The rise of the anti-social American

John Mac Ghlionn's essay in The Hill taps into a growing cultural anxiety that transcends party lines: the sense that something essential has been lost in America's pivot to the screen. From the decline of third places to the atomization of remote work, the author catalogues familiar grievances with genuine urgency. For those on the right, the argument resonates with concerns about social fragmentation and the erosion of civic institutions; for those on the left, it echoes critiques of late-stage capitalism and the commodification of human attention. That rare convergence makes the piece worth reading, not as a verdict, but as a starting point for a conversation both sides can share. Yet the anti-isolation thesis deserves its own scrutiny. The data on loneliness is real—surgeon generals on both sides of administrations have flagged it as a public health crisis—but the causal story is messier than the essay suggests. Are Americans lonely because of technology, or did pre-existing social fractures create the vacuum that technology filled? Suburban sprawl, longer commutes, religious disaffiliation, and the two-income household all predate the smartphone. Technology may be an accelerant, not the original spark. A fair reading of the evidence suggests that screens are both symptom and cause, and that simple nostalgia for a pre-digital past ignores the ways many Americans—particularly marginalized communities—found new forms of solidarity online that their physical neighborhoods never offered. The deeper political question, of course, is whether loneliness is a private problem or a public one. If isolation is merely a matter of personal choice, then the remedy is individual discipline: put down the phone, join a club, knock on a neighbor's door. But if the forces driving isolation are structural—economic precarity, car-dependent urban design, the decline of local journalism, the gig economy's erosion of stable workplaces—then individual solutions will always fall short. Ghlionn gestures at this tension without fully resolving it, which is perhaps appropriate for an opinion piece meant to provoke rather than prescribe. Ultimately, "The rise of the anti-social American" is a valuable contribution to a debate that deserves more bipartisan attention than it receives. Loneliness does not care whether you vote red or blue. The question is whether Americans can find common ground in rebuilding the shared spaces—physical and civic—that make community possible. Readers can weigh the full argument at The Hill: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/6071874-tech-impact-social-loneliness/