Where is parenting in all this? It was not only the children who were influenced by the Internet; the parents also did. Parents became more defensive about letting kids have independence, stop allowing them to go play outside. Why? The internet made bad news traveled faster and social media made it worse. Parents saw monsters everywhere and no longer allowed the children to go out by themselves. They had to be protected from all the “bad” out there. To protect them, they kept them inside and gave them a phone or video games to entertain themselves. As a result, children never learned the skills to negotiate conflict, or solve their own problems.
Will this generation of parents understand the need for children to learn the skills to navigate the world on their own?
Definitely parenting is a big part. I believe parents—and the adult community in general—need to take a more serious look at our role in this problem if we truly want to help solve it. In my small community, we’ve been surprisingly successful at getting teenagers off their phones and back to socializing in real life. Yet now, some of the same people who championed that goal are complaining constantly to the HOA about noisy teens at the playgrounds or kids riding their bikes “too fast” down the street. Sometimes it’s easier to just stick kids in front of a screen than to engage with the messy reality of this stage of life. If we want a healthier community, we’ll need to adapt to a new way of being around each other in shared spaces.
Parents share a lot of the blame. Parenting has been on a downward slide since the 1960s. And you can't do it alone. When a parent tries to impose common sense restrictions and foster responsible values while the rest of their teenager's friends seemingly have no restrictions, it makes the responsible parent seem like a crazy outlier. Only working together as a society can this be fixed. When the norm for all kids is no phones after dinner for example, then kids will comply. If they feel they are the only ones, there will be FOMO.
Great piece. Now we need a piece on what can be done. I have a few ideas, off the cuff: The government should stop subsidizing internet. Remember the digital divide? Free laptops for children? etc. Halt. Instead subsidize places and events where people can meet in person. Outdoor city parks with benches. Community centers with rooms to rent for low price for community events and meet ups.
Second idea: Eliminate entirely cell phones from public schools. Even laptops should be eliminated in the early years ( up to grade 7). Waldorf schools have done this for 20 years and its had positive outcomes. Funny enough, there are several big Waldorf schools in Silicon valley and SF where many top tech engineers send their kids.
I agree with everything Yascha says here: social media results in fewer friendships and less romance; Gen Zs have less conscientiousness, less extroversion and more neuroticism; young people using dating apps are less likely to commit, etc. But I'd like to add a couple of observations.
My kids (now in their 20s) barely ever left the house in their teenage years. That was partly because of video games, but it was also because they never developed the skills and confidence in their younger years that would encourage them to go out. I tried to get my kids to go out, but it was pointless because there was no one else out there; other parents didn't allow it.
Each of my kids made a group of four or five friends in their teens who came to our house all the time, but once those friends were gone (university, etc), they didn't have the skills to make new ones. Video games didn't help with leaving the house to find them. I'm quite the introvert, but still, I had dozens of friends who are still friends now.
They lack the confidence to go places. Someone in about 1990 decided that kids couldn't be trusted to go out on their own. I went to London on the bus with my next-door neighbour when I was ten, and I went to the beach with a whole bunch of friends when I was 14. Kids aren't allowed to do that now. Safer to stay home and play video games.
To add to your thoughts on dating, I think dating apps allow you to skip someone who doesn't seem immediately right. We had to stick with a new partner — even if they weren't perfect — because it wasn't obvious when the next one would come along. With a dating app, there is an infinity of candidates, so you can just ditch this one and move on to the next right away. As with social media taking away the opportunities for friendship, they rarely get to practice at real romance. For me personally, all of my girlfriends were friends whom I knew very well before we started dating, so we had less of that leap into the unknown that a dating app requires.
I think the 1970s and 80s were the best time ever to be a teenager, and I feel sorry for Gen Zs who grew up in the 2000s and later — but I don't think it was just the internet and social media to blame. I think parents changed their attitudes to parenting in the 1990s, and Gen Z children had much less freedom to practice at being teenagers.
I remember my son not even being allowed to play touch football at recess lest someone get hurt or worse have their feelings hurt if they didn't get the ball enough. By contrast, in 7th and 8th grade, I regularly played tackle football at recess with a group of kids.
