Crosscut Festival

- [Announcer] Thank you for joining us for The Internet Changed (Almost) Everything with Pamela Paul, moderated by Knute Berger.

Before we begin, thank you to our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation.

- Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

In fact, we're the very first session.

I'm Knute Berger, Editor-at-Large at Crosscut and host of the show Mossbacks Northwest on KCTS-9.

And by the way, I still take notes by hand, not with my iPhone and full disclosure, my handwriting has always been terrible, even pre-internet.

Today I'm joined by Pamela Paul, New York Times columnist, previously editor of the New York Times Book Review, author of a number of books, including the one we'll be talking about today.

"100 Things We've Lost to the Internet".

Pamela Paul, welcome to you.

Thanks for joining us today.

- I'm happy to be here.

Even if it's on the internet and not in person.

- Yes, exactly.

So one thing I wanted to ask you just at the start about your book, is do you have a beef with the internet?

- Does anybody not have at least one beef with the internet?

I don't know.

You know, there are things that I love about the internet.

I love the fact that it is now kind of holding up my very feeble, my increasingly feeble memory so that I can Google anything and find out immediately the answer.

Although, I do think there are downsides to that.

And certainly, I think anyone at this point in the pandemic, will recognize that this pandemic, particularly the lockdown phases, would've been completely, if not impossible, a lot less sustainable for most people without the internet.

I mean, we would not have been able to communicate with one another in many cases, we wouldn't have been able to access health information for those of us who were lucky enough to be able to work remotely, we could continue to earn a paycheck.

So the internet did a lot of good during the pandemic.

I do think though that the pandemic also showed us that being on the internet a lot, a lot, a lot, has a real downside.

- Well, many of the things that you cite in your book as lost, seem to me, like they're still with us, for example, vinyl LP's seem to have made a comeback.

Craigslist didn't kill antique malls, killed newspapers, but didn't kill antique malls and estate sales.

So when you say lost, what do you really mean?

- So I think that I use that term loosely, you're right, and some of the things are completely gone, but a lot of them have just been radically changed or we have kind of forgotten about them.

And what I wanted to do with this book is not just catalog them, but also kind of document them, point them out so that people could remember like, "oh yeah, I could listen to a record if I wanted to", we do have a choice for example, to leave our phone at home and actually take a real vacation.

Although, I have yet to meet anyone who has done that, unless it was some kinda like enforced retreat.

We do have the ability to claw back some of the things that the internet has taken away from us.

So they're definitely not all pure, erased from the planet losses.

- Well, maybe you could just give us a quick list of the sort of biggest losses, your top losses list.

- The ones that I take personally, you mean?

- It could be both.

- Yeah.

I mean, the ones that are... part of this is that every loss is different for every person, right?

And certainly I'm not gonna claim to speak for all of humanity.

Sometimes something that feels like a loss, like a negative loss, is actually a positive loss or a kind of gain, depending on where you are at at a given moment or for a different person, something is a loss and for someone else's gain.

So for me, for example, I am not a fan of the tablet.

I do not use an e-reader.

I know a lot of people do.

So I talk a little bit about what you lose when you read things on a tablet, then if you read them and what I still think of as like, you know, a real book.

But for someone who is autistic or on the spectrum, or for someone who has any kind of reading disability for a lot of people, reading on a tablet, for someone frankly, who just needs to zoom in and see things in large print, there's a real benefit to reading on a tablet.

So I'm cognizant of the fact that things that are losses for me are sometimes gains for other people.

But the ones that I take personally, or that really feel like significant losses to me are the ones that are not so much physical objects, although there are lots of print, paper based things, that I really miss, but they're the kind of bigger idea things.

So I really miss being able to focus on one thing at a time.

I really miss my attention span.

I will try to maintain, be sustained during the course of this conversation, but I do think that the internet and particularly the phone or portable internet has destroyed our sense of concentration.

I miss the feeling that if I woke up in a hotel in Copenhagen, by myself, that's just where I am.

I'm right there.

No one else is there with me.

But you really lose that sense when you have a phone and you have what can feel like and really be a thousand people or at least hundreds of people knocking at your door with their emails, their up votes, their notifications, their posts, their texts, sort of everyone they're lurking.

