Will marriage survive the internet?
It’s a question no one was asking in the 1990s, even as the World Wide Web became part of our everyday lives. Yet here we are more than halfway through the 2020s, and it’s fair to say the digitization of our social lives has drastically unsettled the relations between the sexes. As scholar Patrick T. Brown recently wrote, “At this point, anyone who is arguing that phones didn’t change societal scripts in a meaningful way has the burden of proof.”
Yes, the battle of the sexes is as old as civilization itself. But digital technology has introduced a new and disorienting dynamic. It turns humans into avatars. And avatars don’t fall in love or find God or have children. They exist in your phone, as pixels to be rewarded with likes or screamed at with comments, depending on the situation.
Take, for example, the horrible case of Lindsay Clancy. Though it’s recently become an object of national fixation, I first read about Clancy in 2024, when The New Yorker published a detailed account of events leading up to Clancy’s killing of her three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan. They were five, three, and eight months old. A postpartum mother myself, I don’t think I finished reading the story. It was too devastating.
After five weeks of testimony, a jury of nine women and three men is deliberating whether Lindsay Clancy is guilty of three counts of first-degree murder or shouldn’t be held criminally responsible because she was not in her right mind when she killed her children. Meanwhile, in a dark twist, Clancy has become a TikTok sensation.
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