Coming of Age with Dr Jorge Pereira Campos

I asked Tim McCarthy, a Harvard professor, what living online is doing to us.

He calls himself a digital migrant: old enough to remember mocking the first people with email, and to have watched every bit of this arrive.

The technology has improved his life in a hundred small ways, and, in his words, it's where things "get a lot darker" once you look at attention, public discourse, and who decides what counts as true. His sharpest line: we don't have a louder voice now, we have a faster one.

The essays are at drjorgecampos.com.

For the first episode of Coming of Age, I asked Dr Tim McCarthy, a historian at Harvard, a question I can't answer on my own: will there ever be a time when everything is just?

His answer is honest. He hopes so, and he doesn't expect to see it in his lifetime. What follows is a conversation about the systems he thinks stand in the way, why he keeps working anyway, and why he reads even the present backlash as a strange kind of evidence that progress is real.

McCarthy is a historian of social movements and human rights. The views here are his, and they're worth sitting with whether or not you share them.

Chapters

00:00 The question

00:12 "I hope so, but I don't expect it"

00:24 The systems McCarthy says keep the world unjust

03:07 Not to dream, but to do

03:47 Leaving the world more just than you found it

04:39 Are we more just now than before?

06:41 The backlash, and the moment he thinks the US is in

08:12 The paradox of progress

10:10 Why backlash is evidence that progress happened

Read the essays and subscribe at drjorgecampos.com.