Scrolling Alone: Smartphones and Social Atomization - American Affairs Journal (2024)

REVIEW ESSAY
Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of
Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt
Penguin, 2024, 400 pages

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, is best known for his books on why “good people” on the left and right disagree (The Righteous Mind, 2012) and why young people educated under safetyist uni­ver­sity bureaucrats are ill-prepared for disagreement (The Coddling of the American Mind, 2018). Liberalism stands or falls on developing inde­pendent, mature, and rational adults who can deliberate publicly in order to achieve the fullest promise of life together. A “coddled” mind, according to Haidt, is one that is blocked from encountering the diversi­ty of view­points necessary to make informed judgments. Haidt, in other words, is firmly liberal in the larger sense. So, when he turned his research toward smartphones and social media, and announced a book on his findings, one expected a critique of the problem of censorship by social media platforms and the need for openness to numerous viewpoints—however “toxic”—to better prepare users, especially young users, for public life in a liberal democracy.

But that is not the book that Haidt has written. With Anxious Generation, Haidt comes to the very opposite set of conclusions that a reader might expect. There can be no content fix—i.e., no injection of speech—sufficient to address the deleterious effects that smartphones and social media have on the mental state of young people. Haidt shows that Silicon Valley’s products are, by design, structurally at odds with the developmental needs of human children as members of the species. The only serious solution, then, is for government (and other responsible entities) to step in and restrict children’s access. “Even if the content on these sites could somehow be filtered effectively to remove obviously harmful material,” Haidt says, it would not be enough.1

But Haidt’s critique of Big Tech goes far deeper than concern for the mental health of Gen Z, as important as that is. His analysis reveals a more fundamental crisis of which the above is a mere symptom: that these devices and platforms sever the mental tissue that makes embodied relationships possible, dramatically weakening the possibility of collec­tive action for the common good. These concerns—which Haidt raises, or at least points to—connect him with a richer vein of com­munitarian thinkers, including Hannah Arendt and Christopher Lasch, who were likewise disturbed by how the invalidation of our world as a common reality ends up invalidating the human person altogether.

Arrested Development

Anxious Generation starts in a more familiar place: with the compulsive use of smartphones and social media and the mental health crisis among adolescents.2 We have heard much about Big Tech companies hiring America’s best and brightest to employ addictive techniques to ensure “time on device.”3 But what is it about human beings that makes them so susceptible to such allurements in the first place? What in the nature of hom*o sapiens allows the “like” button to hold so much power?

Drawing on evolutionary, social, and developmental psychology, Haidt seeks to offer answers. Over the millennia, hom*o sapiens has evolved specific characteristics, needs, and expectations. The evolutionary process, Haidt explains, has prepared human children to anticipate certain stimuli at certain times and in certain forms, and their proper development—that is, their health—depends upon these expectations being met. But they are not being met. What’s happening to kids, Haidt argues, is that smartphones and social media are derailing the process and blocking them from receiving what they really need. The trick is that these technologies are designed to provide artificial imitations of what human animals require and fool them into believing they are receiving the real thing. Silicon Valley, for instance, provides “connections” while stripping humans of sociality, and proffers “facetime” while diminishing eye-to-eye contact.

As Haidt describes, the first interaction postpartum between mother and child is beautiful and mysterious to watch; but it is also when criti­cal developmental needs are being met. Some of the child’s earliest senses of self are supplied, from without, through the mother’s eyes. The baby experiences himself, first, in a vision of adoration, before becoming capable of looking back and seeing for himself. When he is able to return the mother’s gaze, his prefrontal cortex grows as their eyes lock and his individuality begins to stabilize. “Infants in the first weeks of life have enough muscular control to mimic a few facial expressions,” Haidt writes, “and the many rounds of mutual gazing and face making are important means of fostering attachment between parents and children.”4 Haidt summarizes: “Human children are wired to connect.”5

Maturation depends on the widening of this circle of mutual behold­ing through the child’s expanded powers of sight and, eventually, new powers to speak. With a growth in verbal ability, his personality is broadened to reach the father, brothers and sisters, extended kin, and fellow community members, who fill him with words, eye-to-eye con­tact, and actions to emulate.

