Ross Douthat: Why Digital Life Threatens Freedom and Family

In this episode of Just Asking Questions, we’re joined by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss the cultural, political, and demographic pressures reshaping the modern world. His recent essay, “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive,” explores how digital life—from AI companions to algorithmic distraction—is accelerating trends toward social atomization, institutional collapse, and even plummeting birth rates. We talk with Douthat about how libertarians should respond to these changes, whether neo-traditionalism offers a credible path forward, and what it means to maintain meaning and community in the 21st century.

This interview was recorded on April 29, 2025.

Sources Referenced:

• Douthat’s New York Times essay: “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive“
• The New York Times: “The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next?“
• U.S. college enrollment decline statistics
• Slow Boring: “Cities aren’t back“
• Just Asking Questions with Derek Thompson: “Democrats Must Change“
• Just Asking Questions with Tim Carney: “Why Aren’t People Having More Kids?“
• An introduction to G.K. Chesterton’s fences

Chapters

• 00:00 Coming up…
• 00:37 Introducing Ross Douthat and the age of cultural bottlenecks
• 04:57 Are digital technologies disrupting cultural transmission?
• 09:57 How the internet reshapes politics and encourages radicalism
• 15:22 Digital media and the decline of institutional trust and localism
• 18:42 Demographic decline and the fading urgency to preserve culture
• 26:52 Free choice or social breakdown? The libertarian tension
• 34:27 Suburbs, adaptation, and the future of normie culture
• 41:12 Risk aversion, parenting, and the erosion of community life
• 47:17 Fertility, tradition, and the rise of large families as a subculture
• 54:07 Neo-traditionalism in a bespoke age: coping or coping well?
• 58:32 Can we rebuild meaningful culture in a post-traditional world?

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Transcript:

This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting.

Liz Wolfe: What will survive the digital apocalypse? Just asking questions. Our guest today is Ross Douthat, one of the few people living openly as a conservative at The New York Times, and one of my personal favorite writers on Catholicism, faith, and forging meaning and community in an increasingly atomized age. He wrote a piece for the Times called “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.” Welcome, Ross.

Ross Douthat: It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Liz Wolfe: Thank you for coming on the show.

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, it’s great to have you because, I mean, every once in a while, you read one of these pieces that seems to capture something about what is in the air, what is in the ether. And this is just a really remarkable piece that we will definitely link to, and I recommend reading it to go along with the podcast.

It argues that the digital age is forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a bottleneck. So we can imagine this extreme, rapidly acting new evolutionary pressure, and only a tiny fraction is going to make it through that little opening in the bottleneck. So, just to set this up, what are some of the biggest telltale signs that you observe that lead you to believe we’re facing an age of extinction?

Ross Douthat: Sure. Well, first of all, I should say, hopefully it’s more than a tiny fraction, right? You can imagine a bottle with a thinner neck or a thicker neck. One of the points of alerting people to these realities is to try to instill and encourage habits and intentions that get more people, more ways of life, more cultures through the bottleneck.

But basically, the argument that I make is that digital life and digital existence are really, really hard on what we think of as normal, basic modes of cultural transmission from one generation to another—and then also the literal reproduction of the species. And these two things are actually connected. The way we live digitally tends to distract us from the forms of creation and educational transmission of literature, art, religion—all the stuff of human culture that people take for granted.

It also tends to distract us and separate us from the normal, in-real-life ways of hanging around with other people—making friendships, going on dates, finding romance, having sex, and having kids—that allow for the very literal continuation of the human species.

So there’s a lot of things that people did sort of casually without thinking too much about it in much of human history, that people now need to do with a lot more intentionality in the landscape we’re in—a landscape of constant virtual distraction.

If you don’t have a certain kind of intentionality about those things—whether it’s the religion you’re trying to pass on to your kids, or the novel reading you take for granted as what a literate person does, or again, just the literal continuation of Spain or South Korea or Italy or Taiwan as nations—that’s the most urgent part of this: the connection to demographics.

But all of that is not going to happen as automatically as it did in the past. You’re going to have lots and lots of opportunities to live a virtual existence that doesn’t have normal, real-world correlates. And this is only going to increase, presumably, in the age of AI. You don’t have to assume that AI will make all work obsolete or anything like that to see this happening.

You just have to assume that AI is going to be especially good at generating addictive slop on YouTube, or generating artificial companions and friendships that substitute for real ones. And that’s already happening. The more it happens, the tighter the bottleneck gets.

Liz Wolfe: Well, I mean, I am very sympathetic to this thesis, especially because I send Zach a replica-related rant approximately every two weeks, where I’m very worried about the chatbot girlfriends proliferating. I find it to be one of the creepiest, most dystopian things in the world. Zach is very sick of me blowing up his DMs with my worries about this.

Zach Weissmueller: I agree with you that Her by Spike Jonze is our future. That’s our trajectory, for sure.

Liz Wolfe: Absolutely.

Ross Douthat: Well, and in fact, you’ve probably actually created your own chatbot that now sends Zach those messages, so you don’t even have to do it yourself. He’s communicating with Liz Wolfe Avatar. I mean, that’s the alarmism bot. All of my own dystopian tech columns are themselves written by Ross Douthat AI at this point. I should just confess that up front.

Liz Wolfe: But I—OK, I want to sort of get, you know, right off the bat to the heart of what I think the libertarian objection would be to your essay, which is: Are you erroneously blaming a lot of these problems on technological shifts when, in reality, the thing that you’re bemoaning is the fact that our cultural defaults have sort of gone away?

Ross Douthat: I mean, yes, I am suggesting that certain cultural defaults have gone away under technological pressure—

Liz Wolfe: Are they necessarily linked, though? Is your argument that the two are just intrinsically linked?