As you point out, this loss of freedom is/was surely problematic and helped set the stage for the social media addiction issues that shortly followed. But I still think social media is the major culprit of the increase in neuroticism and lack of conscientiousness.
I've seen that map before… It's shocking, really, how many privileges children have lost. I wonder whose fault it was.
We used to regularly get the bus and go for miles before we were ten in the 70s. We also used to ride our bikes down to play in a river that was a couple of miles away.
My theory is back then that parents of the 1970s grew up at a time when statistically there were more dangerous things than riding the bus or riding your bike without a helmet. Polio for instance, other diseases, World Wars, fires, work place accidents, etc. Over time as society became safer and safter and death rates from everything else declined, the idea of your children getting killed doing dangerous things or being kidnapped became a more prominent worry.
Someone should do the maths to decide whether it is better to have 7 million neurotic and depressed twenty-somethings or 127 kids getting killed doing dangerous things.
I'll play devil's advocate on the online dating point. Yes it's broken and people are not finding their soul mates as often. But is it broke on purpose? Hypothetically, if everyone on dating apps found a partner and had two kids in the next five years, could society handle that? Could the climate handle that?
Tis possible to find a partner and have a long term relationship without having kids. At least thats what the devil told me;)
But even hooking up is declining. Idk exactly how that relates to "on purpose" or not, or if it does at all. But it would seem to me, seeing as how in the past people have always been horny, that birth control+dating apps should lead to more sex, especially in the younger crowds. Apparently thats not how its been playing out.
Now i wouldnt dismiss the idea that maybe people are less horny, bc honestly they seem to value screen time more than even sex. The screens the better drug, you might say. But also like the article suggests, dating apps are failing in what theyre supposed to do, bc all the people on them are looking for something(sex, relationships, marriage) and not finding it.
So i guess it depends on whos "on purpose" we're talking about..
I think it has to do with how we treat adolescents. You'll find ten young people who want to talk about huge social problems before you find one that wants to talk about love. No wonder they all have anxiety. We treat love like a defect of the species, and that the real mission in life is career and social activism.
Thats exactly right. To fall in love was most peoples great aspiration back when i was young. That is not the case now. Everybody seems more jaded, adults included. Ive even noticed that in my 74 year old parents.
I feel like theres some connection to music in this. I rarely see people being passionate about hearing music now(nobodies yelling "oh thats my jam!" lol). People dont seem to *feel* the music. And ofc music and love, thats pb and j.
Since reading “The Machine Stops”, E.M. Forster’s short story from 1909, I frequently wonder how he could so accurately imagine not just Internet-like technology, but that such technology would lead users to become physically isolated and eschew direct experience. Hopefully we fare better than the population in his story.
VINA: But they found it's a trap. Like a narcotic. Because when dreams (substitute on-line activities) become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record (substitute Instagram).
As someone who remembers the Seventies, wouldn't you expect people who grow up in an exceptionally cynical time to feel like conscientiousness is for suckers, phones or no phones?
The good news is that the data shows these traits are at least in part learned behavior. That means a properly constructed educational program should be able to reverse some of these trends. A modern example of such an education is included in Lukianoff and Haidt’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind. BLUF some form of cognitive behavioral therapy. Of course the essence of CBT can be traced to stoic principles.
PS the revival of tribalism also reinforces the claim that human nature is malleable, but it does not disappear. A disappointment for our blank slate colleagues and many progressives.
PPS it would seem progressive educators need to rethink their theories
This all seemed/s so obvious, its been right there to see for awhile now. That "we" are just now beginning to recognize it is a testament to humans ability to ignore reality.
But there wont be any great change away from social media. People are desperately HOOKED, like any other addict. And if addiction has taught us anything, its that its a process one goes through, and not everybody comes out at the far end.
I do expect some type of reaction from younger generations, i see it already. But for those that have sold their lives to the digital masters i dont see it getting any better anytime soon. Their rock bottom is still a long way down.