You lose that feeling of I am just here right now, in the now.

Not being a zen person, that's not a natural state for me, unless it's the only available state.

So that's one I miss.

Another one that I miss is being able to disappear on the planet.

And so this is a little bit related to attention span.

But when I was in my early twenties, I moved abroad to a small city in Northern Thailand and it was pre-internet or I think Al gore was on the internet, but not many other people.

And I didn't even have a landline, let alone a cell phone or a portable internet as they are, I think really are.

And so no one could reach me and I could go traveling, for example, backpacking in China for six weeks, without being able to contact anyone.

I didn't even have a phone card and that's gone.

And I think that for, in my life right now, I'm not exactly gonna run off to the Highlands of Bolivia for three weeks or let alone for a year but I think for young people, that ability to go somewhere and really be unconnected from other people is a loss because it's the kind of experience, it's really hard to simulate even if you don't bring your little portable internet because you know that there are internet cafes, you know that there are ways to access other people to communicate, to get information.

You won't find yourself alone and broke in a cafe in Hanoi with no money and sort of have to think on your feet, like where, and how am I going to get by for the next 24 hours?

And I think you learn something through that.

I'm not saying it's a hundred percent fun, but I think it's a valuable experience to have.

- Yeah, I had a couple reactions as you were talking, one was doom scrolling, which is something, I mean, I never used to wake up in the middle of the night and go dig out the newspaper from recycling and read through it to see what was wrong with the world.

But, but certainly in the pandemic era, and even before waking up multiple times in the middle of the night to see what the latest fiasco was is something I've done, which is to your point about the changing the nature of the way we get information and the way we read and process stuff.

You know, I'm curious as to, you identify in the book, I think, as a Gen Xer, am I right?

- Yes.

- And I'm a baby boomer and I have two millennial kids who are middle aged now and I'm wondering what you see are there differences between the generations in terms of what they've lost or the perceptions of what they've lost?

Like, what does your generation feel about these losses and what about the millennials?

- Well, I'm Gen X, so I feel like we are just predisposed to feel the most burnt by anything and the most depressed about it.

But I do think that we are sort of situated at an interesting point.

Boomers too, but Gen Xers, essentially, and again, we're talking like born between 1964 and 1978, technically speaking and some people date it a little bit differently, but we all encountered the internet for the first time as young adults, so we came of age without it, we worked for a while without it, and then we had it and we were there for internet 1.0 and 2.0 and now, I don't know where we are 3.0 and beyond.

And I think that that experience certainly defines my way of looking at the internet and that I know that it's possible to get by without it.

I remember what it was like in the before times, I have appreciated the growth and what it's done all along.

I think that for millennials, it's different in that most of them do remember the before times, Gen Z is a little bit different, but millennials remember the before times, they got through, in most cases, their adolescence without social media and they're old enough to recognize and be grateful for that.

And yet their young adulthood has been defined by the internet.

And I think the digital generation, the digital natives, Gen Z, I think for them, it's been incredibly difficult because all they can do, and in a way I thought this is my little recent history book that I'm writing for them so that they know what it was like.

I think that they're nostalgic for the before times.

I think that they are suffering this period of change in which there's been a lot of technological change, but we haven't quite acclimated.

We haven't quite adjusted to how do we function here?

How do we reclaim things like, you know, democracy and privacy and civil discourse, all of those things that the internet has kind of swiped from existence.

And I think Boomers, I don't know, you tell me how you feel.

I think it's probably, maybe you have a little bit more perspective and so you feel sort of maybe a little bit less personally aggrieved.

- Well, for me, the transition was difficult.

I was a PC resistor.

I didn't wanna give up my Royal Typewriter.

When I tell people that now, they're like, "Wow, you were in this business when there were still typewriters and people smoking in newsrooms?"

Yes, I was.

I adapted, now you would have to pry my laptop from my cold dead hands.

And the phone thing is interesting, you mentioned digital natives, Gen Z, and when my granddaughter was four years old, she picked up my phone and found games and things on it that I had no idea were there.

Cuz I'd never explored my phone.

I was just like dialing with my finger.

And you mentioned something kind of interesting, that's a very specific thing that also you generalized from you said that the progress had doomed the kitchen telephone and one of the things you cite as lost, I mean, we have these iPhones that do more than an IBM computer from the sixties could do, including video and everything else.

