Society seems to be growing steadily crazier. And maybe it doesn't just seem to be. Maybe it actually is growing crazier. In the 1930s, science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein dubbed the early 21st century ‘the Crazy Years', a time when rapid technological and social change would leave people psychologically unmoored and, frankly, crazy. Today's society seems to be living up to that prediction. But why?
I recently read James C. Scott's Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. One of the interesting aspects of the earliest agricultural civilizations is how fragile they were. A bunch of people and their animals would crowd together in a newly formed city. Diseases that weren't much of a threat when everybody was out hunting and gathering over large areas would suddenly spread like wildfire and depopulate the town almost overnight. As Scott writes, an early city was more like a (badly run) refugee camp than a modern urban area, with people thrown together higgledy-piggledy with no real efforts at sanitation or amenities. He observes that the pioneers who created this ‘historically novel ecology' could not possibly have known the ‘disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing'.
Then I ran across this observation on Twitter: ‘The internet is rewiring brains and social relations. Could it be producing a civilizational nervous breakdown?' And I saw another article noting that depression in teens skyrocketed between 2010 and 2015, as smartphones took over. It made me wonder if we're in the same boat as the Neolithic cities, only for what you might call viruses of the mind: toxic ideas and emotions that spread like wildfire.
Social media is addictive by design. The companies involved put enormous amounts of thought and effort into making it that way, so that people will be glued to their screens. As much as they're selling anything, they're selling the ‘dopamine hit' that people experience when they get a ‘like' or a ‘share' or some other response to their action. We've reached the point where there are not merely articles in places like Psychology Today and The Washington Poston dealing with ‘social media addiction', but even scholarly papers in medical journals, with titles like ‘The relationship between addictive use of social media and video games and symptoms of psychiatric disorders: A large scale cross-sectional study'. One of the consulting companies in the business of making applications addictive is even named Dopamine Labs, making no bones about what's going on.
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