The insanity of addiction is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I see it constantly on substack, people talking about reclaiming their lives as they scroll them away. Make no mistake, this place is a part of the problem, not any solution.
Damning picture of “how we got the internet all wrong!”
…Maybe time to get serious about “how we built and used the internet all wrong.”
...Maybe time to reverse that, and restore the vision that was subverted.
Like all tools, the internet is inherently neutral. What matters is how we shape the tools, and thereafter, how we use them and how we let them shape us (as McLuhan taught).
We have let corporate oligopolies gain control of how this powerful new communications infrastructure feeds - and can co-opt - the allocation of our increasingly overstretched attention in order to “engage” us and extract our data, so they can sell us things and ideas. We have let them “enshittify” the internet - and our lives.
Maybe we are coming to a fateful turning point - as social media fuse with AI to irrevocably deepen that enshittification of our life.
But maybe we are recognizing the danger, and slouching toward a re-centering on digital media that augment humans as “bicycles for our minds” - and for the communion of our minds - instead of de-augmenting us to be denizens of a giant, fiendishly-engineered Skinner box.
Maybe enough people will join the growing movement to “free our feeds,” and control these bicycles for our minds as we, not our puppet-masters, choose - to augment our humanity instead of de-humanizing us.
There may still be time for us to make that choice. But that time may soon run out.
Spot on, and I would also include the erosion of confidence in institutions, government and ‘reality’ that the internet and social media have fostered. With AI only set to make things exponentially worse. We have to address this urgently before we enter a truly dystopian age of societal decline at precisely the point that we need to pull together to survive climate change.
Waiting for evidence is too risky in some cases. Raising kids is hard. Every parent knows they get addicted to smartphones and turn into zombies on them. They can easily wander into inappropriate harmful images and ideas. Waiting for evidence seems like an excuse for businesses to reap the rewards of addicting kids. Late stage capitalism?!
Perhaps the root of the problem lies more with contemporary society than technology alone. Who else seeks refuge online or between the pages of a good book?
I'm always very suspicious when I see huge effects like those in the UAS. My prior is that the world is immensely complicated and change is gradual and multi-causal. As of 2022, attrition in the UAS for the first cohort is 44%, and subsequent cohorts follow a similar path. I'm no expert in sampling, but this seems pretty damn high to me. I'll also note that the fraction of the targeted sample members who consent to participate, become a panel member, and remain active is 10%. Again, I'm no expert, but this seems pretty low to me and points to serious issues with the representativeness of the panel.
As a recovering social scientist, I get it, human beings are very complicated and it is very difficult to tease out trends, much less causation. We have to take what we can get. So I'm not about to argue that the UAS is useless; it seems extremely well thought out and executed to me and is a valuable resource! But it does have its methodological warts and so I do not see it as a smoking gun. The Internet and social media probably do have some bad effects, but are they singly responsible for an entire generation in crisis? I'm still skeptical.
Idk, and i appreciate a fellow skeptic. Anecdotally though i can tell you ive witness the conversion numerous times, when a person first starts down the social media/phone path and the degradation of mental health that always comes with it. And ive seen the reverse. Now, thats been good enough proof for me, but thats something ive witnessed, lived through, so i "know" it in that sense.
As you said, we gotta take what we can get in that regard. Personally ive found its better to make A decision than to ride the fence any longer. If it turns out to be wrong, well i can get myself a facebook or instagram or whatever then(though honestly, having never tried them, its hard to see the allure).
It all depends on how you use it. What you describe is not universal or inevitable.
There are new markets for objects and ideas that could not exist or survive without a fast means of communication and search that reaches a billion or more people. So many niches that existed only in theory are now active as discussions and transactions.
For example: the databases Discogs and Alibris (for music and books, respectively) have millions of listings from thousands of sellers across the world. In the old days it would have been very difficult and expensive for sellers to advertise to this huge audience and for buyers to browse this enormous catalog - prohibitively so. Access to this data is now free for both buyers and sellers. The databases have been built and maintained by the users (along the lines of Wikipedia) and the cost to build the catalog is next to zero. These sites and many like them have created new, active markets and have allowed people to connect with others who have similar interests. This is all new and it's good.