What was it about the kitchen phone specifically, that seemed like a terrible loss to you?

- Well, it's a real change in that the phone in the kitchen was, first of all, many houses for a long time or apartments only had the phone in the kitchen, that was the sort of, where the Brady Bunch had their phone or the phone was in Meet Me in St. Lois, it was in the dining room.

And that was a kind of portal to get into the house without walking through the front door.

That was essentially, unless you climb in through a window, that was the only way that someone who didn't live in the house or wasn't in the house, could come in was through that phone.

And when it was in a communal space, everyone knew if someone was coming in and even if you didn't have the exact information, you gleaned a lot from it.

So let's say you're all at the dinner table and the phone rings and you are allowed to get the phone, cuz you may remember, it used to be considered incredibly rude to call during dinner time.

And many families at least it was verboten to pick the phone up during dinner time.

But let's say you did, everyone at the table can hear that conversation and they're gathering information.

If the phone is for whoever picked it up, then they know like, "Oh my God, my big sister, she's having this conversation, she's whispering, she's keeping it quiet, who could it be?"

You could interrogate her after if you were her parent, you could interrogate the girl about who she was on the phone with, who dared called during that time, you would find out who your kid was in a communication with.

Or if you answered the phone and it wasn't for you, or if you answered the phone and it wasn't for you and someone picked it up in another room and you just went like this and listened in.

You knew who was being, you know, communicating in a house.

And now parents have no idea who their kids are communicating with.

The phone of the kitchen, no one would call on the landline, if you even have a landline, they're not even calling cuz kids don't call, they're FaceTiming or they're texting or they're snapping or whatever they're doing and they're doing it in their own bedroom or they're doing it under the table while you're at dinner because only 28% of Americans have a no phone at the table rule.

And so you're not privy to that.

And what it does is kind of atomize the family or whoever it is that you're living together with in that everyone is communicating with people outside the house, without anyone in the house really knowing and that's a huge change.

If you just kind of sit on that idea and you remember, oh, this is how it used to be.

It used to be that everybody was in each other's business all the time.

Now everything happens behind a screen and the rest of the family doesn't have access to it.

- Yeah, I just was thinking, the only time you overhear people talking on the phone is somebody on the bus, who's loudly talking into their cell phone.

A private conversation you'd rather not hear.

- Right, or yelling down the street.

I mean, even just think about that.

If someone used to walk down the street, yelling to themselves, you were like, "oh, this person has a serious mental illness, there's something awry."

Now.

It's completely normal to see people walking down the street alone, yelling and really having kind of no self consciousness about that.

So it's really transformed our ideas of what is kind of normal behavior out there in the open.

And I wanna go back to one thing you said about doom scrolling, because one of the chapters, one of the things that we've lost, each chapter kind of is a thing and sometimes it's 10 things within the confines of the chapter title.

But one of the things is of course, a good night's sleep and you lose that, not only because a lot of people sleep with their phone next to them in bed or under their pillow, the majority of teenagers sleep with their phone in their bedroom and most of them within an arms reach.

So not only that, which is just stimulating, cuz you kind of know that it's there, but you wake up in the middle of the night, as maybe older people are prone to do and of course, what do you do?

You look at the phone it's easier than turning on the light, potentially waking up your partner and reading a book.

And besides, you know, not that many people, not as many people do that anymore, but so you can disturb your sleep that way.

But the other more insidious way that I think we've lost a good night's sleep gets back to this idea of there's been a huge wave of change and our bodies and brains have not caught up to it.

So, remember how everyone used to have that statistic of, and I'm gonna get it wrong, cuz I'm gonna just completely paraphrase it, but there was some statistic like in the 19th century, you got as much information over the course of a year as you would in a single day's addition of a print newspaper.

And now of course on the internet, you can take whatever was in that print newspaper and multiply it by exponentially.

We are going through, we're not just getting so much information in a day, but I think more importantly, we are absorbing emotional experiences.

We're having a kind of, you know, constant influx of emotional engagements with the outside world, whether it's a tweet that really pisses you off, or reading about something on Facebook that happened to a kid you went to elementary school was hit by a car or you're just constantly gathering, not just what's going on to the people that you know, but to everyone that they know through all these social networks and at the end of the day, it's like you may have experienced five deaths within your network.

