Damon Beres is a journalist who has been covering digital technology for over a decade, with a focus on how it affects people and the planet. He is currently a Senior Editor at The Atlantic, where he leads tech coverage and co-launched the AI Watchdog project in 2025. He is also writing a book called Easy Mode that digs into the interplay between digital technology and the human mind.
I’m really excited to share this interview because Damon is at a different stage of parenting than my other guests. He has a 4-year-old son, which means he’s not yet wrestling with phones, social media, and AI chatbots in the same way that parents of older kids are. Instead, his focus right now is on something more foundational: building muscles and love for creativity, curiosity, dialogue, and critical thinking before screens enter the picture.
We met online during the pandemic, and I’ve always appreciated his voice and perspective. Damon has increasingly been writing about how frictionless technologies are affecting our ability to think and engage with the world and each other, and as you’ll hear in this conversation, the stakes feel higher than ever.
A few things that were referenced in our interview: Damon’s articles The Age of Anti-Social Media, and @Grok, Did Venezuela Deserve It?, and the LinkedIn post that I quoted.
💡“Aha” moments
Chatbots aren’t designed to help you learn or find information — they’re designed to generate mediocre guesses that sound convincing. I can’t stop thinking about the implications here for kids who are learning how to do research, and find / analyze information. As my own kids do their first research projects, I watch them use Google, and they do not scroll past the AI overview unless I prompt them to and actively guide them through a discovery process. Without active guidance, these products are training them to accept whatever the algorithm serves them first.
The story of the internet has been about removing friction, and maximizing efficiency and convenience. We are at peak “efficiency brain” where as Damon says… “it is really easy now just to be in an endless conversation with yourself and your own mind.”
Generative AI didn’t come from nowhere… it is the latest chapter in the internet’s “convenience is king” ethos. It follows algorithmic social media, which in Damon’s words is essentially an “… automated process of discerning user taste and serving them content accordingly.”
Face-to-face conversations have friction (interruptions, disagreement, unexpected questions, nonverbal cues) and that friction is essential for childhood development. Digital technology is eliminating that friction at an increasing scale.
We’re living through a “mask off moment” where business and political elites have quietly accepted that CSAM, deepfake porn, and other horrors are just “the price of doing business.”
Platforms that once had some content moderation, some sense of a line and/or consequences, are abandoning even their minimal guardrails.
✨Highlights
“There’s something about how things feel now that seems like it’s kind of the worst it’s ever been in a lot of ways. And I do feel like my feelings and opinions about all this are shifting a little bit. And I’m still resolving a lot of that.” - Damon Beres
“This has been kind of a light bulb moment for me. Not in the sense that this kind of AI generated sex abuse material or AI generated harmful stuff is new [...] I’ve known all this stuff and I know how children—how all people, including children—can be victimized by this technology and by bad people who want to do bad things. There is something about the massive social contagion effect of this technology existing on X that has been really disturbing and new-feeling to me. And suddenly I’ve had this feeling of: oh, things can change quite rapidly [...] These massive platforms that at least nominally used to have content moderation and seemed like they used to care about the safety of their users, in the most extreme sense anyway… just may not anymore. And this has given me the feeling of, wow, maybe I should scrub everything about my child that’s ever existed online, private or not, because it is so easy to do the most heinous things with media now, with AI out there.” - Damon Beres
[regarding a LinkedIn post that really resonated with me]
“... [the author] says, ‘this isn’t a tech issue. It’s not even a regulatory issue. It’s a large portion of our ruling political and financial classes quietly accepting the necessity of CSAM, encouraging suicide and self harm, deep, deep fake porn, and a laundry list of other abhorrent things as the price of doing business.’ And even as I read it now, my hair is standing on end because I think for me, that’s exactly it… I didn’t have words for it. And then I read this and I was like, this is why it feels different. It’s this thing.” - Emily Tavoulareas
“... it’s a mask off moment. And I think that this person is right to articulate it in that way. Perhaps it’s been true for a long time, but there was always this kind of veil of respectability […] there’s just this kind of feeling, I think, especially in this post-generative AI moment of kind of anything goes and the platforms really can’t control the technology fully. And so, a lot is being shrugged off right now, and it feels like kind of a dangerous moment for that reason. It’s different.” - Damon Beres
“I think to many people, it feels exactly the way you’re describing… it is this open sewer. It’s one that we no longer have an option about. It’s being placed in our homes, in our devices, in our kids classrooms… there’s no opt out. And whether you’re interacting with Grok or not is almost irrelevant. The sewer is porous. That whole ecosystem is so porous that if that public sewer is full enough, it’s going to spill into everything else.” - Emily Tavoulareas
“I do think that it’s not necessarily as simple as this product is just evil, right? Because sure, we wouldn’t say Photoshop is evil. I do think, however, what is clearly the case here is that there is an issue of scale that is just... profoundly different now. It is so easy to make so much of this material at such a high quality that I don’t really buy that this is just a pen thing… I do think that there is something very new here.” - Damon Beres
“I think that the reduction of friction and the results of that, oftentimes problematic results, is kind of the story of the internet. [...] my sort of top-lined view on this is that the internet, speaking in very general terms, has been a pretty long story of making certain functions and certain behaviors easier and easier and easier. And I really think that there is sort of a lineage here. You look at generative AI, it didn’t come from nothing. It is situated within a context where we have algorithmic social media, which is an AI-driven technology of a different sort, but is fundamentally this sort of automated process of discerning user taste and serving them content accordingly.
