If any one thinker has captured the brokenness of our uniquely blighted era, it's Jonathan Haidt.
He's a social psychologist and researcher whose focus, of late, is the sudden collapse of a generation's mental health. Young people right now are a mess. The kids are not OK, as rates of mental illness and social dysfunction have spiked over the last decade and a half.
For years, this trendline has been notable, as literacy, the capacity to focus, and a sense of cohesive identity and purpose have slipped away from our kids.
The gut-level answer to this, and the Occam's Razor reason: the rewiring of young minds by semi-sentient corporate "social" media. At first, it was considered Luddite to suggest this, and folks would cluck about correlation not being causation. But we've got the data now, after decades, and in study after study, the toxic influence of algorithm-driven always-on 24/7 dopamine bumps is clear.
I feel it, whenever I'm on too much of a doomscrolling jag. But my kids feel it, too. My sons have both bailed on social media entirely, and both feel it had a uniformly negative impact on their minds and their creativity.
The evolved systems of human sociality that shaped our minds for millennia are being short-circuited by profit-driven social media and tech. Constant, immediate gratification stunts our souls.
In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Haidt names this as a fundamental cultural failure. From the perspective of a social psychologist and anthropologist, he compellingly argues that a society that fails to inculcate healthy adult sociality into the young does critical damage to itself. It destroys our moral core, and without that sense of purpose, we decay and rot. Such a culture becomes neither progressive nor conservative, but indulgently decadent and mindlessly reactive.
Anxious overparenting and a childhood entirely managed by adults from infancy through adolescence is also a factor, but even that seems to have risen in parallel to new media.
Long and short of it: thirty years of internet hasn't gone as we'd hoped. Unmoored from our ethical frameworks, it's done critical damage to our individual and collective psyches.
So. How do we reverse this process? How do we hold the corporate powers responsible to account, understanding that they're kinda sorta in control right now? It's not just that they've inserted themselves into our minds and shaped the minds of our children.
They've taken control of our economy. They've seized and reframed our social relationships. They manage what we see, and when we see it. They've been the mechanism that gave the propaganda machines of tyrants access to our people. And now, they've bought their way into the venal heart of American political power.
There they were, lined up neatly, celebrating the government that they purchased.
Meta. Alphabet. Amazon. X.
Their bright ideas have crippled a generation. They've subverted both our minds, our economy, and our Republic.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand why we trust these people to rule us.
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