You may have gotten really upset about 10 different things and I don't think that our bodies or our minds have caught up with how do you process all of that?

It's a lot to take in, in one day and I think it's not surprising that so many people feel really amped up at the end of the day, that so many teenagers feel really anxious and depressed and worried at the end of the day, because we've just taken all this stuff in.

It's almost too much for a given 16 hour period.

- It's interesting because if we, as a society, are sort of suffering from collective trauma, we're kind of compounding it with the phenomenon that you're talking about.

- Yeah.

I mean, look, the world is like pretty terrible enough as it is, even if you just take one thing, like climate change, but then if you add onto climate change, just the existence of that fact that we are all aware of, you could go online and you could see, 10, 20, 50 different videos of it, you could look at climate deniers online and get enraged over that.

There's just a lot of different ways in which you can engage with that information intellectually and psychologically, emotionally and it's really hard come 10 or 11:00 PM, or whenever you try to go to sleep to just turn all that off and say "Okay, you know, I'm gonna just Zen out now and peacefully drift off."

- I wanted to ask you about the media, in general.

I spent a lot of time doing research in newspaper archives and reading pioneer newspapers and early 20th century newspapers and all the news was bad then.

I mean the, the amount of bad, terrible, news that was packed into the newspapers in say 1918 was every bit as much as now, maybe even more, but somehow reading it in newsprint doesn't have the same effect or I don't think have the same effect on people as what you're describing now.

And so I wanted to ask you, as somebody in the newspaper business, what's your sense of the state of newspapers and how the internet has changed things?

Thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs, both ways, what do you think?

- I think thumbs both ways.

And I just want to expand on your point for one moment.

There was a period where everyone, I don't know, it was like five or 10 years ago where, or it wasn't 10 years ago, it was maybe about five years ago that everyone was like, "Oh my God, we're using our phone / portable internet too much.

What can we do to decrease our addiction to these devices?"

And someone said, "Oh, turn it to black and white and you'll find it a lot less fun."

And so many people did, they turned it to black and white and they were like, this sucks, this is really boring.

It was not as engaging, it was not as exciting, it was not as fun, it was so much less fun that I think that most people who did that experiment said, "I don't care, I'd rather just go back to the fun, happy, full color world of my old digital device, than be less engaged with this black and white version."

And I think that again, emphasizes what you were talking about.

It's when you have this, essentially it feels like a piece of candy of a technology, the iPhone I'm thinking of specifically, although I imagine it's true for an Android, it just makes everything that much more compelling.

The news is not simple black and white text on a grayish, bit of poor, recycled paper, but it is or poor quality recycled paper.

It is, you know, fully colorful sound, video, graphics, I mean, we make the news really fun and engaging.

And so I think to then answer your question, that's for the good and for the bad, right?

Because what is fun and engaging isn't necessarily the most important thing for you to know.

And I mean, I could answer this question for like 10 hours, so I'll try to stick to books for a moment.

I think that there are positives to books and I'll talk a little bit about those.

So one thing that we were able to do at the New York Times, is to add the ability to buy the book online, through your local independent or through an online retailer.

We weren't able to do a library function, although that'd be very cool, but you can easily go to another tab and do that, and that would've been a lot harder if you were just reading a print book review, for example, it's then another step to get up, get in the car, go get the book, or even get up, go online, order the book or go to the library.

We are able to offer excerpts, first chapter excerpts, so that you could be reading a review of a book and then click over and read an excerpt again, something that you would not have been able to do if you were just reading that book review in print.

So there are a lot of things that you can do with the news and the other thing I wanna say is that, you know, print is a finite space and all the news that's fit to print, you can fit a lot beyond that when you're not sort of prescribed by trim size of a broadsheet newspaper or a tabloid size book review.

So we are able to do a lot of things online with our books coverage that we just couldn't fit into the book review.

So it really expands your idea and then when you add things like audio and video, being able to create an audio version of any news story is huge for people who are blind or have difficulty reading.

It's good for people on the go.

