Digital Media is the Reason…for All of This.
It’s ruined politics, romance, work, and mental health...and our ability to fix any of it.
Digital media - the raging circus of videos, photos, and text we dive into for hours a day - is the reason that present-day life feels so off, so strangely bad, and so distinctly worse than the past.
The reason is not any of the competing theories commentators have suggested on the news or podcasts. The reason is not political partisanship. Sixty years ago, we had rampant political assassinations, including a President whose head exploded all over the street in Dallas. A hundred years before that, we had a Civil War that killed more Americans than every other American war combined.
The reason is not inflation. Inflation has been multiple times what it is today in every decade of the last century, including the 50s when many people believe we peaked. Many of today’s poorest Americans have TVs, refrigerators, and smartphones with more computing power than what put a man on the moon.
It’s not the immigrants. It’s not the woke mind virus. It’s not even Donald Trump. None of these things would pack a tenth of the societal outrage they inflame without the dutiful help of moving pixels and profit-trained algorithms.
Accepting that digital media is the reason for our woes is difficult. Almost all of us consume it with reckless abandon. No one wants to feel complicit in humanity’s worst implementation since the invention of gunpowder.
Digital media also delivers a Mount Everest of positive byproducts. Our access to all of human knowledge is intergalactic. Communicating clearly and often with loved ones across the world is a sci-fi movie plot. And a single mother’s ability to run a business from her kitchen table has improved life on a cosmic scale.
But responsible societies do two critical things well: They soberly weigh the pros and cons of the biggest forces affecting their lives, and they collectively counteract those that cause more harm than good.
The fact that we have not majorly reformed - or even mildly regulated - digital media at this point in the 21st century is the clearest imaginable sign that the United States has ceased to be a responsible society.
When taken together, the laundry list of damage digital media does to each of us and everyone around us is an existential alarm for anyone with enough willpower to stop scrolling and pay attention.
Digital media is the reason our children are depressed. Video content is addictive because we evolved to lock attention onto moving things, especially living things that could pose a threat. Our ancestors who survived were obsessed with scoping the tall grass for tigers, the horizon for killer tribes, and over their own shoulders for jealous alpha males. The ones who weren’t were eaten or murdered.
Digital videos grab attention with sharp vibrance and rapid shifting, which alight threat-obsessed brain chemistry in young users. Repetition during long bouts of scrolling, combined with few alternate forms of joy, hardens these anxious neuropathways into permanence.
Our kids’ brains feel surges of up-feeling, connective neurotransmitters - serotonin and oxytocin - during and after focused encounters with humans from whom they feel love. These convince their young brains there is no need to obsess over threats.
Alternatively, solitary digital media consumption surges the fleeting comfort of dopamine and down-feeling neurotransmitters, like cortisol, which in large doses make kids feel exhausted, irritable, anti-social, and depressed.
Digital media is the reason you no longer talk to your uncle. Adults trapped in digital addiction tend to prefer content that comments on the society around them. But platform algorithms circulate the most “popular” content, typically warnings to fear and despise “bad” people - modern versions of the killer tribes and jealous alphas from our past.
Algorithms serve your anxiety-saddled uncle stories about “bad” people who happen to think and act just like you. He is still your blood, but when a strained human subconscious is involved, “survival” always trumps kinship.
Digital media is the reason you hate your job. Tech is the only industry in history that allowed “first movers” - Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta - to achieve “escape velocity,” meaning the compounding rate at which they collect “data” is so high, no upstart company, regardless of talent or funding, will ever be able to catch up and compete. This is why you’ve never thought you should start a search company. The industry’s digital nature makes it ripe for massive abuse.
With veritable monopoly power - and addictive products - these companies became the richest in history. Their explosive profits pressured all other companies, organizations, and even universities to take whatever profit-generation model they had and inject it with steroids.
This resulted in immediate, immense pressure on middle managers everywhere to saddle their subordinates with unrealistic productivity metrics, then harass, threaten, or terminate them when they don’t achieve the impossible.
Digital media is the reason politics is stupid and infuriating. Upon being elected to office, you have two choices. You can devote yourself to public service, attending to your constituents' needs, and trying to improve society. Or, you can convert your political prominence into digital prominence, which can blast you into a stratosphere of fame, fortune, and fawning admiration from millions addicted to your content.
