creator”—a professional poster whose medium was social media itself.

From the start, Slack’s hip vibe made it feel more like social media than enterprise chat. It was colorful. You could post emoji. You could create custom emoji for your company, supporting in-jokes and private languages (The Atlantic’s Slack features a phalanx of alt-tacos). At Slack-centric companies, the stream of a popular channel runs as quickly as a social-media feed, posts swimming past, several people are typing. This is work for a generation that thinks that work is or should be like the internet, and vice versa.

But Slack embraces both the light and dark sides of social-media life. A work-chat self now feels distinct from a work self, let alone a whole self. As on social media, the urge to weigh in, react, inveigh—in short, to post—has taken over, whether or not actual work is being facilitated in the process. As on social media, extreme positions proliferate on Slack, with workplace posts reading more like takes than like office talk. Even my Atlantic colleagues’ reactions to Slack’s rebrand seem profoundly overstated, shared because the software and the moment conspired to make them share-worthy.

Slack’s new redesign, with its fresh prods to engage, makes the software feel even more like social media. The interface has always seemed hell-bent on getting you back into the program, even if you’d prefer to do the actual work that your job demands. An icon flags unread posts in brightly colored circles. Channel names are bold until you scroll up and down to clear them. Why pick up the phone when you can do an audio “huddle” inside of a DM? Almost all software wants you to look at it, but Slack, a supposed productivity tool meant to help knowledge workers recover from their email, demands more fixation than email ever did.

So there is a refreshing honesty in the Slack update that my colleagues are lamenting. It admits that work is secondary. Making deals, managing employees, designing products, executing marketing—all of those activities are surely worthwhile pursuits for knowledge workers. But as with all of the great enterprise software that preceded it, one now gets those things done in spite of Slack rather than by means of it. Most important, for the workers using Slack, is using Slack.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, he became the steward of a company enmeshed in longstanding data-privacy problems with the US government.

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In September 2022, one month before Elon Musk took over Twitter, California governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 587 into law. Dubbed by its proponents as a “transparency law,” the state statute requires large social media companies to publicly post their content moderation policies and hand over lots of data to the…

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Elon Musk is “wired for war.” At least, that’s what Musk has told Walter Isaacson, whose thick biography of the mercurial mega-billionaire, Elon Musk, is out this week. When Musk says this, he’s not talking about Ukraine, where his Starlink internet service has played a central role. And he’s not talking about his aggressive takeover of Twitter. He’s talking about video games.

Civilization, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, The Battle of Polytopia, Elden Ring—Musk has spent much of his life in fantasy worlds. Isaacson’s biography includes many astonishing details and relatively few pages focused on Musk’s gaming obsession. But the video-game detail is telling. Musk doesn’t seem to inhabit our reality, exactly, even as he profoundly shapes it. At once innovative and destructively brazen, he leads companies—Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, X—that influence how we live and communicate in this world, and that aspire to help us reach another. It’s easy to imagine him navigating Earth in a kind of top-down view, allocating his resources to advance along the “rocket science” skill tree or clicking and dragging satellites above an active war zone.

Isaacson’s book recounts something once said to Musk by Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s brain-implant company, Neuralink, and the mother of two of his many children: “I have this feeling that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”

This isn’t a simulation; Musk’s actions have significant consequences, for national security, for the future of green transportation, for the prospect of leaving this planet. I talked to Isaacson about the biography, including a recent controversy over its details about Starlink and Musk’s involvement in Ukraine. The conversation was a bid to understand how Elon thinks—and the future that he hopes to bring about.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Damon Beres: A lot of people are reasonably terrified of Elon Musk and the power that he represents. How do you approach writing about someone like that?

Walter Isaacson: I was just going to be an absolute honest observer and tell the stories of what it was like up close, what he was thinking, what he was doing. I want the reader to be able to judge Musk based on a narrative in which both his good and bad sides are woven together. There are multiple Elon Musk personalities, and there are times when he’s just brutal, times when he’s got an epic sense of himself—which is both frightening and inspiring all at once—and times when he’s an incredibly focused engineer. One of the exciting challenges is navigating the many Elon Musks, which, unlike anybody else I’ve written about, are quite vivid and different.

Beres: You write about his “demon mode” personality. How did you experience that as his biographer?

Isaacson: I saw demon mode many times. It would take my breath away sometimes, when he was furious on a rocket launchpad in Texas or would walk the factory line in Austin and get into hard-core, intense mode. I try not only to report those scenes but to circle back with the people who were the target of either demon mode or inspiration mode and figure out the harmful effects and how it pushed things forward. I did more than 100 interviews. I tried to show what the impact of his various personalities can be.

Beres: How would you sum up that impact?

