Drew Magary, writing in his Funbag column for Defector, has some smart insight into how things are and why.

…growing up in the analog age meant that I was forced to interact directly with people to get what I wanted. If I wanted a pizza, I had to call the restaurant and talk to a teenage idiot manning the phone. If I wanted to hook up with a girl, I had to ask her out on a date (terrifying). If I wanted to bully someone, I had to physically pick them up and hang them on a door hook by their underwear. Not all of these interactions went smoothly, but that’s how you learn to be a social animal. You fuck up a face-to-face exchange, you learn from it, and then you handle the next exchange better. You don’t learn all of this in a straight, upward trajectory. This is because people are messy, so you have to learn how to deal with each person in your life a certain way. No one starts off a master schmoozer. That takes experience.

So what happens when tens of millions of people grow up with that experience reduced to a bare minimum? Well, you get a world where people don’t know how the fuck to talk to one another. Everyone you deal with is just a faceless Seamless driver, or a chatbot, or some stranger on social media whom you’ll never have to meet. You learn nothing from any of these interactions, which makes you a less capable socializer. This is no longer a generational issue. I now use food delivery apps, I’ve put randos on blast on social media, and I’d rather cut my arm off than take a voice call. If I don’t have to deal with another person, I won’t. And you know why? Because dealing with people is fucking hard. So millions of Americans, young and old, have skipped out on doing that work. It shows up in our electoral choices.

There’s no going back from this.