I agree with your critique of the Internet, but I don't think it is directly responsible for the decrease in mental health in the young generation. The key to this is Neuroticism, which has indeed increased recently in the young.
The physiological basis of neuroticism is probably an unstable state of the inner ear, particularly the vestibular part. We need a stable bodymap and placemap, a spatial framework on which to hang our memories, a consistent structure for the emotions, all of which depend on reliable input from the organs of balance This all needs constant resetting from the environment.
Thus I propose that the main cause of this increased mental illness is the lack of exposure to different environments, to lack of exercise, to sitting indoors, etc.
"..lack of exposure to different environments, to lack of exercise, to sitting indoors, etc."
Is this not a direct result of the tech/internet devices everyone carries on their person now? Its a perfected idle machine, a portable delivery device combined with addictive "content" equals everybody sitting around not doing those things you mentioned.
I remember back when tv was the devil, there seemed to be only so much tv one could watch before we felt like we had to "get out of the house". I dont see that with phones. People will spend huge swaths of time scrolling. Hell, theyll cross a busy street scrolling. What weve made for ourselves is internet crack, and people *cannot* get enough.
I do agree that the physical effects of this type of lifestyle lead to mental/emotional/spiritual degradation. I often say it doesnt matter *what* you watch on your phone, it matters *that* you watch it on your phone
I am saying that I do not think that it is the content on phones and Internet that is the main problem, it is indirectly that the social media have reduced exercise, sport, exposure to external environments so necessary for constructing internal maps of the world.
"I often say it doesnt matter *what* you watch on your phone, it matters *that* you watch it on your phone."
"Is this not a direct result of the tech/internet devices everyone carries on their person now?"
"I do agree that the physical effects of this type of lifestyle lead to mental/emotional/spiritual degradation."
Yes, im agreeing with you. Except that i think its more "direct", and that phones fuck up how peoples brains work, like any other addictive substance, and that the more addictive the content(ie social media) the greater the fucking up of the brain.
I guess im saying its both. But i look forward to reading your piece on how its just the one and not the other
I have never heard of this hypothesis before, but I’m reminded of my uncle as a counterpoint: he lost his legs from the knees in Vietnam to a land mine, was wheelchair bound for the rest of his life, but was one of the brightest and most extroverted men I’ve ever met.
While I believe embodied knowledge is under appreciated, I’m not so sure that there’s such a straight line from vestibular stimulation to neuroticism. Do you have any sources I can look at to this effect?
There is a good reason you haven't heard this hypothesis, I am currently writing it up! It is a new overarching explanation for many undisputed facts. See Eysenck (1947) for finding that static ataxia was the best test of Neuroticism; Larrey (1814) on his seasickness, showing that the inner ear controlled the autonomic nervous system; John Hunter (1794) on the havoc his unstable ear caused. N predicts all mental illnesses, and many physical illnesses, but is unrelated to neurological diseases or organic brain disorder.
It feels to me more like an issue with smartphones than with social media. I’m not on any social media, yet I’m spending hours and hours a day staring at my phone unless I make a conscious effort to stop. Hell I’m typing this on my phone.
Plus I watched you all when Facebook became huge. It was fine. People who were on FB, even people who were on it a lot, weren’t talking about it all the time, there weren’t a million articles written about it - those of us who weren’t there were only vaguely aware of its existence. Like Portugal. I’m sure it was cool, but it didn’t really have an impact.
You all didn’t go nuts until internet on smartphones. I didn’t either. My working theory is that it’s staring at the phone constantly, while walking, driving, “working”, dinner with your family, whatever, that’s causing all this negative impact.
Personally i place alot of the blame on the scrolling mechanism coupled with liking/commenting. This made it an interactive activity that has no end, ever.
