The Ones Who Are To Blame

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.

A is for Amazon

As I typed in a search term today, I watched Google fill in the phrase for me, trying as it always does to anticipate my every thought.   Google knows where I live, and knows some of my search history.   Its great thrumming warehouse-banks of processors and complex algorithms carefully optimize every return, endeavoring to maximize the likelihood of getting me where it thinks I want to go.

But Google does not know me, not really, because my thought as I typed suddenly became:  If I took Google's suggestions on the first letter of my search and made an alphabet book for children, what would it look like?   

What would that say about Google?   What would that say about our humanity in the internet age?

And so I went through the alphabet, letter by letter. 

A is for Amazon, AOL, Apple, and Amtrak
B is for Bank of America, Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, and Bed Bath and Beyond
C is for Craigslist, CNN, and Costco
D is for dictionary, Dominos and Drudge
E is for eBay, ESPN, Expedia, and etsy
F is for Facebook, Fandango, and Fox News
G is for Google, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Translate
H is for Hotmail, Home Depot, Hulu, and HHGregg
I is for Instagram, IMDB, Ikea, and iTunes
J is for Jetblue, JCPenney, J Crew, and Jennifer Lawrence
K is for Kayak, Kohls, and KMart
L is for Linkedin, Lowes, Les Miserables, and Living Social
M is for Mapquest, Macy's, MSN, and Maps
N is for Netflix, NFL, Nordstrom, and news
O is for OPM, Old Navy, Overstock, and Orbitz
P is for Pandora, Pinterest, Papa Johns, and Paypal
Q is for QVC, Quotes, Quizlet, and Quentin Tarantino
R is for Redbox, Ray Lewis, Redskins, and Rotten Tomatoes
S is for Southwest, Sears, Skype, and Sprint
T is for Target, Twitter, Translate, and Thesaurus
U is for USPS, UPS, United Airlines, and US Airways
V is for Verizon, Verizon Fios, Verizon.net, and Verizon Wireless
W is for Walmart, Weather, Wells Fargo, and Washington Post
X is for XBox, xFinity, Xbox Live, and X Factor
Y is for Youtube, Yahoo, Yahoo mail, and Youtube to mp3
Z is for Zillow, Zappos, Zero Dark Thirty, and Zara

Your results would vary, I'm sure.   But what a terrible, terrible alphabet book that would make.  It's the sort of alphabet book you might find in an Aldous Huxley dystopia, a classroom full of dutiful little Betas chanting it in unison.  It's the kind of alphabet book you'd find in a preschool in Hell.  

All except "J is for Jennifer Lawrence."  Such a sweetheart, she is.  

Radical Christian Extremism

Here and there across the interwebs this last week, I've caught whiffs of a recent conference.  It was an event sponsored by Google, in which the participants were all individuals who had either participated in or been directly effected by radical, violent extremism.  They included former violent jihadis, armed militants, skinheads, neo-Nazis, gang members, and other fun folks to have around.

The meeting was in Dublin, Ireland, a nation that has known it's own share of Troubles with those who have radicalized their position to the point where killing and harming others becomes acceptable.   It was an interesting meeting, by all accounts.

What was striking in reading summaries of the meeting were points of commonality that all violent movements or groups share.  Those commonalities are 1) the deep seated human desire for belonging and acceptance; 2) the assumption that anyone "outside" of the group is automatically of lesser value than those "inside," and  3) the creation of an environment in which outsiders or particular groups are demonized, feared, and hated.   These conditions are present across the board, whether a group is ethnic, secular, nationalistic, or based in the teachings of a religious tradition.

Here, of course, I get to thinking about how extremism and radical faith have played out among followers of Jesus of Nazareth.   There has, of course, been plenty of blood spilled putatively in the name of the Prince of Peace.  Between multiple wars in Europe, the Crusades, and the Inquisition, the history of our faith has seen all too many moments when it's been used to justify crushing the unbeliever.  Typically, that unbeliever has property we want, or just so happens to be part of a culture that our government wants to subjugate so they can take their stuff.   Power does work that way.  We've fought over ecclesiastical hierarchy.  We've fought over differences in theology or biblical authority.

When I get down to it, though, I have trouble seeing a radical commitment to the ethos that Jesus actually taught as having any potential to leading to violence in deed or in word.  Extreme commitment to Jesus doesn't look like war, or like terror, or even like writing self-righteously trollish comments on the blog of someone with whom you disagree.

Christian absolutism looks a great deal more like St. Francis than it does Torquemada.  If you're radicalized by Christ's teaching to love your neighbor and your enemy, and view every human being as a potential vessel of the grace of the Spirit, then it's really rather difficult to justify seeking their harm in any way.

It's not always bad to be a radical.

Google, China, and Market Morality

Yesterday's news that Google might pull out of China didn't come as a major surprise. Though America's corporate leadership has happily handed our industrial might to the Chinese in exchange for all that cheap crap we can buy at WalMart, China remains stolidly socialist. Not socialist in the "we provide affordable health care to our citizens" way. Socialist in the old school way, meaning repressing speech and imprisoning dissidents.

A series of recent cyberattacks targeting the gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists appear to have come from proxies of the Chinese Communist party, and were part of an ongoing and aggressive campaign. It was enough to make Google decide that perhaps their corporate ethics..which are all about openness and freedom..might preclude their being able to operate in such an intensely repressive centralized state.

The response of Wall Street was also not surprising. Shares of Baidu, the search engine that is officially approved by the Chinese government, soared over 13% yesterday at the opening bell. Shares of google dropped, although they clawed back a bit by the end of the trading day. The reasons behind this are obvious. Google may be giving up potential profits and a major market. Baidu, which already has a majority of Chinese market share, stands to materially gain. If your interest is in both short-term and mid-term profit and shareholder return in the next several quarters, then it makes total sense to divest from google and buy up Baidu. That is, in point of fact, the ethic that governs our marketplace. Though the argument is often made that the movement of capital in the free market is amoral, it moves and acts according to a clear set of norms. Profit maximization is a moral framework.

This market morality is, unfortunately, often directly opposed to the values that shaped our free and democratic republic. When the pursuit of profit-maximization is allowed to stomp on the pursuit of life and liberty, then we should recognize there are often radical and irreconcilable differences between the ethic of the market and the ethic of universal human liberty. Human beings who are part of the marketplace need to be aware that when they choose market over liberty, they are not just making a business decision. They are making a moral choice, one that defines them.

They have to choose which set of values will govern their decisions.

One cannot, as a dear friend once told me, serve two masters.