231: Garrett Graff: Social Media, Politics, and the Failure to Flourish
No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp
Can tech business models coexist with democracy?
Graff reflects on his optimism, personal tech tensions, and doubts about building a healthier civic internet.
What can it possibly mean to flourish in our tech saturated world?
In the early 2000s, the internet felt like a civic miracle in the making, with profound possibilities for human flourishing and civic progress. Facebook gave voice to protestors in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. Twitter helped bring down dictators. The web seemed poised to enhance democracy, amplify transparency, and connect us more deeply. But then the tide turned.
This episode features Garrett Graff, historian, journalist, and host of the award-winning podcast Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet. In this sobering conversation, Graff joins Lee to unpack how a platform born of hope became a tool for outrage, surveillance, and even genocide.
Drawing on more than three decades of digital history, Graff traces how tech's shift from user-driven exploration to algorithmic manipulation created not just a loss of innocence—but a structural system designed to enrage. We hear the story of the Arab Spring, where connectivity spurred revolution, only to become a mechanism of authoritarian control. We examine Myanmar, where unchecked hate speech on Facebook helped fuel mass atrocities. And we explore a haunting question: What kind of people are we becoming through our use of these technologies?
Along the way, Graff reflects on his own tech optimism, the moral responsibility of tech executives, and why understanding internet history is a civic—not academic—duty. He and Lee also examine whether AI is already repeating these same mistakes.
If you’ve ever asked how the internet became what it is today—or what role we each play in its future—this episode offers both clarity and a call to courage.
Garrett Graff’s insights offer one of the most thoughtful takes yet on the digital age’s moral and social consequences.
Show Notes, Resources, and Transcript for abridged episode with Garrett Graff.
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No Small Endeavor: An award winning podcast exploring what it means to live a good life, with thought provoking conversations about human flourishing, spirituality, theology, politics, faith, social sciences, search for meaning, meaning and purpose, practices, common good, truth beauty and goodness, productivity, habit formation, neuroscience, science and religion, social justice, the cardinal virtues, the how of happiness, theology and culture, self development, virtue theory, being human, moral philosophy, and community. Follow @nosmallendeavor
Host Lee C. Camp: Lee has worked as a professor of theology & ethics for more than 25 years, teaching and writing on topics of faith & politics, inter-religious dialog, and human flourishing at the intersection of theology, moral philosophy, and social sciences. Follow @leeccamp
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