Where is parenting in all this? It was not only the children who were influenced by the Internet; the parents also did. Parents became more defensive about letting kids have independence, stop allowing them to go play outside. Why? The internet made bad news traveled faster and social media made it worse. Parents saw monsters everywhere and no longer allowed the children to go out by themselves. They had to be protected from all the “bad” out there. To protect them, they kept them inside and gave them a phone or video games to entertain themselves. As a result, children never learned the skills to negotiate conflict, or solve their own problems.
Will this generation of parents understand the need for children to learn the skills to navigate the world on their own?
Definitely parenting is a big part. I believe parents—and the adult community in general—need to take a more serious look at our role in this problem if we truly want to help solve it. In my small community, we’ve been surprisingly successful at getting teenagers off their phones and back to socializing in real life. Yet now, some of the same people who championed that goal are complaining constantly to the HOA about noisy teens at the playgrounds or kids riding their bikes “too fast” down the street. Sometimes it’s easier to just stick kids in front of a screen than to engage with the messy reality of this stage of life. If we want a healthier community, we’ll need to adapt to a new way of being around each other in shared spaces.
Parents share a lot of the blame. Parenting has been on a downward slide since the 1960s. And you can't do it alone. When a parent tries to impose common sense restrictions and foster responsible values while the rest of their teenager's friends seemingly have no restrictions, it makes the responsible parent seem like a crazy outlier. Only working together as a society can this be fixed. When the norm for all kids is no phones after dinner for example, then kids will comply. If they feel they are the only ones, there will be FOMO.
hope so!
Great piece. Now we need a piece on what can be done. I have a few ideas, off the cuff: The government should stop subsidizing internet. Remember the digital divide? Free laptops for children? etc. Halt. Instead subsidize places and events where people can meet in person. Outdoor city parks with benches. Community centers with rooms to rent for low price for community events and meet ups.
Second idea: Eliminate entirely cell phones from public schools. Even laptops should be eliminated in the early years ( up to grade 7). Waldorf schools have done this for 20 years and its had positive outcomes. Funny enough, there are several big Waldorf schools in Silicon valley and SF where many top tech engineers send their kids.
I agree with everything Yascha says here: social media results in fewer friendships and less romance; Gen Zs have less conscientiousness, less extroversion and more neuroticism; young people using dating apps are less likely to commit, etc. But I'd like to add a couple of observations.
My kids (now in their 20s) barely ever left the house in their teenage years. That was partly because of video games, but it was also because they never developed the skills and confidence in their younger years that would encourage them to go out. I tried to get my kids to go out, but it was pointless because there was no one else out there; other parents didn't allow it.
Each of my kids made a group of four or five friends in their teens who came to our house all the time, but once those friends were gone (university, etc), they didn't have the skills to make new ones. Video games didn't help with leaving the house to find them. I'm quite the introvert, but still, I had dozens of friends who are still friends now.
They lack the confidence to go places. Someone in about 1990 decided that kids couldn't be trusted to go out on their own. I went to London on the bus with my next-door neighbour when I was ten, and I went to the beach with a whole bunch of friends when I was 14. Kids aren't allowed to do that now. Safer to stay home and play video games.
To add to your thoughts on dating, I think dating apps allow you to skip someone who doesn't seem immediately right. We had to stick with a new partner — even if they weren't perfect — because it wasn't obvious when the next one would come along. With a dating app, there is an infinity of candidates, so you can just ditch this one and move on to the next right away. As with social media taking away the opportunities for friendship, they rarely get to practice at real romance. For me personally, all of my girlfriends were friends whom I knew very well before we started dating, so we had less of that leap into the unknown that a dating app requires.
I think the 1970s and 80s were the best time ever to be a teenager, and I feel sorry for Gen Zs who grew up in the 2000s and later — but I don't think it was just the internet and social media to blame. I think parents changed their attitudes to parenting in the 1990s, and Gen Z children had much less freedom to practice at being teenagers.
There was definitely an attitude shift in parenting that trended towards too much safety. See this article for example:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
I remember my son not even being allowed to play touch football at recess lest someone get hurt or worse have their feelings hurt if they didn't get the ball enough. By contrast, in 7th and 8th grade, I regularly played tackle football at recess with a group of kids.
