John Harris writes:

If 2025 has had any kind of defining cultural theme, it perhaps boils down to people’s increasing sense that a life completely beholden to screens is no life at all. To this, add two connected trends: a drop in millions of people’s use of social media, and a rising yearning for experiences that are more authentic. This is not, just to be clear, any kind of suggestion that we are about to reject digital technology and wind the clock back 30 years. But something is definitely up, and it is worth tentatively celebrating.

If your interest in posting what you had for lunch seems to be waning and you now look back at a habit of doing so with mild horror, you are not alone. According to analysis commissioned earlier this year by the Financial Times, time spent on social media worldwide peaked back in 2022, and fell by almost 10% by the end of 2024. There are notable exceptions to this trend, not least in North America, where growth in use has slowed rather than going into reverse. But that does not quite detract from what the figures tell us. The decline they highlight is most pronounced among people in their teens and 20s. Other data suggests that since 2014, the shares of people who use such platforms to “stay in touch with friends, express themselves or meet new people” have declined by more than a quarter.

Some of this, it seems, is driven by the new domination of platforms by high-profile influencers and AI-created “slop”. The bitter, polarised atmosphere of so many online spaces is also relevant. Over the summer, the New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka held out the prospect of what he called Posting Zero: “a point at which normal people – the unprofessionalized, uncommodified, unrefined masses – stop sharing things on social media as they tire of the noise, the friction, and the exposure.” This, perhaps, is the overlooked context for Australia’s ban on social media for people under 16: rather than being some authoritarian bolt from the blue, it looks like it may have arrived at a point when people were already changing their habits – and so, rather like modern smoking bans, it may simply end up accelerating a trend that was quietly kicking in anyway.

Or look at internet dating, the ultimate example of an attempt to replace the magical and often random nature of human interactions with cold digital logic. Thanks to Ofcom, we know that between 2023 and 2024, Tinder lost 594,000 UK users, while Hinge dropped by 131,000, and Bumble by 368,000. The value of shares in Match Group, the company that owns Tinder and Hinge, has dropped by nearly 80% since the highs they reached during the pandemic. Over the same period, Bumble stock is reckoned to have dropped by 92%. In a letter to its shareholders, Match acknowledged that younger people were seeking “a lower-pressure, more authentic way to find connections”. [Continue reading…]