Speech between children and adults is more than a method of trans­ferring information. When a child begins to engage in conversation, the back-and-forth has an intrinsic play character. “When toddlers begin to speak,” says Haidt,

The social connections with parents and other caretakers grow deeper. Turn taking and good timing are essential social skills, and they begin to develop in these simple interactions. . . . Developmental psychologists refer to these sorts of interactions as “serve-and-return,” conveying the idea that social interactions are often like a game of tennis or ping pong: you take turns, it’s fun, there’s unpredictability, and timing is essential.6

This verbal game, as Johan Huizenga observed in hom*o Ludens, is carried into adulthood and, however subtly, informs all mature utter­ances. The verbal-play element becomes the very foundation of culture, which rises from the lowest forms of child’s play and aspires to the heights of poetry, law, politics, philosophy, and religion; “genuine, pure play,” says Huizenga, “is one of the main bases of civilization.”7

Much is at stake, then, when the tried-and-true means for expanding the sight and speech of a child—in-person familial and communal rela­tionships—are replaced or interrupted by electronics engineered to secure time on device. Reducing face-to-face interactions over the years when brains are so plastic and available for shaping is to squander a critical period of development. Consider, for example, the implications of a new study released in March 2024 (after Haidt’s book was completed) in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. Researchers in Australia, looking to measure “the association between screen time and adult words spoken, child vocalizations, and conversational turns when children are 12 to 36 months of age,” studied 220 families with children born in 2017.8 Every six months, the children under examination were outfitted with in­conspicuous digital language processors that collected data on their exposure to words. The findings validate Haidt’s concerns: “For every additional minute of screen time, children heard fewer adult words, spoke fewer vocalizations, and engaged in fewer back-and-forth interac­tions.”9 More precisely, “the largest decreases were seen at 36 months,” when an additional minute of screen time reduced adult words by 6.6, child vocalizations by 4.9, and conversation turns by 1.1.10

These findings underscore that childhood attachment to screens is simply negative for brain development and explain why so many children today struggle to engage in the basic verbal serve-and-return that prior generations conducted as a matter of course. Such children, effectively raised on devices, are unlikely to ever master the higher forms of linguistic play, and may never even become serviceable in their own native tongue.

All of the above flow from the embodied nature of the human animal, which expects (and needs) to hear, see, and speak with its fellows in the flesh. As Haidt puts it, “Human childhood evolved in the real world, and children’s minds are ‘expecting’ the challenges of the real world, which is embodied.”11 The proper growth of toddlers requires gaining their legs and working with their hands, which frees them to move about their environment and shape it for their purposes. Children also have an ingrained need to enjoy their body in more physically demanding play like running, jumping, kicking a ball, and wrestling with their father. This inter-familial playing becomes the basis for larger communal games, where kids meet up with their neighborhood friends for hide-and-seek, to adventure through some underbrush, and eventu­ally participate in formalized games like soccer and baseball. Even for adults, games can be thrilling and challenging; and while for Huizenga they are ends in themselves, for Haidt, a social psychologist, they are critical for brain development.

This animal need for embodiment helps explain why addiction to smartphones and social media can be so dispiriting for young children: it conflicts with their nature. Silicon Valley’s products foster the disembodiment of selfhood and of social relationships, which have been transplanted from the real world to the realm of digital avatars floating among placeless electronic networks.

Such needs also help explain why the disembodiment of masculine play in the form of videogames is so alluring to young men, but so dissatisfying. “For physical development,” Haidt says, kids, and espe­cially younger boys, “need physical play and physical risk taking.”12 Young men aspire to make their mark on the world, to leave a trace of their personality somewhere, physically through work or by making a name for themselves in public life. Strenuous and risky play between men, “face-to-face or shoulder-to-shoulder,”13 as Haidt puts it, makes them “anti-fragile.”14 Hard play does more than make kids tough—it lays down the roots of a life lived less fearfully and, hopefully, heroically and in service of others.15 In an era so prefabricated and overdetermined, with little room for masculine expressions of heroism, let alone cama­raderie, videogames draw young men in, simulating action, but produc­ing none of its salutary effects. As Haidt puts it, “Virtual battles confer little or no benefit.”16

