Sometimes Things Get Worse
against the digital immune system
Matt Yglesias had a good post recently stating what should be the obvious: the seemingly endless expansion of short-form video into more and more of the waking hours of ordinary people has obvious destructive consequences.
most of what people consume on TikTok or YouTube or any of Meta’s properties is not social at all. It’s just media. The companies agglomerate huge amounts of video, and then feed you videos based on what they think will keep you clicking and scrolling. These companies invest a lot of effort and expertise in fine-tuning this process so that users find it enjoyable on a moment-to-moment basis and spend a lot of time watching these videos. [emphasis added]
If anything, the bolded portion undersells things. This year’s book Careless People by former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams, which Meta tried very hard to keep from public view, provides direct insider knowledge that the company intentionally used its platform and algorithms to manipulate user behavior, emotions, and perception of reality in pursuit of profit. I mean, this has been obvious for a long time, right, but this kind of actual from-the-horse’s mouth corroboration is really important. What distinguishes many of the concerns of the current moment from technological fears of the past is that these systems are individualized and reactive, enabling them to become far more addictive than older technologies like television. (I would also argue that the television panic was justified! A lot of people really did waste tons of their lives addicted to old-fashion linear TV, in a deeply sad way.)
You may contrast Yglesias’s piece with this one from my friend David Sessions, who has been chewing at this question from the opposite direction lately. The piece, titled “Why Tech Moral Panic Matters,” argues that the current widespread anxieties about technology (especially concerns over loneliness, smartphones, and social media, which he terms “neo-atomization discourses”) have coalesced into a moral panic that is being used to promote social conservatism. He argues that, even among liberals, the language of “epidemics” and “addiction” about tech-driven alienation has replaced explicit moralizing, creating an uncritical consensus that technology is an overwhelming force we must be saved from. Sessions contends that this monocausal focus on technology as the source of social breakdown serves as a Trojan horse for right-wing tropes. He argues that this tech panic is not new, tracing similar “alienation panic” tropes in the 1950s that shaped liberal discourse. In particular, Sessions challenges the factual basis of the panic, claiming that scientific research on the “loneliness epidemic” and the link between phones/social media and poor mental health is highly contested, and that “porn addiction” is a non-medical rebrand of religious moralism.
There are much worse versions of this, but still - I object! I in fact have two objections, one to a very specific tactic here and another far broader, to the larger world of “stop worrying about technology/modernity” essays. The first is pretty simple, and was best voiced by LM Sacasas, who has diligently and intelligently worked this beat for decades. Sessions does the “we’ve had moral panics before” routine in his piece. Sacasas succinctly rejected that thinking back in 2014:
Do not cite apparent historical parallels to contemporary concerns about technology as if they invalidated those concerns. That people before us experienced similar problems does not mean that they magically cease being problems today.
Indeed: the fact that people have had fears in the past, whether they turned out to be founded or not, does not automatically undermine the fears we experience today. The fact that we have had technological problems in the past does not make those problems not problems or our own problems not problems. And the fact that skeptics so often reach for this particular type of argumentative kabuki makes me deeply suspicious of the ultimate source of their skepticism.
And then there’s the broader milieu here. I am increasingly frustrated by what I would call the digital immune system. It’s this tendency where worries over the deleterious effects of technology are met with kneejerk defense, a kind of isolated demand for rigor that holds those fears to higher evidentiary standards than most sociocultural claims are held to and reflexively questions the motives of those who are worried. It’s the impulse to dismiss any critique of the new, any hesitation toward the latest technology, any skepticism toward the modern turn, any wistfulness for the past, as the cranky mutterings of the old. If something new develops in culture or technology or the economy, and some concerted effort is made to question the impact of that development, you can bet that there’s a condescending “Well, actually!” coming that insists that everything new is good and every skeptic is just an old fogey. This is most prominent and obvious when it comes to technology, but note that it can happen for all kinds of new developments. Making this all the more annoying, this is often inflected with a particularly clumsy form of faux-political argument that assumes that the progressive or left stance is always in pursuit of the new and the conservative or right stance always in defense of the past, which is wrong and which I will discuss later on in this piece.
At its worst - and I don’t think David is anything like the worst, for the record - this all represents one of the most tedious and self-satisfied reflexes of our era. It’s also remarkably promiscuous, voiced by people from all manner of different ideological bents and coming from all manner of directions, joined together only by a strange and reflexive desire to defend the latest development from various forms of cultural criticism. In columns at the most hallowed newspapers as well as in the most niche Substacks, in the discourse around social media and around the Fed, in technology writing as well as religious commentary, in cultural analysis and sports analytics, you’ll find it. And frankly,it’s very annoying!