Algorithmic media emerged from earlier forms of social media where people connected to each other and built up these stores of data in a way that felt much more convenient than keeping an address book and business cards and calling people on the phone and sending emails and stuff. early social media emerged from an iteration of the internet where you had, you know, file sharing, Napster, LimeWire, BitTorrent, all that stuff, where there is this idea that, like, everything could be placed on the internet for free access and that the sort of convenience is king ethos like really sank in in those early years, right? So when it comes to friction, I think that the major thing is that all of these technologies have made it very easy to act without thinking critically.” - Damon Beres
“When things become very easy, people want to take that convenience. And I think that this has profound effects on our ability to think, but also our ability to relate to one another and to understand other people. Because the phase that we’re in right now, with generative AI and chatbots in particular, is that it is really easy now just to be in an endless conversation with yourself and your own mind. There is no friction there anymore because you will type to a machine that parrots human-like language to you in a very compelling way and affirms your ideas and your thoughts. There have been so many cases reported in the media about “AI psychosis” (people getting really sick and sometimes ending their own lives following interactions with these bots) and that is sort of the ultimate friction reduction where there is no longer even a barrier between your mind and your mouth… you’re kind of in this constant cycle with yourself and that’s very worrisome, I think.” - Damon Beres
“... one of the elements of my book will be, and one of the elements in the Atlantic article I wrote was about children growing up in this environment and in this paradigm. And something as simple as having a face-to-face vocal conversation with a person involves a lot of friction in a certain way. Someone can disagree with you, someone interrupts or asks an unexpected question, someone has a facial unspoken cue that kind of stops you that you respond to. Experts that I spoke to for that Atlantic article were very clear that that kind of interaction is key for early childhood development. And I would argue that it’s probably key for anyone at any point to have interactions like that, but especially for a developing mind. That is how a person learns to exist in the world and learns how to socialize and learns how to be.” - Damon Beres
“… my major interest in exploring this topic in a bigger way in the book, is sort of that we have allowed society to be steered to a great extent by digital technology over the past, I would kind of put it at like past 20 years or so [...] I think that what I’m concerned about is that our society slips into just this kind of passive state of allowing all of this to control and steer our experiences, which is itself maybe what speaks to a lack of friction in some way. Like, I think like a lot of this feels really good to people… it feels soothing to use these products in many ways.” - Damon Beres
“And I think that people need to, I don’t want to say people should resist it because I think that there are applications of the technology that I think are very good… but I do think that people must be thoughtful and aware, and we have to be able to communicate in real terms with one another on a like societal basis to help set the terms (legally or otherwise) of engagement with this technology and what is permissible and what’s not… just because we have seen the very bad things that happen when we don’t do that. And I think that this is a moment where we can both reflect on the recent past and establish some kind of architecture for a future that looks a little different.” - Damon Beres
“... the article that I was working on this past weekend about Venezuela was about how chatbots handled the breaking news situation and how they handled delivering information about that event… and they were really bad. And they were bad for multiple different reasons which I don’t need to get into, but the upshot is that these are not really tools that are designed for knowledge discovery or to make you smarter. They are not necessarily tools that are designed to reflect reality. What a large language model is designed to do is to deliver human-like language according to training data and according to the way that the model has been set up and programmed.” - Damon Beres
“... what I think will happen, absent an intervention, is that a lot of people are going to exist in a kind of mediocre state of accepting questionable material that has been served to them by chatbots. They will be less media literate. They will be less able to socialize with other people. They will be less capable of critical thinking. I think that there is every reason to expect that those things will be true as the technology becomes more widespread and as it becomes not just more widespread, but kind of the only option.” - Damon Beres
“I think that the lesson from the past 20 years has just been that people get lulled into patterns by these tools that, after all, are acting on their minds. You know, this is not a tool that is tactile or has something to do with your literal embodied experience of the world. It’s the material that is entering your brain and influencing your thoughts. And again, you know… sometimes in very good ways. You find a great new perspective on social media. If someone says something really smart, you find community… so many good things. I’m not so… whatever… that I would say otherwise, but I do think in an aggregate sense, you see these problems. And I think the lesson is that we have to take a very active and critical role in thinking for ourselves and establishing what is acceptable.” - Damon Beres