Haidt sees videogames and p*rnography as laying similar traps for young men. “For boys, [electronic devices] opened up many ways to satisfy their desires for agency as well as communion. In particular, it meant that boys could spend much larger amounts of time playing video games and watching p*rnography while alone in their bedrooms.”17 There can be no doubt that unfettered access to smut has coarsened, and in many cases ruined, the relationships between men and women. But it has also de-risked sexual relationships by severing erotic pleasure from the need to find a mate in an inhospitable marriage market. This disembodied form of sex draws young men in, but provides no reward. “p*rn separates the evolved lure (sexual pleasure) from its real-world reward (a sexual relationship),” says Haidt, “potentially making boys who are heavy users into men who are less able to find sex, love, intimacy, and marriage in the real world.”18

This is emblematic of what, according to Haidt, is the fundamental problem with the way kids are being raised today, especially boys. They are introduced and incorporated into digital “networks” at a very young age, where parents naïvely assume they are enjoying de-risked experiences, in lieu of being forced to take serious risks in the real world. In the real world the price of failure might be high, perhaps even life threatening, but only there can genuine action bring growth and build community. The rise of safetyism in the 1980s and 1990s, a subject that Haidt has written on for some time, compelled parents to restrict the liberties of their kids, to keep them closer to home under a watchful eye. This created new domestic pressures to allow kids to access social media and smartphones far earlier than advisable, as a way to simulate the freedom that parents—with the other hand—were taking away. But social media and smartphones were not actually doorways to a de-risked world. Rather, living their days totally unsupervised on these platforms, the kids were being thrown to the wolves. Hence, Haidt’s “central claim” in the book, that “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became ‘the anxious generation.’”19

Haidt’s concern for disembodiment and the erasure of the real strikingly parallels several broader moves to execute a national retrenchment around “reality,” including attempts to turn away from a financialized economy that trades in consumer goods (digitized and otherwise) toward a “real economy” based on a genuine industrial policy in support of productivity at home. Everywhere from defense policy to family policy, there seems to be some effort to turn from “bits” to “atoms.” These are all, in different ways, national moves toward a renewed corporeality—a reanimation of the body politic, one might say—and a shift away from more abstract modes of acting and being. Hindsight may one day reveal Haidt’s call for the regathering of human children around the real as being the psychological expression of this wider correction.

More immediately, though, the very need for national repair sheds light on one of Haidt’s prescriptive shortcomings. He calls for vigorous protections to be asserted, for the first time, over the digital life of kids (quite literally keeping them off these devices), while calling for a loos­ening of the safetyist straightjacket that keeps them from free movement in the real world. There is no contradiction in this, whatever libertarians might say. We routinely keep kids from what harms them and direct them toward that which gives them life. The problem is—as evidenced by the larger retrenchment outlined above—reality just isn’t what it used to be. The New York City where I lived for twenty years from 1999 to 2019, and where Haidt risked permitting his kids to ride the subway in the Bloomberg era (the height of the NYPD’s power and prestige) is, today, governed by what Sohrab Ahmari calls sado-progressives who factor violence into the daily commute.20 Millions are pouring through our border unchecked and are making their way throughout the country, completely unidentified. Marijuana use is ram­pant and licensed by the state. Public schools are manipulating children into gender transition and, more broadly, failing to teach them anything valuable. Racial tensions run high and the streets are violent. Only in elite communities where these forces are relatively constrained, or on country properties with acreage and room to roam, will Haidt’s exhorta­tions to relax safetyist parenting be meaningfully taken up. Lacking a coherent social order, such aspirations can only go so far.

The Anxious Generation: Networks without Community

One of Haidt’s most interesting observations is that anxiety among Zoomers is so endemic it may be the generation’s defining characteristic (hence the title of the book). Of all the other maladies that have been discovered to plague Gen Z—depression, loneliness, suicide ideation, self-harm, etc.—anxiety tops them all in frequency of occurrence. Anxi­ety is akin to fear, but it differs in important respects. Fear is an immediate reaction to a concrete threat which passes when a specific danger is averted. Anxiety, on the other hand, is a sense of foreboding that danger may arise. Haidt explains, “While fear triggers the full response system at the moment of danger, anxiety triggers parts of the same system when a threat is merely perceived as possible.” It is striking that, as a group, Gen Z is wracked by a persistent, but apparently objectless, sense of impending danger.