Choosing the latter only requires pumping out the type of content that algorithms circulate fastest and furthest - punchy, vibrant videos, memes, and tweets attacking “immoral” enemies. To corner the market, you can champion major legislation that does little except harass, attack, and demoralize those enemies.
If you do this effectively, the world’s most powerful people either will beg you to stop or beg to partner with you on your next project. Companies and organizations will pay you six figures to speak at their conferences and advertise on your webpage. Wherever you go, admirers will treat you like Elvis, Brad Pitt, and Jesus Christ all rolled into the same person.
Digital media is the reason romance is dead. When your grandfather met your grandmother at a sock-hop, he swore she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. When your buddy met his girlfriend last year, she didn’t even break his top thousand.
Dating apps deliver a conveyor belt of endless romantic options. For many, this has made “settling down” a less appealing option than ever. Digital media also delivers a daily tsunami of images of unattainable beauty, and people enjoying their lives more than any human could. Our thinking brain knows these are doctored with lighting, positioning, makeup, and filters. But our subconscious grows irate that so few people “out there” seem worth the effort.
Of course, looks are not the sole component in romance. Chemistry and personality still bring and hold couples together. But physical attraction is a powerful motivator for emotional investment, especially early in a relationship, and especially for men.
If there is an early argument or miscommunication, his brain is more likely to pause emotion investment, retreat to the bacchanalia of beauty in his phone, and dream about a romantic utopia that he’ll never have. His roiling screen addiction - often fed by video games, online gambling, or porn, and often all three - is quietly making his brain chemistry more anxious, irritable, and disinterested in connecting emotionally with anyone.
…In the off-chance you’re still convinced this rap sheet of damage does not outweigh social media’s massive benefits, I’ll stress how woefully incomplete the list is so far.
Fake reports about child abductors caused a crowd in Ataclan, Mexico, to beat two construction workers almost to death and set them on fire.
Similar fake reports about kidnappings in India triggered a mob to beat up a family of five, including children, shatter windows, and attack police.
Anti-Rohingya content, which Facebook spread to smartphones all over Myanmar, caused a full-scale genocide in 2016.
Digital media is the reason we are trapped in a loneliness epidemic. In 2013, Americans spent 6.5 hours a week with others face-to-face. By 2019, it was 4 hours, and now it’s less than three. What they are all doing instead is not pickleball.
Digital media is the reason Donald Trump is President. When humans experience increased anxiety, which social media has been doing for most of America since 2011, many search for scapegoats to blame (“enemies” to combat), and for a leader who will punish them. (A branch of psychology called Moral Foundations Theory suggests - and all available evidence confirms - the impulse toward anger at an “enemy” is more common, powerful, and contagious among self-described conservatives.) Whether it’s immigrants, liberals, the Gays, or the woke, Donald Trump is the “leader” of your dreams.
Digital media is the reason more than a million Americans died of COVID-19. We (humanity) discovered the virus in December 2019, locked down Wuhan in January, declared a global pandemic in March, and by April, we were sheltering in place. By May, it is working. Scientists celebrated that we had “flattened the curve.”
But then, the most "digital media President in history insisted on a phased reopening. New public gatherings became super-spreader events that exploded new cases.
In the next few months, Trump labeled COVID-19 the “ChinaVirus,” (enemy #1), attacked the CDC for testing too much (enemy #2), blamed “The Dems” for echoing CDC restraint around opening schools too early (enemy #3), blamed “Fake News” for reporting high numbers of cases (enemy #4), and mocked mask-wearers for being “too politically correct” (enemy #5).
Government errors around mask-wearing and microwaving groceries were amended by new data, but fake news raced around the world before fact-checking could put its shoes on.
Millions formed tribal identities around flouting public health recommendations. A 2021 UCLA study concluded that at least 400,000 lives could have been saved had President Trump not politicized the pandemic. The current number is now, without a doubt, far greater.
Digital media is the reason we can’t fix any societal problems. One of the most successful public campaigns of all time was the LGBTQ movement starting as a whimper in the 90s and winning marriage equality in 2015. Desperate to uncover the secret, researchers discovered the most powerful driver was the TV sitcom, Will & Grace, which portrayed gay people as normal humans worthy of empathy, and charismatic, moral agents who softened hardened bigots.
The show was able to flip national sentiment not because of great writing, acting, or show running, but because it aired in the 2000s, before Facebook and Twitter went public and before Instagram, SnapChat, Tumblr, 8Chan, Telegram, or TikTok existed.
