You’ll appreciate the structure: a man and his dog, crossing America in a truck named Rocinante, trying to understand a country he fears has changed beyond recognition. Morgan follows Steinbeck’s route sixty years later and finds that the loneliness Steinbeck sensed has metastasized into something Steinbeck couldn’t have imagined — a nation staring at screens.
You’ve already accepted Haidt’s premise — that smartphones and social media have rewired childhood in ways that are making boys and girls sick, isolated, and ill-equipped for adult life. Now read the field report from someone who helped build those tools.
Morgan spent decades in Silicon Valley developing systems that became the infrastructure of the attention economy. He wasn’t an innocent bystander to Haidt’s story — he was one of the engineers. Travels With Paco is his reckoning with that, told not through data and charts but through encounters with real Americans. Where Haidt asks what is happening to our kids?, Morgan asks what did we build, and can we make it right?
You’ll recognize the commitment to back roads and real conversations. Morgan stops at small-town diners, truck stops, and hardware stores, talking to the Americans who don’t show up on cable news.
You’ll find Morgan’s road trip to be a field report on everything Putnam measured from his desk. The decline of social capital, the collapse of civic institutions, the retreat into private life — Morgan sees it all from behind the windshield and in face-to-face encounters that put human stories to Putnam’s statistics.
You’ll recognize the peculiar discomfort of being an insider who can’t stop watching the machine from the inside. Wiener spent her twenties embedded in San Francisco’s tech culture, seduced by its perks and unnerved by its ethics — and wrote about it with the wry detachment of an anthropologist studying her own tribe.
Morgan’s view is from the other end of the same story: thirty years in, not three. Where Wiener asked why did I stay so long?, Morgan asks what did I leave behind — in myself, and in the country? Both books grapple with complicity. Both are written with literary sensibility rather than the breezy confidence of a business book. And both arrive at the same unsettling conclusion: that Silicon Valley’s greatest product wasn’t software. It was a culture of distraction, packaged as connection.
You’ll connect with Morgan’s argument that hands-on skills — hunting, building, fixing — still matter as pathways to character and community, and that we’ve lost something important by replacing them with screen time.
This one’s uncanny. The author’s name is Arthur Morgan — the same as RDR2’s protagonist. Both Arthur Morgans begin as enforcers in extractive systems (one a loan shark operation, the other Silicon Valley’s attention economy). Both undergo moral awakenings. Both search for redemption in a Gilded Age. The book explicitly explores these parallels, including a detailed comparison of how both Arthurs confront income inequality, exploitation, and the question of what it means to be a good man in a broken system.
The spirit of the open road is here, but Morgan’s journey is less about freedom and more about responsibility — what you owe to the country you’re driving through, not just what it owes you.