As you point out, this loss of freedom is/was surely problematic and helped set the stage for the social media addiction issues that shortly followed. But I still think social media is the major culprit of the increase in neuroticism and lack of conscientiousness.
I've seen that map before… It's shocking, really, how many privileges children have lost. I wonder whose fault it was.
We used to regularly get the bus and go for miles before we were ten in the 70s. We also used to ride our bikes down to play in a river that was a couple of miles away.
My theory is back then that parents of the 1970s grew up at a time when statistically there were more dangerous things than riding the bus or riding your bike without a helmet. Polio for instance, other diseases, World Wars, fires, work place accidents, etc. Over time as society became safer and safter and death rates from everything else declined, the idea of your children getting killed doing dangerous things or being kidnapped became a more prominent worry.
Someone should do the maths to decide whether it is better to have 7 million neurotic and depressed twenty-somethings or 127 kids getting killed doing dangerous things.
I'll play devil's advocate on the online dating point. Yes it's broken and people are not finding their soul mates as often. But is it broke on purpose? Hypothetically, if everyone on dating apps found a partner and had two kids in the next five years, could society handle that? Could the climate handle that?
Tis possible to find a partner and have a long term relationship without having kids. At least thats what the devil told me;)
But even hooking up is declining. Idk exactly how that relates to "on purpose" or not, or if it does at all. But it would seem to me, seeing as how in the past people have always been horny, that birth control+dating apps should lead to more sex, especially in the younger crowds. Apparently thats not how its been playing out.
Now i wouldnt dismiss the idea that maybe people are less horny, bc honestly they seem to value screen time more than even sex. The screens the better drug, you might say. But also like the article suggests, dating apps are failing in what theyre supposed to do, bc all the people on them are looking for something(sex, relationships, marriage) and not finding it.
So i guess it depends on whos "on purpose" we're talking about..
I think it has to do with how we treat adolescents. You'll find ten young people who want to talk about huge social problems before you find one that wants to talk about love. No wonder they all have anxiety. We treat love like a defect of the species, and that the real mission in life is career and social activism.
Thats exactly right. To fall in love was most peoples great aspiration back when i was young. That is not the case now. Everybody seems more jaded, adults included. Ive even noticed that in my 74 year old parents.
I feel like theres some connection to music in this. I rarely see people being passionate about hearing music now(nobodies yelling "oh thats my jam!" lol). People dont seem to *feel* the music. And ofc music and love, thats pb and j.
Ty, ill be pondering on this for a minute lol
Since reading “The Machine Stops”, E.M. Forster’s short story from 1909, I frequently wonder how he could so accurately imagine not just Internet-like technology, but that such technology would lead users to become physically isolated and eschew direct experience. Hopefully we fare better than the population in his story.
From Star Trek's 1966 pilot:
VINA: But they found it's a trap. Like a narcotic. Because when dreams (substitute on-line activities) become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record (substitute Instagram).
As someone who remembers the Seventies, wouldn't you expect people who grow up in an exceptionally cynical time to feel like conscientiousness is for suckers, phones or no phones?
Good point, I think conscientiousness has fallen and cynicism has been rising far before the internet was widespread
The good news is that the data shows these traits are at least in part learned behavior. That means a properly constructed educational program should be able to reverse some of these trends. A modern example of such an education is included in Lukianoff and Haidt’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind. BLUF some form of cognitive behavioral therapy. Of course the essence of CBT can be traced to stoic principles.
PS the revival of tribalism also reinforces the claim that human nature is malleable, but it does not disappear. A disappointment for our blank slate colleagues and many progressives.
PPS it would seem progressive educators need to rethink their theories
This all seemed/s so obvious, its been right there to see for awhile now. That "we" are just now beginning to recognize it is a testament to humans ability to ignore reality.
But there wont be any great change away from social media. People are desperately HOOKED, like any other addict. And if addiction has taught us anything, its that its a process one goes through, and not everybody comes out at the far end.
I do expect some type of reaction from younger generations, i see it already. But for those that have sold their lives to the digital masters i dont see it getting any better anytime soon. Their rock bottom is still a long way down.