Isaacson: He’s probably the most important person pushing us into an era of electric vehicles and power walls. Also, he’s singularly been able to get astronauts into orbit from the United States after NASA decommissioned the space shuttle a dozen years ago. He’s been able to create his own Starlink internet in low Earth orbit. And he’s been able to land rocket boosters upright and reuse them again—things nobody else has been able to do. On the other hand, he’s blown up a lot of shit, including Twitter. He’s not nearly as good at understanding how to deal with social media as he is dealing with rocket engines. The book ends with rockets going up and rockets exploding, which is a metaphor for his accomplishments and the debris that often comes in his wake. That makes him an absolutely fascinating person, if you don’t mind rubbernecking and watching a tale unfold.

Beres: Last week, Elon spoke out against the Anti-Defamation League, and did so on X, where he responded to and thus amplified a clip from Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist. This is all happening in the context of the 2024 presidential election, and the context of rising anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. People view Musk’s rhetoric as quite dangerous. This very dark side is politically consequential.

Isaacson: I agree. Musk gets into a dark mode and shoots himself in the foot, which would be fine, but he then shoots other people in the feet. It’s just bad. It’s not just his tweets about the ADL; it goes back for a very long time. He accused a rescue diver of being a pedophile in 2018. There was the Paul Pelosi thing, which was appalling.

In the book, there’s the tale of one of his friends noticing he’s getting into a dark mood and saying, “Let me take your phone.” They were in a hotel, and they put the phone in a hotel-room safe and punched in a code so Musk couldn’t get it. And then Musk calls hotel security at three in the morning to have them open the safe. He’s addicted in a destructive way to the dark, impulsive tweets that are harmful to his legacy, but also harmful to society. I don’t know how much more strongly I can say it.

In a deeper sense, his mother, Maye, says that the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father. The book begins with the darkness of the father, who is filled with conspiracy theories and epic fantasies and can go dark and demonlike. It is reflective at times of an almost epic struggle—to make humans multiplanetary, but still channeling demons that are deeply destructive.

Beres: Let’s go to Starlink, the constellation of satellites that Musk has launched to provide internet to a number of countries. Musk’s attitudes are now affecting the war in Ukraine. He is, reportedly, caught between the Ukrainians, who want his aid, and the Russians, who supposedly have his ear. What is your read on where Elon stands in the context of this conflict, knowing what we know about his darker attitudes?

Isaacson: When Russia invaded Ukraine, they were able to disable the satellite communications of private companies, like Viasat, and military satellites. The only one that could resist Russian attacks was Starlink, and immediately Musk started getting texts from Ukrainian leaders. His savior instincts kick in, and he’s deeply supportive of Ukraine. He sends hundreds of Starlink satellites and pays for free use by Ukraine. Then as the war goes on, there’s one amazing Friday night where he texted me, and I’m at my old high school watching a football game. I go behind the bleachers, and he’s talking about the Ukrainians using Starlink for a sneak submarine drone attack on the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. And he says, “How did I get into this war? I just made Starlink so people could watch movies and play games.” He decides not to allow the Ukranian drone subs to sink the Russian fleet, which he thinks would lead to World War III. He begins to realize, Why am I in this position? That’s too much power.

He then makes a deal to be just a contractor and allow certain of these satellites to be owned and controlled by the U.S. military and intelligence, creating something called Starshield, where these things are used for military purposes, but he’s not the one in charge of them. I think that’s a logical outcome. So, yes, he’s got an extraordinary amount of power by being the only person who has a communications system that can’t be hacked in outer space. But he realizes that and feels his way out of it.

Note: After I spoke with Isaacson on Friday, confusion arose over whether Musk ordered his engineers to disable the Ukrainians’ internet access in Crimea or instead refused to enable it in the first place. An excerpt of Isaacson’s book in The Washington Post said the former, but Isaacson then posted on X to say that the latter situation was in fact true. I asked Isaacson to clarify in the following brief text exchange. Our original conversation continues after the break.  

Beres: Are your new statements meant to be taken as a correction of the text in the book? How confident are you that Elon was truthful with you about this in any case?

Isaacson: Based on my conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack. He now says that the policy had been implemented earlier, but the Ukrainians did not know it, and that night he simply reaffirmed the policy.

Beres: I see. So in a sense, both statements are true: Elon did secretly decide to turn off coverage—that is, without telling the Ukrainians—but the notion that it happened in the middle of an attack is not accurate.

Isaacson: Yes. A more technical term would be that he decided to geofence coverage so it was not enabled along the Crimean coast.

Beres: You say that Musk made Starlink so people can watch movies and play games. That’s a little naive, right, this notion that such a powerful technology doesn’t have a greater consequence? Do you think he really believes that?

Isaacson: He launched Starlink as a funding mechanism for SpaceX so he could get rockets to Mars. He says there’s a $1 trillion market for internet and communications, and if he could just get 3 percent of that, he would have a budget larger than NASA’s. So that was a much more practical reason for launching Starlink. Musk is motivated by an odd mix of goals. He actually believes in the epic mission that he set for himself of getting humans to Mars. But he’s also very practical in saying the steps on the way include launching communications satellites so he can fund it.