So I think that there are a lot of pluses and I'm just gonna stick with the pluses so that I'm so that people know that I'm not an entirely depressing anti internet person - Yeah, well I think folks reading your book wouldn't really get that impression cuz there's a lot of nuance and humor.

But on that same topic, there's a recent piece in the Atlantic with- - Oh yeah, Jonathan Haidt?

- Yes, exactly.

- I just had to preempt you because yeah.

- Yeah, no, I wanna get your response to that because essentially, he makes the case, that our democracy is threatened in part, by this shift in social media, from the early two thousands and he pegs it to I think about 2011 to 2015 and it sort of sort of tracks insidious nature of liking and sharing on Twitter and Facebook, which essentially turned informed tweets and Facebook posts to a amygdala pounding, hitting your fear and turned it into sort of performance art to get the most clicks.

That virality, if that's a word, really has had some bad consequences.

And I'm wondering what you think about the threat to virality and the role social media may have played in that.

- So, two things, one is, I absolutely agree with everything that Jonathan Haidt said in that piece.

I think maybe where I differ most is in terms of thinking about what potentially could be solution.

Although I agree with some of his solutions.

I think maybe they don't all go far enough.

And it's interesting, when I was thinking about this book and conceiving it, a lot of it came from a real serious, intellectual and emotional response to the internet and what it hath wrought upon all of us and our world and me kind of shaking my old man fist at the sky and saying, just being incredibly angry and upset over it.

And what I decided to do was, I wasn't gonna write that book because many people have written that book and Jonathan Haidt's piece in the Atlantic is being turned into a book.

And I think there were a lot of people kind of doing that and I thought, okay, I'm gonna go back from the anger and what does this mean for the future?

And I'm gonna rewind and then look at what it was that we had before in this book and kind of stay there and sort of try to remember, because one of the good/insidious things about the internet is that it's very quickly habit forming and so we sort of forget, we've forgotten a lot of this pre-internet stuff and I almost just wanted to dredge it up.

To be like, wait a minute, remember this stuff?

Like, remember typewriters?

So, the goal in the book was very different from that.

But if you want me to rant about the world that we are currently in, I'm happy to do that.

I just did as one of my first columns for the Times, as a columnist, a piece about leaving Twitter.

And when I was working on that column, a friend of mine, who's also a journalist said, "Don't write that column, everyone writes that column, that column has been written."

And what everybody says is like, Twitter is terrible, we're all terrible on it and therefore, I left because it's toxic.

And in my piece wrote, I'm leaving, cuz I'm terrible on it.

I'm terrible on this platform.

It's bringing out the worst in me.

And I think in Jonathan Haidt's piece, one of the recommendations that he has is everybody should just, as an individual, it only will work if we all kind of do this individually, is cut back on your internet use or your social media use, specifically about 80%.

The other thing and just to tie this to your question about journalism that I think is important about disengaging from social media is that I think that the statistic of the number of Americans who use Twitter at all is something like 28%.

It's 20 something.

And most of those people use it relatively, casually.

They're not even hardcore users.

It doesn't represent our country or our world, the people who are on there.

And so I think that for journalists, it's particularly treacherous to be on there because it gives you a very skewed opinion about what the world is like and what people are thinking about and what people actually feel.

And again, then going back to my column, if it brings out the worst in us, then it's really, it's the worst of the 28% of people that is on Twitter.

And to Jonathan Haidt's point, one of the things he talked about in his piece is that the voices that are amplified on Twitter are the voices at the margins of both the very far left and the very far right to our detriment and it gives us a skewed perception of what people's interests, ideas, beliefs, convictions are actually like.

So therefore, if you are a journalist and you are trying to gather information about the world and understand it and translate it to an audience and you're doing that on Twitter, then you're probably not getting a very accurate picture.

- Let me just insert a reminder here, for all of you on your best behavior, those of you watching at home were going to be a asking some of your questions in just a few minutes, so be sure to enter them in the chat section and we'll try to get to them.

As a historian, I'm interested in digital records and a lot of institutions are putting their collections online, which was a godsend during the pandemic.

But what are the dangers of losing these card catalogs and filing systems, things that you talk about in your book, is our history gonna be kind of a big blank because we didn't keep physical objects?

- I think there's a value to both.

I do think we lose something when we don't have the physical object.