Today, platforms encourage armies of “haters” - thousands of lonely, anxious opportunists - to flood the internet with attacks against anything they can couch as “enemy propaganda” for their millions of lonely, anxious followers.
The desperate truth is: if we ever discover we’re approaching another pandemic, a nuclear attack, an asteroid screaming toward Earth, or some other emergency requiring mass cooperation to survive, digital media will unleash a tsunami of slander against the alarm ringers and claim to reveal the “true ill intentions” of those trying to save us. With AI, many of these messages will be automated, no longer requiring real humans to create them. But real humans will consume them, feel triggered by them, and react with furious resistance.
The next Democratic administration, no matter how popular, talented, or benevolent, will fail to repair any part of our broken society without first ending digital media’s iron grip on our psyches.
There are many ways to do this:
-A government commission can examine algorithms monthly, survey damage, and mandate changes that decrease radicalization in adults and depression in children.
-An administration can turn social media - our de facto “public square” - into a utility, where predictable profits are locked in, in exchange for strict regulation that limits societal damage.
-Congress can eliminate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which would allow anyone harmed by damaging content to sue Big Tech firms for platforming it and spreading it.
This is a warning for the Democratic Party. Unless any of its presidential hopefuls first address the phenomenon of digital media, all their promises to fight wealth inequality, inflation, the cost of housing, failing schools, racism, political corruption, or climate change will face overwhelming, and likely successful, online resistance before they can even begin. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s been able to stop scrolling long enough to notice.
I am against AI and always will be. Elders don't even hear their children's voices anymore or receive visits, except, maybe, a once a year birthday or Christmas visit. Usually, you get a text or voicemail! Let's get back to human interaction!! NO on AI.
This is a powerful analysis. This is a powerful statement of the problem. But my question for the author is as follows:
Kindly remind me. Do you provide a solution? Not that you have to. Not that it’s your responsibility. But a good diagnosis usually comes with at least a clue for the solution. Identifying a problem goes a long way towards solving it even if not all the way. How we name things matters especially when we are naming diseases and pandemics and crises.
A powerful new insight has emerged in neurophysics called active inference theory. I won’t go into detail but part of the theory is the fact that we have a new model of life. The model is pretty simple.
Another part of the theory is that a basic function of life is that it is self correcting, self balancing and self healing. This doesn’t mean that we wait around for automatic processes to solve all of our problems but it means that we have large systems that we can work with and utilize in facing these kinds of major challenges.
Another part of the theory which also makes good sense is that what living systems do in these situations and what we can do consciously is called belief updating in the model. This means that we can change our understanding of the world.
You have provided some good food for thought for belief updating. We can revise our estimation of digital technology. Another part of belief updating in the model has more internal ramifications. We can change our understand of ourselves and our own ability to respond and adapt.
This new framework is neurological and so potentially it has a lot to say about the adaptive resources which we all possess. I talk about this at length in my blog here on substack. My position is that we can revise our understanding of who we are to include our perceptual systems.
We identify ourselves in one perceptual system which we call reason and common sense but there is a second major perceptual system that we can rely on. This second major perceptual system is a kind of animal wisdom or somatic intelligence that resides in the deep field of the body. The first is called exteroception and the second is called proprioception, which means self-awareness.
I know that seems kind of abstract and we tend to want to have big and fancy solutions, new institutions and new technologies and new policies for our government. But sometimes what we really need is just a gentle inner shift, a change from within, a subtle shift in orientation—the cumulative effects of which over time and collectively add up to the big changes that we know we need.
Thank you for your sharp and incisive argument. Identifying the problem is half the battle. We have to start somewhere and there is a tremendous amount of resources that we can use to respond adaptively and positively and with hope to this crisis.
I think one important place that it needs to happen is within each one of us. While in the past that has always been a kind of a vague seeming platitude and in the end felt like an excuse, that has changed. The same advances that have revolutionized our world externally or technologically are an indication of the fact that we possess radical new powers of understanding for change internally as well.
It is not unrealistic to imagine that we possess the insight we need in the fields of neuroscience, anatomy, medicine and somatics in order to make that old adage of revolution from within workable, practical, and even hopeful.
It is this new physics of life that I talk about but I am certainly not the only one. I do however offer the unique vantage point of touch healer, embodiment teacher and somatic theorist.