In 1974 the American philosopher Robert Nozick posed a prophetic question: if there was a machine that offered the illusion of a life of consistent pleasure, which simultaneously removed any inkling of being hooked up to a machine, how many of us would choose to plug in? As the New Statesman’s philosophy columnist David Edmonds recently reminded us, the conclusion of Nozick’s thought experiment was that most people would say no. The pull of the real world is far too strong.
If such a thought experiment were to be repeated in 2025, would it produce the same results? The American academic Christine Rosen is not so sure. Her new book, The Extinction of Experience, argues that social media, gaming, dating apps and smartphones have severely diminished real-life experiences. Rosen, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a centre-right think tank based in Washington DC, spends most of her time thinking about the social and cultural implications of big tech. She believes that as more of us are living our lives through the small block of metal and glass in our pockets, our willingness and ability to experience the world is diminishing.
“We should not become comfortable with the idea that these simulated experiences are just as good, if not better, than real experiences,” Rosen told me, when we met on a rainy morning in a café in London’s Marylebone. Appropriately, as we were about to start our interview, I had a tech problem: my microphone wasn’t working. “That’s really refreshing to see,” Rosen said. “I’m usually the one with the tech issues.”
Rosen, 51, admits that she can sound like a Luddite: “I grew up without this stuff. The first technology in the home we had, besides the television, was an Atari gaming console. We all thought it was thrilling.” But she is certainly not alone in her efforts to expose the harms of the online age. The Extinction of Experience joins a growing body of literature dissecting the impact of smartphones and social media, including Jonathan Haidt’s much-cited 2024 book The Anxious Generation.
Upon starting work in the 1990s Rosen became more suspicious of advancing communications technology. “When cellphones became more common, I was doing some speechwriting in Washington DC and one of the people I was writing for wanted to get me a phone so he could contact me at any time,” Rosen said. “I thought, ‘That’s a bad idea.’ I had an instinct that I didn’t want to be available to the people I work for all the time.”
As smartphones became more common in the new millennium, instantaneous contact became intertwined with gratification. The pandemic and lockdowns made work-life boundaries more porous, and, Rosen argues, tech enabled this. “I used the word ‘extinction’ [in the book’s title] because I was alarmed to find some things disappearing and no one even noticing,” she said. “I think there are some basic truths about human nature that we are ignoring. We have been operating with a mindset of the engineer: here’s the problem; we’ll fix it. Humans don’t like to be bored? Let’s fix that by just giving them everything that they want at any moment of the day. We’re conforming to the demands of the machine, rather than making machines that are better at working with the frailties of human nature.”
One example in Rosen’s book is our inability to navigate a new city without walking head-down, almost unconscious of our surroundings, absorbed by the map on our phone. Another is an unwillingness to enjoy a meal out without relying on apps such as TripAdvisor to choose a restaurant (at which each plate will be photographed and the image uploaded to Instagram).
Rosen also lists worrying changes such as the deterioration of “very basic things like handwriting”, a practice which, she argues, spurs creativity and helps the brain retain more information. She also laments the decline in face-to-face interaction. Between 2003 and 2022, in-person socialising between American adults dropped by 30 per cent; among teenagers it reduced by 45 per cent in the same time period. “This changes our behaviour towards others,” Rosen told me: “how we get along or don’t get along, how we resolve conflict, how we understand each other.”
In her book, Rosen points to the rise in road rage (reports of rage-related incidents increased 40 per cent in the UK between 2021 and 2022), positing that this has been encouraged by the isolating influence of technology. Rosen argues that by making social interactions instantaneous but mediated by a screen (and so less human), we have impaired our capacity to wait. “It’s a good thing to learn how to be patient.”
Christine Rosen was born in 1973 in St Petersburg, Florida, “a wacky and wonderful state” that remains “near and dear” to her. Rosen went to the University of South Florida on a bassoon scholarship. “Very few people choose that instrument,” Rosen said. “And as it turns out, it can be very useful for music-scholarship purposes.” She moved to Washington DC for a postgraduate research project and has stayed there ever since, joining the AEI in 1999.
Living in DC, Rosen is close to the epicentre of American power. The re-election of Donald Trump has ushered in a new era for American tech: Elon Musk, the tech “broligarch” leading SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and X, is an adviser to the president. Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) has taken an axe to US federal infrastructure, assisted by a host of computer engineers and a suite of AI tools. Musk is known for his tech-driven vision of progress for progress’s sake: his innovations include Neuralink’s early-stage brain implant that purports to “unlock human potential tomorrow”.
Such techno-optimism is at odds with Rosen’s view that technology is quietly edging out the human experience. “Musk is so fascinating to me,” she said. “He’s a very contradictory figure.” Rosen said she has no issue with him “trying to shake things up a bit” in government through the efficiency drive he is championing at Doge, but she is deeply concerned that his vision could lead to a world in which inequalities only worsen. In Silicon Valley, she says, there is “this idea that if you like the world you live in, you’re ‘reality privileged’, because most people’s reality is terrible. So instead of fixing the world – which I think is our obligation to each other as humans – let’s just give them the best VR goggles, and they can live their best lives online. I think that’s unacceptable.”
This world – in which suffering and inequality are negated by virtual pleasure – is reminiscent of the one created by Aldous Huxley in his 1932 novel Brave New World. Huxley imagined a future in which a narcotic drug (“soma”) is taken regularly by the population in order to create euphoric feelings of happiness and to escape from the brutal and mundane realities of everyday life.
“Huxley understood human nature,” Rosen said. He knew “that if you give people an easy path, they will take it”. For Rosen, this is the weakness the tech industry has exploited. “The main challenge now is overcoming this idea that everything should be easy and convenient. It’s good to have challenges and face them.”
For Christine Rosen, halting this slow march towards the extinction of experience requires government intervention. “I think we need some regulation with teeth to enforce age limits for children for social media use,” she said, pointing out that it is the younger generations, growing up surrounded by technology, who need the most protection. But it will also require individuals to change. “When it comes down to it, each of us has to be honest about our own habits and what it’s doing to us to spend so much time mediating our own experiences, versus being out in the real world and having them.”
[See also: Labour’s collision course]
Content from our partners
This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age