The insanity of addiction is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I see it constantly on substack, people talking about reclaiming their lives as they scroll them away. Make no mistake, this place is a part of the problem, not any solution.
Damning picture of “how we got the internet all wrong!”
…Maybe time to get serious about “how we built and used the internet all wrong.”
...Maybe time to reverse that, and restore the vision that was subverted.
Like all tools, the internet is inherently neutral. What matters is how we shape the tools, and thereafter, how we use them and how we let them shape us (as McLuhan taught).
We have let corporate oligopolies gain control of how this powerful new communications infrastructure feeds - and can co-opt - the allocation of our increasingly overstretched attention in order to “engage” us and extract our data, so they can sell us things and ideas. We have let them “enshittify” the internet - and our lives.
Maybe we are coming to a fateful turning point - as social media fuse with AI to irrevocably deepen that enshittification of our life.
But maybe we are recognizing the danger, and slouching toward a re-centering on digital media that augment humans as “bicycles for our minds” - and for the communion of our minds - instead of de-augmenting us to be denizens of a giant, fiendishly-engineered Skinner box.
Maybe enough people will join the growing movement to “free our feeds,” and control these bicycles for our minds as we, not our puppet-masters, choose - to augment our humanity instead of de-humanizing us.
There may still be time for us to make that choice. But that time may soon run out.
Spot on, and I would also include the erosion of confidence in institutions, government and ‘reality’ that the internet and social media have fostered. With AI only set to make things exponentially worse. We have to address this urgently before we enter a truly dystopian age of societal decline at precisely the point that we need to pull together to survive climate change.
Waiting for evidence is too risky in some cases. Raising kids is hard. Every parent knows they get addicted to smartphones and turn into zombies on them. They can easily wander into inappropriate harmful images and ideas. Waiting for evidence seems like an excuse for businesses to reap the rewards of addicting kids. Late stage capitalism?!
Perhaps the root of the problem lies more with contemporary society than technology alone. Who else seeks refuge online or between the pages of a good book?
I'm always very suspicious when I see huge effects like those in the UAS. My prior is that the world is immensely complicated and change is gradual and multi-causal. As of 2022, attrition in the UAS for the first cohort is 44%, and subsequent cohorts follow a similar path. I'm no expert in sampling, but this seems pretty damn high to me. I'll also note that the fraction of the targeted sample members who consent to participate, become a panel member, and remain active is 10%. Again, I'm no expert, but this seems pretty low to me and points to serious issues with the representativeness of the panel.
As a recovering social scientist, I get it, human beings are very complicated and it is very difficult to tease out trends, much less causation. We have to take what we can get. So I'm not about to argue that the UAS is useless; it seems extremely well thought out and executed to me and is a valuable resource! But it does have its methodological warts and so I do not see it as a smoking gun. The Internet and social media probably do have some bad effects, but are they singly responsible for an entire generation in crisis? I'm still skeptical.
Idk, and i appreciate a fellow skeptic. Anecdotally though i can tell you ive witness the conversion numerous times, when a person first starts down the social media/phone path and the degradation of mental health that always comes with it. And ive seen the reverse. Now, thats been good enough proof for me, but thats something ive witnessed, lived through, so i "know" it in that sense.
As you said, we gotta take what we can get in that regard. Personally ive found its better to make A decision than to ride the fence any longer. If it turns out to be wrong, well i can get myself a facebook or instagram or whatever then(though honestly, having never tried them, its hard to see the allure).
It all depends on how you use it. What you describe is not universal or inevitable.
There are new markets for objects and ideas that could not exist or survive without a fast means of communication and search that reaches a billion or more people. So many niches that existed only in theory are now active as discussions and transactions.
For example: the databases Discogs and Alibris (for music and books, respectively) have millions of listings from thousands of sellers across the world. In the old days it would have been very difficult and expensive for sellers to advertise to this huge audience and for buyers to browse this enormous catalog - prohibitively so. Access to this data is now free for both buyers and sellers. The databases have been built and maintained by the users (along the lines of Wikipedia) and the cost to build the catalog is next to zero. These sites and many like them have created new, active markets and have allowed people to connect with others who have similar interests. This is all new and it's good.
