Have Our Screens Made Us Too Distracted For Democracy? | Crooked Media
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August 21, 2025
Offline with Jon Favreau
Have Our Screens Made Us Too Distracted For Democracy?

In This Episode

 Ben Rhodes—bestselling author, Pod Save the World co-host, and fellow Obama administration alum—joins Offline to explain how America is being torn apart by short-term thinking and the technology that stokes it. Ben recently wrote a piece for the New York Times on the topic, and he and Jon connect the dots between big tech, the attention economy and domestic dogmas, drawing on fifty years of foreign policy to explain how we got to a place where no one can focus on the worst of what Trump’s doing—let alone agree on a national narrative.

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