Ross Douthat: I mean, I guess my general view is that you should regard technological change as causing—well, put it this way, to use a biological metaphor: Any culture contains within it multiple tendencies at any given time. Technological revolutions act on cultures. They interact with preexisting tendencies and heighten or accentuate or cause—again, “cause” is like causing a gene to be expressed. It’s like saying, “OK, under certain environmental conditions, some gene in your body gets expressed.”

So under the conditions created by the internet and the iPhone and now AI, you get a kind of accentuation of an already existing tendency toward hyper-individualism, atomization, separation from institutions, churches, families, and so on.

And again, yes, all of these trends preexist and predate the internet. I would certainly not argue that there’s a monocausal story here where it’s just the internet driving, say, distrust of institutions. Distrust of institutions has been rising steadily in America—with a brief shift around September 11—since the 1960s. That’s a long-term trend. It’s not driven by the internet alone.

Is the internet an accelerant for people’s alienation from institutions? Yes, I think it obviously is.

But the other thing I would say is that the essay and the argument I’m making is not a kind of Luddite case for saying these technologies are bad and we need to get rid of them. The argument is more—and I probably could have put in a few more paragraphs to make this explicit—that this technological change is happening. We’re not likely to have a Butlerian Jihad, Dune-style rebellion against sentient machines or something. To be clear, I can imagine futures where that happens.

But where we are right now, in 2025, people are going to keep using iPhones, keep living in virtual reality, and adopt whatever the new AI technologies are to some degree. Given that we’re not going to go around smashing the machines tomorrow, it’s like: You need to be aware of what these new technologies are doing, and you need to focus on how human beings can master the technology rather than the other way around.

How do you make the use of the iPhone, social media, digital media—all these things—fit into a world where human beings keep making great art and having families? That is the challenge. It’s a case that assumes technological change. It’s not trying to resist it. It’s assuming the change and saying, “OK, how do we deal with this? How do we ensure that when society has fully absorbed whatever the technology is doing to us, we still have human things on the other side?”

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, it strikes me as a very McLuhanite argument. Marshall McLuhan—who I find persuasive in this day and age to a large degree, more than I would have expected—argues that technology, specifically communications technology, reorders the human senses in certain ways. Then you need to have an awareness of what those effects are in order to adapt to it.

He goes as far as to say that this is really the prime mover in terms of creating new historical and cultural phenomena. I don’t know if you go that far or not, but one example that you give of the way it sort of reorders the political landscape is what you call the rise of these weird, bespoke radicalisms. We’ve got Luigi Mangione fandom on the left, World War II revisionism on the right, and you describe it as an extinction of a certain kind of political discourse.

Why are those two particular examples outgrowths of the digital age of extinction?

Ross Douthat: I mean, it’s partially just that the digital experience discourages norminess in all its forms, you might say. Liberal democracy historically has thrived on people being loosely engaged with politics in ways that are not bespoke. You’re part of a broad coalition that is trying to get particular things done in politics and has a defined set of interests, but you’re not sculpting and crafting this hyperpersonalized political identity.

Now, again, this is a case where you don’t want to just say this is bad, full stop. In fact, some bespoke political identities get at real truths about the world that are lost in a world of boring normie liberalism. And as someone who is not myself a normie liberal, I have a real appreciation for the ways in which the internet can enliven political argument, increase the range of available ideas, and expand political debates.

So it’s not as simple as saying this new world is 100 percent worse because we’re all going to be living in weird fusions of Hindu nationalism, Fabian socialism, and the Black Panthers—or something. But again, you want to be aware, as a citizen engaging in politics, of the way your own political engagement is being rewired.

I didn’t talk about this at length in the essay, but the other thing it does is create these weird “politics as fandoms,” where you’re engaging with politics not by knocking on doors or canvassing or forming an institution organized around a particular issue, but more in the way people might engage with football or hockey. Clearly, the internet encourages some version of this. Social media especially encourages a version of this where it’s like, what is the thing your “main character” is doing today?

So many influencers, right and left, are clearly offering this kind of politics-as-fandom. And again, democratic government is not really well served by this kind of mentality. It’s not how republican government is supposed to work. So it’s not going away, but you want to be aware of it. You want to figure out: How do you, in your own life, avoid thinking of politics in this way? And also, how do you, as a senator or congressman or someone who takes political institutions seriously, avoid existing in that kind of landscape?

Because it’s a landscape where it’s really hard to actually get anything done politically. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the internet has accelerated the impotence of the U.S. Congress. Again, to your previous question, it’s not the only reason Congress has become increasingly impotent, but internet-age politics are especially ill-suited to real-world legislative deal making.

Liz Wolfe: Wait, why is that? Is it just because localism doesn’t matter, and you can’t sort of gin up enough support for a person who’s representing a relatively small contingent?

Ross Douthat: I think it’s partially that local interests seem to diminish in salience dramatically. Politicians become less dependent on local interests—even when they’re getting elected locally—and more dependent on national constituencies.

Yuval Levin at the American Enterprise Institute has written a fair amount about this: the way in which institutions, in the digital environment, become platforms rather than common enterprises. So you see members of Congress for whom being a congressperson or senator is less about participating in this institution that exists in the real world—where you go into a building, follow particular protocols, attend meetings and committees—and more about building up your digital reality.

Liz Wolfe: This is sort of exemplified by Nancy Mace’s big hubbub over sharing the women’s restroom in one of the congressional buildings with trans people. It felt like something that wasn’t really narrowly tailored to what actually serves her constituents, but rather a means of making the name “Nancy Mace” itself more prominent and higher profile.

Ross D

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