I agree with your critique of the Internet, but I don't think it is directly responsible for the decrease in mental health in the young generation. The key to this is Neuroticism, which has indeed increased recently in the young.
The physiological basis of neuroticism is probably an unstable state of the inner ear, particularly the vestibular part. We need a stable bodymap and placemap, a spatial framework on which to hang our memories, a consistent structure for the emotions, all of which depend on reliable input from the organs of balance This all needs constant resetting from the environment.
Thus I propose that the main cause of this increased mental illness is the lack of exposure to different environments, to lack of exercise, to sitting indoors, etc.
"..lack of exposure to different environments, to lack of exercise, to sitting indoors, etc."
Is this not a direct result of the tech/internet devices everyone carries on their person now? Its a perfected idle machine, a portable delivery device combined with addictive "content" equals everybody sitting around not doing those things you mentioned.
I remember back when tv was the devil, there seemed to be only so much tv one could watch before we felt like we had to "get out of the house". I dont see that with phones. People will spend huge swaths of time scrolling. Hell, theyll cross a busy street scrolling. What weve made for ourselves is internet crack, and people *cannot* get enough.
I do agree that the physical effects of this type of lifestyle lead to mental/emotional/spiritual degradation. I often say it doesnt matter *what* you watch on your phone, it matters *that* you watch it on your phone
I am saying that I do not think that it is the content on phones and Internet that is the main problem, it is indirectly that the social media have reduced exercise, sport, exposure to external environments so necessary for constructing internal maps of the world.
"I often say it doesnt matter *what* you watch on your phone, it matters *that* you watch it on your phone."
"Is this not a direct result of the tech/internet devices everyone carries on their person now?"
"I do agree that the physical effects of this type of lifestyle lead to mental/emotional/spiritual degradation."
Yes, im agreeing with you. Except that i think its more "direct", and that phones fuck up how peoples brains work, like any other addictive substance, and that the more addictive the content(ie social media) the greater the fucking up of the brain.
I guess im saying its both. But i look forward to reading your piece on how its just the one and not the other
I have never heard of this hypothesis before, but I’m reminded of my uncle as a counterpoint: he lost his legs from the knees in Vietnam to a land mine, was wheelchair bound for the rest of his life, but was one of the brightest and most extroverted men I’ve ever met.
While I believe embodied knowledge is under appreciated, I’m not so sure that there’s such a straight line from vestibular stimulation to neuroticism. Do you have any sources I can look at to this effect?
There is a good reason you haven't heard this hypothesis, I am currently writing it up! It is a new overarching explanation for many undisputed facts. See Eysenck (1947) for finding that static ataxia was the best test of Neuroticism; Larrey (1814) on his seasickness, showing that the inner ear controlled the autonomic nervous system; John Hunter (1794) on the havoc his unstable ear caused. N predicts all mental illnesses, and many physical illnesses, but is unrelated to neurological diseases or organic brain disorder.
Ha! I opened this post lying on my back with my phone in my hand -- the exact same position as the picture at the top 🤦🏻♂️
It feels to me more like an issue with smartphones than with social media. I’m not on any social media, yet I’m spending hours and hours a day staring at my phone unless I make a conscious effort to stop. Hell I’m typing this on my phone.
Plus I watched you all when Facebook became huge. It was fine. People who were on FB, even people who were on it a lot, weren’t talking about it all the time, there weren’t a million articles written about it - those of us who weren’t there were only vaguely aware of its existence. Like Portugal. I’m sure it was cool, but it didn’t really have an impact.
You all didn’t go nuts until internet on smartphones. I didn’t either. My working theory is that it’s staring at the phone constantly, while walking, driving, “working”, dinner with your family, whatever, that’s causing all this negative impact.
Personally i place alot of the blame on the scrolling mechanism coupled with liking/commenting. This made it an interactive activity that has no end, ever.