I remember doing research when I was in college and going my college had a library of early Americana and looking at old documents, old flyers, things that ran in circulars, pieces of all this sort of paper ephemera.

It really, it makes it real in a way that seeing all these things on screen is literally flattening, right?

You're just seeing it in this sort of two dimensional way if you don't have that same visual, tactile, sensory experience when you don't have the physical object.

And I think for many people, I think when you talk about different ways of learning and different kinds of intelligence, all of us recognize that some of us are kinetic learners, some of us need to kind of feel move, be active, be in a space with something.

So many of us are visual learners.

We're tactile learners, we need to feel something.

We all know this by the direction that museums are going in, which is interactive, having us be fully experiential.

And so, we are taking that away though, simultaneously from these objects from our history.

In that, just to see them on the screen, that's not interactive.

We call the screen, we call things online interactive, but it's not interactive in the real human sense of interactive.

I do think we lose something.

And I think too, many of us, again, in terms of our memories, the way that we operate in space, we see things and we remember them by where they were.

When you lose your keys, you're like, wait a minute.

I remember seeing it out of this corner of my eye, or I remember it was next to this other, something brown.

And when you don't have a card catalog or a file cabinet or a bookshelf full of stuff like you have behind me, you lose that sort of sense of the geography of where things are.

- Okay, we have just like 30 seconds before we go to audience questions.

And can you name one or two things quickly, that we've lost that you say good riddance to?

- Oh gosh, good riddance.

I'm in a negative space.

You got me to like a dark place where I can only remember things I'm...

I'll say good rid to the emergency breakthrough phone call, which will fly over the head of many people here, probably cause you have to be in a very specific, demographic space to have experienced it.

But that was something where you could call the operator up and have them jump into a conversation where you were getting a busy signal and say, it's an emergency, so and so wants to talk to you.

This was intended for things like roadside accidents, where someone is desperately trying to get in touch with their mother to let them know their car is totaled, but it was often used among high school girls, at least, to manipulate one another and to interrupt each other's conversations.

It was just one of the ways in which girls tortured one another, which they now can do through TikTok.

- OK, so we have some questions.

One comes on the heels of our generational thing.

This is from Jack.

The book feels pretty generational.

I'm 22 and my life seems fine to me.

Are these just losses for older people?

- Maybe when you get older, Jack, you'll recognize some of them as losses.

No look, they might, I think that they are losses, no matter what, they could be good, positive losses or negative losses, but they are certainly things that you no longer have.

I can't speak to every single thing cause I don't know enough about you or about which things would affect you, But I do think that there is a lot of nostalgia among digital natives for things that they never had.

I mean, to your point about vinyl records, like you go into any Urban Outfitter like teenage store now, and they're selling portable record players because there's this urge to kind of like, okay, we've been through the insane amount of choice on Spotify, but there's something super cool about having an old time record or there are apps that now simulate the need to wait for photos to develop and not to be able to tweak them digitally, that get back to what we all had to do, which was to drop your photos off at a photo development shop and wait for a week for the pictures to come back.

So I do think that there is some amount of nostalgia among your generation, but look, if you're happy, and you don't miss any of these things, great.

Then this is just like reading about the old timey times of Little House on the Prairie for you and thinking like, thank God, I don't have to go plow the potato field.

- This is a question from Tom.

Do you think people in different places, like rural versus urban, first world versus third world, experience these losses differently?

What about people who feel loss because they don't have access to the internet like others?

- I definitely think that people experience it differently.

And that's one of the reasons why, and in the beginning of the book, I sort of remind people like, hey, this is who I am.

This is the way I see it.

But I did try to, in my mind, kind of say, well, what if you looked at it this way?

What if you looked at it this way?

So that even from my own perspective, I could recognize that some of these things are losses at one given moment or in one situation in my life and then at another point really might be a kind of a loss that's actually more like a gain.

Again, depending on the situation you're in.

So for example, you're never the only one on the internet, and that could be positive.

You're never the only one to have a child with a rare, genetic disorder, because you can find other parents in that same situation online and you can go to chat rooms and you can access medical information, you could see a fundraising group and you know, I'm not the only one.

