ChatGPT was the most downloaded app in 2025. People would rather wait in line for self checkout than interact with a human with no waiting.

I was rewatching this TED Talk from 13 years ago–the one that made the whole world decide that being an introvert meant you were smart, and being an extravert meant you were annoying and dumb. I wanted to see if she seemed sincere, or if I got the feeling she was working for the tech overlords. I do believe she was sincere.

But it doesn’t change one glaringly obvious fact that nobody talks about, for fear of stumbling upon introverted wrath: 13 years later, everyone identifies as an introvert, we have a very difficult time socializing, we are lonelier than ever, and in spite of how much she associated introversion with reading in her talk, we generally suck at reading now. We are not smarter for having gone inward. We are lonely and stupid. And since we didn’t exchange talking for reading, but instead exchanged it for scrolling, our ability to communicate is in the fucking toilet.

Which is what the tech industry needed to bring about tech fascism.

It may be time to reacquaint ourselves with why we valued extraversion in the first place. This woman makes the case, if not explicitly , that we valued it arbitrarily–just because we feel confidence for confident people–presumably because we’re too dumb to do anything else and have been socialized to blah blah blah…

But if we were socialized to be outgoing back in the day, maybe there was, I don’t know, a fucking reason for it?

Could it be that socializing is something you have to practice, and that being able to interact with a wide variety of people is good for communication and democracy? Is it possible that your genius plans to better the world mean precisely nothing if you can’t win other people to your side? Is it possible that if you’re more social ..you are less lonely because you have more people you can relate to on different fronts?

The woman in the TED talk associates extraversion with rowdiness–assuming, I guess, that all human beings who talk a lot are perpetual teenagers who party nonstop at any age. She seems to think her experience doing a stupid cheer at summer camp is the whole of an extraverted experience.

She doesn’t tell a story about, say, Barack Obama, a Leo and an extravert (even though he knows how to read!) organizing communities in Chicago as an example of what extraverts do. She used an example of teenagers spelling a word wrong as a group.

But whether you are introverted or extraverted, if human interaction is too much for you, or taken as a sign of an inferior intellect, democracy does not stand a chance.

No one is going to prevent you from staying home and reading a book on 2025, except your own lack of attention span, courtesy of the tech industry. But they are going to tell you that you’re too loud, too “main character”, too much, too cringe. And they’ll tell you that while the world falls down around them.

The best thing you can do for democracy in 2025 is stop repeating to yourself over and over that “socializing is draining.” Yes, it is. All things which require effort are draining (and despite what introverts are told, socializing is not like cocaine for extraverts–we are also ready for bed at the end of a party. Things that take energy take energy, no matter who you are). And instead say to yourself, “socializing is worth it.”

Because however fabulous you find the inside of your own rotten brain, it is rotten if you are not ever bouncing what’s inside of it off of other people. What you know is comically incomplete if you do not believe other people have anything to offer you in a social situation.

Whatever your reason for avoiding people, avoiding people is the same as forsaking them. But you don’t have to jump in to socializing right away, introverts. Start with doing the thing you say you truly long to do: read a fucking book. With your fucking eyes. Remember what it means to get invested in someone else’s story, and perform the draining task of paying attention. Prove you can do it.

Then get out there and tell the world what you read. Make a friend. Start a club. Save democracy.

Listen to The SmutMag Podcast today on SmutMag Radio for more on this topic, at 12pm, 3pm, and 6pm PST.

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