The Tea App, AI Panic, & The Death of Attention Spans

A once again long-overdue Substack exclusive.

It’s a Saturday afternoon here in Western Pennsylvania, and I haven’t written something solely for this platform in a long time. As such, I figured it’d be a good time to sit down and put some thoughts to virtual paper about what’s been kicking around in this squirrel brain.

Tea Time

For those of you not terminally online (that’s what you subscribe to this newsletter for, after all), Tea is an app that allows women to post general thoughts on men that they’ve dated to an online forum that, at least ostensibly, is only inhabited by other women. Formed in 2023 by former Salesforce director Sean Cook from the Bay Area (in response to his mother’s harrowing experiences with online dating), the app recently saw a massive surge in popularity, becoming one of the top apps on Apple’s App Store in recent weeks.

And then the dam broke. Yesterday, the app experienced a major data breach, affecting people who registered before February 2024 (so the users behind the recent wave of popularity likely weren’t affected). The following amounts of user data were essentially flung out to open Internet forums like 4chan (and the sort of people who hang out on 4chan are really the type you can expect to be nuanced and reasonable in these sorts of situations).

• 3,000 selfies and photo IDs from Tea’s user verification processes (including driver’s licenses)

• 59,000 images from public posts, comments, and direct messages within the app

• Somewhere around 59.3 GB of data was leaked and is now publicly accessible.

As Chris Groshong points out in his latest excellent piece at Forbes:

Tea marketed itself as a safe space where people could share vulnerable experiences without fear of retaliation. That trust was supposed to be a feature, not a liability. But in exposing the identities of people who likely signed up for the app under the promise of anonymity, the breach reversed the app’s core mission. Trust was broken, and it was trust the platform had sold as its core value.

Leave aside all the tech questions about vibe-coding, Web2, and online privacy for a secondIt’s as good a time as any to remind you that anonymous online interaction really degrades discourse. Not in the way that some folks believe all online interaction is corrosive (and don’t worry, I’ve got lots of thoughts on that too), but in the sense that they erode the last remaining undeniably human variable that social media communication still has.

Think about it this way: the humanity of a conversation degrades by how many variables you take away from the interaction.

• Talking, in person, to another person? Yep, that’s real connection.

• Talking on the phone to another person? We’ve subtracted the face-to-face but we’re still hearing each other and picking up on tone and other subtle sub-communicatory variables.

• Texting another person? We’ve further subtracted the hearing, but at least we know it’s a real person on the other side of the text conversation - one with values, aspirations, and opinions that we normally know at least a little bit about.

• Messaging an anonymous person online? You have to ask, at some point, how much give-and-take is actually happening here.

In fact, there’s a very real way in which nothing about the Tea app is/was built on trust. I have many more thoughts about this but they’ll probably be long enough for an actual article somewhere down the line. Moving on to other things.

Who are We Letting Teach Us About AI?

I couldn’t help but notice this recent bit from an advertisment for a very prominent Christian magazine, of which I generally have a very high opinion.

When it comes to technology, I’m admittedly a late adopter. I carried a flip phone for years while fellow reporters were dialing sources on iPhones. To this day I’ve never asked a single question of ChatGPT. My interactions with artificial intelligence have mostly been limited to Siri and the “AI Overview” feature of Google, which now pops up unsolicited when I search the web.

It’s not that I dislike tech. But the pessimistic side of me reasons thusly: If I’ve gotten along fine without the latest gadgetry until now, why bother? I’d just be wasting my time. (emphasis mine)

Respectfully, this seems off to me. You wouldn’t make that argument with a host of other civilizational advances (the Internet, the iPhone, to say nothing of breakthroughs in medical science). I think that ‘church world’ has not always done a great job of seeing technological progress as a natural outflow of God’s calls to dominion and stewardship of the natural world - and the current reticence to engage on AI is often most explainable through that lens.

As a GenZer, a pro-tech Christian, and a fairly future-oriented one, I’ve maintained that there’s an issue with how many Christians approach the rise and prominance of artificial intelligence.

1. People who don’t use AI at all will progress at a normal level.

2. People who over-rely on AI, overly outsourcing the things that make their insights valuable, will end up hitting long-term pitfalls.

People who are serious about leveraging its productivity to *augment* their insights/workflows will progress exponentially.

What I see, especially in the Christian/conservative space, is a lot of concern about people jumping from group 1 to group 2. What I see significantly less of is encouraging people, especially young Christians, to seriously consider moving from group 1 into group 3. And I wonder why that is.

A Few Shorter Things (and then I’m done, I swear)

1. Marc Andreesen on why we either want uber-short or uber-long Internet content: “Kids want to watch either two-minute videos or thee-hour Rogan episodes.” Just starting thinking about potential reasons for why this is - if someone has thoughts, don’t hesitate to email, I’d love to kick this back and forth more. Link here.

2. Economist Kyla Scanlon on why the ease of digital life actually hurts GenZ: “There’s value in things being a little bit difficult. There’s a bunch of friction in the physical world and perhaps not enough in the digital world.” Link here.

3. My latest (with Libby Krieger) on Christian cultural influence. “As Christians, our duty is the opposite of apathy. We’re called to care. Rejecting our generation’s default indifference is just the beginning. “Christ is King” isn’t a license to coast — it’s the foundation for action.” Link here.

There’s about a million other things I could talk about but I’ll try and actually get these on a more regular schedule sometime soon. As always, thanks for reading. And may you and yours have a more peaceful summer than the programmers of the Tea app are having. -Isaac