Well, before the internet, you would've felt like the only one, probably, especially, if you were in a rural area, if you didn't have direct access to other people with that same, who are going through that same experience.

So that can be very positive and then it can also have a negative side, right?

Because if you think like, wow, I and now I'm gonna be a little bit superficial here, but I have the best collection of miniature glass figurines from turn of the century Venice or whatever it is, and you're like, look at my cool collection, you post it online and you Google and you would go onto any website and you'd find, no, my collection is measly.

There are many people who have far better collections than I do, theirs are worth much more money, I thought I was so unique with this little, interesting hobby, but actually I'm not the only one and I'm not even pretty good at it, not even particularly good at it.

So I do think it depends.

In terms of access, I think that, in this country at least, access is obviously improved enormously.

I think it obviously is different in different places around the world.

But again, I would say that there is as much loss to that as there is gain.

- Paula James asks, do you have any thoughts on cash versus crypto?

- Oh gosh, my thought on crypto is this.

I sat down at the New York Times, did an excellent section about what is Bitcoin?

What is crypto?

What is all this stuff?

And I read it religiously and I absorbed it and I understood it for about five seconds and then it went away and I no longer understand crypto.

I do have a strong feeling against using online paid apps like Venmo or Zelle, because I find that my attitude generally is, unless the current system that I'm using is not functioning for me, there really is no reason to upgrade.

Generally speaking, the internet is trying to sell one on products and services to make money, even if the services and products are allegedly free, they're selling your data, they're selling something to you.

You are the product, whatever it might be and I find that using cash and credit cards kind of is enough for me.

So there's your answer.

You're very, non-financial, unsophisticated answer on crypto.

- Okay, well this'll probably be our last question we have just a couple minutes, but Nancy wants to know, did the process of writing the book, change your mind about any of the assumptions you had when you started?

- You know, one of the interesting things about writing this book is that I did start, I conceived of it and began it before the pandemic.

And then we were all under lockdown and I would say that that really caused a shift in my thinking.

At the beginning, I thought, oh no, we're all so dependent on the internet, no one is gonna wanna read about what life was like before the internet, because that's all we are right now and we're really grateful to it.

And I think the pandemic did that for a lot of creative people and writers, where they suddenly stopped whatever they were doing and like, "Well, who wants to read this climate change novel?"

Just sort of made everyone think like, "What relevance is this?"

It was kind of like the 2016 election, where you just think like, how is this important anymore?

And then for me too, it changed the way in which I wrote.

I used to write on the train as my commute to going into the New York Times every day.

It was a set period of time that I could do my work on the book, separate from my very busy day job.

And then of course, I wasn't commuting anymore, so it just completely upended the way in which I was writing.

I think that ultimately, lockdown actually helped to solidify and clarify the reason for the existence of the book because everything was online for about six months of lockdown, at least for where I was and you really began to experience firsthand, what you lost.

Parents with children who were in kindergarten, really could see in their children's experience of going to kindergarten on Zoom.

Oh, you lose a lot when you're not in a physical classroom with other human beings.

Oh, you lose a lot when no one can see your facial expression.

You lose a lot when human beings are sort of reduced to dimensions.

And we could also see, the other thing that, that you could tell is that as the people came out from under lockdown, how quickly the habits of the internet took hold.

So we all got into the Zoom thing, right?

And then suddenly when you saw people in real life, you were like, "Wait a minute, I can't have like a chat on the side with someone else while I'm talking to you, cuz you can see me and there's no chat box."

So, that's really what I think most affected my experience before and after.

- Well, Pamela, I'm sorry, we've run out of time.

Wish we could keep going, but thanks so much for joining us today, on Zoom, or the equivalent.

- Thank you, internet.

- And yeah, thank you for being part of the Crosscut Festival and helping us get off to a good start.

- It was a total pleasure.

Next time in real life, perhaps.

- That'd be great.

And thanks to all of you watching at home.

I hope you'll attend some of the other fantastic sessions at the festival coming up.

For example, tomorrow at 3:00 p.m. Pacific time, is our extremely, timely panel, Post Roe America, moderated by Slates longtime Supreme Court watcher, Dahlia Lithwick.

You can find sessions, schedule and details at crosscut.com/festival So you won't miss a thing.

Thank you so much.

(gentle music)