The Great Validation Pact

Many, many years ago, I read a novel called Fool on the Hill. It's by Matt Ruff, whom you may know better as the author of Lovecraft Country, the novel that was optioned for the HBO series. Fool on the Hill was Ruff's first novel, which he wrote as his seniors thesis, and it was published in 1988, about a year after he finished college. If you've read the novel and disliked it (internet reviews are mixed), I don't need to hear about it. My memories of it are positive. Ruff wrote it when he was, like, 21 and I probably read it around the same age-ish, so maybe that's why. Or maybe because it was kind of like the Big U by Neal Stephenson and Bored of the Rings by the Harvard Lampoon, two books that were lying around the house when I was growing up. Plus even though his novel is about Cornell, I went to Berkeley where there was – and still is! – a co-op house called Lothlórien, the vegetarian/vegan co-op that was (is?) also the host of the annual Food Orgy. I attended exactly once my freshman year and left before I could answer any of the questions I'm sure you have.

Anyway, it may surprise you to learn that none of this is particularly relevant to what I'm about to write. It's just fun context. What's relevant is that the primary character of the book is a writer who, at one point in the narrative, finds himself fighting a dragon. When he thinks he's done something well during this fight, when he thinks he's made progress or wounded the dragon, he congratulates himself and is immediately smacked into the dirt by the dragon's tail. For whatever reason, this image has stayed with me more than anything else in the book. I think of it whenever I am engaging in my own form of hubris.

A few weeks ago, I sent out a newsletter called Technology Is Not the Answer, which you may remember as the newsletter in which I got very fired up about how the tech industry is not going to help us solve the problems we have with tech. Don't worry, that wasn't hubris. I still stand by that and will for the rest of my life, and I do not anticipate any dragon tails with that one. But I did once again bring up this little tidbit:

I used to semi-jokingly ask if anyone in leadership understood how friendship actually happened. Honestly, I wasn't joking. Because not only do they not understand how friendship happens, they don't care. Not really.

Again, stating that isn't hubris. I still don't think they care.

The problems is – and it gives me no pleasure to tell you this – it turns out I don't always understand how friendship happens either. Not entirely. I have a much better sense of it than tech leadership, and I certainly don't want to monetize it. But it turns out I still have my blind spots. It also turns out those blind spots are useful for talking about social media and tech.

Now, as many of you know, I have been an advice columnist twice in my life. Everyone's an advice columnist these days, but I first became one over 25 years ago. Now that I think about it, I first became an advice columnist roughly around the same time as I read Fool on the Hill. For most of my life, I've been someone that other people come to with their problems. It was true even when I was a kid and as a teenager, and then it became very true in my 20s. Also, strangers talk to me everywhere I go. Even in Sweden, where not even neighbors talk to one another, old ladies would stop me on the street to ask for directions. I sometimes joke that I am like a cosmic way station for lost souls. (Hmm, maybe I should write a novel.)

Despite all this, or maybe because of it, I only this very week realized that just because someone is emotionally honest with you about the behavior of people in their lives does not mean that person wants you to be emotionally honest with them about their own behavior and how it affects you. In fact, they almost certainly do not!

My therapist and I talked about all of this on Monday, and I am dead serious when I say it was like a lightbulb moment that blew my fucking mind. A heady combo of absolute whoooooaaaaaa revelation and cringing horror at the fact that I had never made this connection. I have made this mistake more than once and been so mystified when the response is, shall we say, less than ideal. And lest you misunderstand, I don't mean I'm blithely going around telling everyone how awful they are for fun. I'm talking about people who came to me for months (years!) about their problems, and then when they didn't show up so well for me I pointed it out once or twice and they got Big Mad.

This is a deeply vulnerable thing to share in a public way. We are way off the usual path of a tech newsletter. But I share it because, when I told a friend about this incredibly embarrassing breakthrough, he replied that he thinks most people view friendship as a validation pact: we talk about how other people behave toward us, and we each tell the other that we were in the right. And I'd thought it was cynical and depressing enough when my therapist had said "most people have much more superficial relationships than you might expect"!!

Then I stopped and realized: Oh my god no wonder social media took over our lives.

And then I stopped and realized: Oh my god we're so much more deeply fucked than I ever imagined.

Sorry everyone, but it turns out those tech jerkoffs really do understand how friendship works.

It's almost funny when you think about it. It was so nice at first, the way we could stay in touch with everyone regardless of whether we'd remained close for years or hadn't spoken since the fourth grade. The way the social graph kind of compressed everyone in your life and gave them all the same value and prominence. You didn't have to remember anyone's birthday anymore. Facebook would remind you. You didn't have to take the time to read someone's boring holiday newsletter. Instagram would feed you a slow drip of their holidays and important moments. You didn't have to catch up with anyone all that much because everyone and their moms were sharing mundane thoughts on Twitter and in newsfeeds across the internet.

Then it started to get weird. Facebook was all angry rants. Instagram was so polished and unreal. Everyone got so annoyed at the toxic positivity and the earnestness. Remember when Gawker defended snark? And then social media turned into an absolute hellscape with hateful comments and Nazis. Even TikTok with its often aggressively vulnerable content isn't safe from this; just look at the posts of anyone who goes viral. Older audiences are like huddling masses, trying to find some kind of public space that still makes sense. Younger audiences are spending more time on Snapchat, Discord, or text groups, taking content they find and sharing it in smaller private spaces. Everything feels fragmented and fractured but what can we do about it?

Maybe the more important question is: What are we willing to do about it?

I know. Despite my shimmering post-gestalt haze, it seems like I'm still bellying up to the friendship bar with a hearty, "Well everyone, turns out you can fuck up too!" But that's not what I'm doing, I swear. I ask this question more as a horrible realization that tech has tapped into our absolute worst instincts, time and again, in ways I don't think we fully understand. Everything is a shortcut, not to what we think we want but to what we actually do when left to our own devices. (Literally.)

You know I yell about how bad products get made despite user feedback. So you know that I'm not here to defend the industry by saying that sometimes the products we come to hate get built because of us. It turns out a lot of us engage in behavior that makes the product look like a winner. The metrics of our use show a a signal that we'll use a product or feature. Sometimes that signal is a byproduct of another behavior, but sometimes it's legitimate use in the way the product was designed. And that's because what we say we want or say we do, and how we actually behave, are often very, very, very different. Ask any user researcher or therapist.

So the question of what we're willing to do is crucial. Are we willing to get honest about what we actually want and how we actually behave? Are we willing to acknowledge that maybe one reason our social networks feel threadbare isn't just because tech came along and ruined them, but because tech allowed us to lean into our most superficial tendencies? That it fed our desire to validate and be validated, and that for a long time we were okay with that because that is the way a lot of us engage in friendship offline too? Will we work on that in order to distance ourselves from all the harm social media and tech have caused us? Are we ok with learning something that might test us, might even require a "hey sorry, I was wrong"?

Or are we going to keep opening Instagram and Reddit and TikTok and Bluesky, looking to see how many people liked the posts we just made and left nice comments?

I dunno about you, but I guess I know what I'll be talking about in therapy soon.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx