My interview in "El Mundo," Spain's newspaper of record
A conversation about democracy in the 21st century
A short newsletter this week to share that I’m featured in this weekend’s edition of El Mundo, Spain’s influential newspaper of record.
The feature is part of the paper’s ongoing series on preserving democracy in the 21st century, titled “Luces para la Constitución.”
Here’s an excerpt from the interview, conducted by Washington correspondent Pablo R. Suanzes. The interview was published in Spanish; I’ve translated it using Google Translate.
QUESTION [Pablo R. Suanzes]. You have written that on November 5, the election in the United States was the night that the 20th century ended. Was it just a provocation?
ANSWER [Jason Steinhauer]. I was serious. Many friends in Europe were asking me for predictions and I wanted time to reflect on everything we had seen, not only in 2024, the election campaign and Biden, but in the run-up to 2024, with the COVID-19 pandemic, all the technological changes we are witnessing, the introduction of Elon Musk into politics. All this led me to the conclusion that I expressed in an essay: the 20th century is over.
Q. The essay says it’s not solely because of Trump, it’s not just about politics, but that what marks the change of an era are the interconnected technologies, institutions, and ideologies that shape people's decisions and world events.
A. When you think about the ingredients that make up the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, there are undoubtedly the people in the public sphere who play a leading role in politics, with their ideas, their ideologies, their speeches. But they are not the only ones. Institutions also contribute and have their own cultures, their own missions, their own values. Institutions can have a huge impact on how we operate, what we think is important, where we focus our attention. And there are also technologies. I'm a big believer in the writings of people such as Marshall McLuhan and Lewis Mumford who talk about how the more we use certain technologies, the more we behave like them. They have an enormous influence on how we think, how we operate, how we organize our societies. Not to mention music, culture and art.
Q. What is the most profound change?
A. If we look at the 20th century, with all its particularities and nuances, the dominant institutions, the dominant political figures, the technologies that were dominant had something in common: the belief that cooperation through international organizations could help alleviate global problems, whether it was climate change, famine, or exploring space. It was a recurring theme in rhetoric, even despite territorial disputes or cultural differences. But if we look at where we are now, I would say that November 5, 2024 may have really put the nail in the coffin. There is a massive distrust of these global international institutions and a real belief that the goal of the nation-state is not to collaborate, but only to put one's own interests first. In many ways Trump embodies it better than anyone, pulling the United States out of the WHO, out of the Paris Climate Accords and doubling down on America First. There are people in the U.S. who applaud this, but others believe that these international institutions have played an important role in trying to address global challenges and that we need to continue to defend the role of these institutions in the context of a changing zeitgeist.
Q. What marked the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the long 19th century was not only the violence in the Balkans that somehow ended in the First World War, but also the emergence of the avant-garde, the change in music, the break with figurative art, the new physics...
A. Much of the culture of the 20th century grew out of a reinvention after World War I and the carnage there. And the scars that people brought back from them greatly influenced the way the world developed. Sometimes, as an escape route and as a rebirth to face what people had just experienced. The interesting thing is that all those artists and cultural figures then were human, but the next cultural movements, the next artistic movements that emerge in the 21st century in the new world that we're creating might not be created by humans. They could be the work of artificial intelligence or, at least, humans working in tandem with AI. Now it is no longer necessary to have skill with your hands to make a beautiful painting, it is having a skill with ones and zeros.
Q. You say that the infinite scroll will go down in history as one of the most important inventions of our time.
A. Absolutely, and we don't pay enough attention to how important it has been. One of the main reasons why we are all addicted to our phones is because there is a constant flow, we can stay connected for 24 hours a day, seven days a week and never reach the end of the scroll. That is very different from a book, a magazine or a newspaper, which by the way does not spy on you or monitor you. Obviously that has huge consequences for people's time and attention. It has enormous consequences for their cognitive abilities and has enormous implications for politics…
To read the entire interview, please visit the El Mundo website and disable ad blockers. Visiting newspaper websites and enabling ads are two ways to support professional journalism at a time when it is critically needed.
My deep gratitude to El Mundo for featuring me in their pages. This marks several times in the past few years that I’ve been fortunate to be featured in Spain’s newspapers and think tanks:
El Mundo first referenced my work in this article about the U.S. Presidential election from December 2024;
Spain’s other newspaper of record, El País, quoted me in this 2022 article about the social network BeReal;
El País interviewed me twice in 2021, first about the rise of the social media app Clubhouse, and, later, about the fall of Clubhouse;
I was also interviewed for a podcast by Club Tocqueville in 2023, a civil society organization based in Catalonia.
I’ve actually never been to Spain, despite being featured in the Spanish media. Perhaps I’ll have the opportunity in the years ahead. There is a long and vibrant tradition of intellectual debate in the country, and I’m grateful to be included in it.
Please visit the El Mundo website to read the interview, and feel free to leave a comment on their webpage or mine with your thoughts, reactions and reflections.
More to come in the weeks ahead,
-JS