Beres: With that in mind, what motivated the purchase of Twitter, which he has now rebranded as X? His grand ambition is to get people to Mars. He buys this social-media platform, and here we are. How do we make sense of that decision?

Isaacson: It was astonishing to watch him as this Twitter purchase evolved. He was secretly buying Twitter stock and thinking of going on the board of Twitter. He had money from the sale of stock options, and he said, Well, what product do I like the most? I’m addicted to Twitter, so why don’t I invest in that? His kids, his friends—all in Austin, Texas, over the course of a few days—say, Why are you doing this? This makes no sense. It doesn’t fit into your missions. And by the way, Dad, you know we don’t use Twitter.

Then he goes off to Hawaii to stay at Larry Ellison’s house and meet one of his girlfriends at the time, Natasha Bassett, the actress from Australia. And he just gets into a manic, impulsive mode and stays up all night for two nights and starts sending text messages to Parag Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter [at the time]. Then he goes to Vancouver, where he meets Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, his other girlfriend. They stay up all night playing Elden Ring until 5:30 in the morning. And then he says, I made an offer.

So rule one in understanding Musk is that he’s impulsive. He’s a risk lover and he’s immature at times. And so in a few weeks of dark impulse, he decided to make a bid for Twitter. And then we ride along for a couple of months. Half the day he’s saying, How am I in this mess? How can my lawyers get me out of this mess? And the other half of the day he’s saying, I can fulfill my vision for X.com—the company he started 20 years ago—and make a financial platform connected to a social-media network.

I finally ask, “How does this fit into your big mission? Getting humanity to Mars? Getting us into the era of electric vehicles and making AI safe?” At first he tells me, “I guess it doesn’t fit in. It’s crazy.” And then he says, “Well, maybe by having more free speech on Twitter, we can help save democracy.”

Beres: Do you believe he’s a free-speech absolutist, as he’s described himself?

Isaacson: Oh no. He’s definitely not a free-speech absolutist. It wasn’t just the ADL. The first week he takes over Twitter, he’s yelling about kicking people off who are advocating boycotts of Twitter for allowing extremists to come back on. This is nothing new. He’s able to have some contradictory opinions: Boy, I like free speech, but then if somebody doxes my location by putting up where my jet is, or if somebody advocates a boycott of Twitter, can’t we get them off? And he has to be talked down from that.

Beres: Is Elon Musk a dangerous person? Is that a word you would use?

Isaacson: There are things he does, especially with Twitter, that I think are really problematic. There are things he does that are actually quite helpful, including creating a world that’s moving toward electric vehicles when the other car companies in the early 2000s had given up on that. This is a person with multiple moods and modes and personalities, ranging from engineering mode to demon mode. At times, he can be reckless and even dangerous. And at times, he can do some pretty amazing things.

There are really three great innovators of our time. One is Steve Jobs, who brings us into the digital age of friendly personal computers and smartphones and music. There’s Jennifer Doudna, who brings us into the age of editing our own genes. And to some extent, Musk, who may bring us into an era of electric vehicles and space adventures. In the case of Musk, it’s not as pretty of a sight as it is for the other two.

Beres: Do you think Musk’s darker side is fundamentally rooted in his upbringing and the way his father looms over him? How do you explain it?

Isaacson: The book begins with growing up in a very violent place in South Africa. Being beaten up by bullies, having his head smashed as he’s pushed down the concrete steps of the schoolyard, and then having his father take the side of the bullies. And his father berated him for hours on end. His father had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, and had fantasies that were dark. Those instilled a lot of demons in Musk. Grimes talks about demon mode coming out and how bad it can be, and how it sometimes gets shit done.

Talulah Riley, Musk’s second wife, tells me about holding his head at night when he was vomiting because of stress. He started channeling things his father said to him and using the same phrases. That addiction to drama, that addiction to risk taking, that addiction to making really dark and stupid tweets—it’s all ingrained in who he is, as well as the adventuresome, risk-taking side of his upbringing that helps him accomplish things.

We live in a country that is populated by people who took lots of risks to get here, whether it was on the Mayflower or crossing the Rio Grande. And we got to the moon. Musk feels that we’ve become a nation with more referees than risk takers, more regulators than people willing to push the boundaries. It’s why we don’t have high-speed rail and why we haven’t been able to go back to the moon after 50 years. He approaches that with a certain impulsiveness and a rashness and an immaturity. But he feels it’s a bit of an antidote to the psychological comfort and carefully regulated world that we’re living in.

There’s a right balance somewhere, and I would probably be much more on the cautious side of that balance. But that’s why I end up writing books about people who shoot rockets to Mars. I’m never going to build a damn rocket that’s going to go to Mars. And nor are you.