But it turns out not to be objectless. Anxiety can be a response to social danger, too. “Our evolutionary advantage,” Haidt explains,

came from our larger brains and our capacity to form strong social groups, thus making us particularly attuned to social threats such as being shunned or shamed. People—and particularly adolescents—are often more concerned about the threat of “social death” than physical death.21

The threat of social expulsion, of being cast out, is nothing new. But the conditions in which it can happen have changed dramatically. Today, the “shame storm,” as Helen Andrews has called it, comes quickly, can be kicked off by total strangers, and can grow without limit, because the disembodied mob is unchecked by time, place, or counter forces.22 Whereas before, children who were being bullied could flee home to shelter behind adult strength, or find a group of friends ready to stand at their side, now, because of devices, DMs, and social networks, which are placeless and timeless and follow you everywhere you go, there can be no escape. The threat of social death is all-encompassing.

Hints that one might be an outcast come endlessly. Under the reign of the networks, one’s status is never secure. The avatars always pull rank. A classic example is a friend who continually peers down at her phone to send a “chat” to someone evidently more interesting. “Smartphones grab our attention so powerfully,” says Haidt, “that if they merely vibrate in our pockets . . . many of us will interrupt a face-to-face conversation. . . . [W]e just pull out our phone and spend some time pecking at it, leaving the other person to conclude, reasonably, that she is less important than the latest notification.”23 Haidt quotes sociologist Sherry Turkle, who neatly summarizes: “We are forever elsewhere.”24

Naturally, in a social milieu like this, you occasionally (or perhaps always) suspect that your friend wishes to be somewhere else. When she compulsively attends to parallel relationships right in front of you, an uncertainty about your value arises. And this uncertainty is universally inflicted. Practically every smartphone owner participates in the mutual undermining of their fellows’ confidence in their membership status. This sense of never being fully there, or never having anyone’s undivided attention, is why Gen Z is so prone to feeling lonely, even when in the presence of friends.25

Under these psychological conditions, the embodied group is radical­ly undermined. As a mental reality, one’s participation in a group, great or small, is made precarious and insubstantial by this general state of total distraction. This, Haidt believes, is “what happened to Gen Z”:

They are less able than any generation in history to put down roots in real-world communities populated by known individuals who will still be there a year later. . . . Children who grew up after the Great Rewiring skip through multiple networks whose nodes are a mix of known and unknown people, some using aliases and avatars, many of whom will have vanished by next year, or perhaps tomorrow. . . . They have no roots to anchor them or nourish them. . . .26

The chief effect of these technologies is, therefore, atomization, the very thing that connection to global networks was supposed to over­come. What we have accomplished via the ubiquity of smartphones is mass isolation. In other words, Big Tech’s products distort and diminish the part of human nature that today we call “social,” but which centuries ago Aristotle called “political.” Understanding this justifies Haidt’s judgement that a “phone-based existence”—that is, our existence—is simply “inhuman.”27

Forever Elsewhere, Nothing in Common

Haidt’s picture of an entire society that is “forever elsewhere” is, funda­mentally, one that sees nothing in common. “The public” is the world that all men can see. “The private” is what a man—with a few loved ones by his side—sees alone. Because social media is disembodied, it can never be a true public. On social media, which is highly tailored and individualized, there is no shared view, only millions of commodified private views being nudged together by algorithms.

A genuine public life cannot stand atop such ephemerality. The foundation of a true public is a fabricated man-made world that is concretely and commonly available to the sense perceptions of all. Hannah Arendt made the point in several places that the collective power of the senses, trained upon the same sets of objects, forms the cornerstone of community. Think of the traditional public square, which presents itself to everyone’s eyes and, thereby, grounds collective games, commerce, festivity, debate, politics, and much else. Arendt explains:

the experience of the materially and sensually given world depends upon my being in contact with other men, upon our common sense which regulates and controls all other senses and without which each of us would be enclosed in his own particularity of sense data which in themselves are unreliable and treach­erous. Only because we have common sense, that is only because not one man, but men in the plural inhabit the earth can we trust our immediate sensual experience.28

We no longer have such common sense. With screens perpetually eclipsing our views of the man-made world and algorithms driving us down individualized rabbit holes, the public—both as a place and as a people—no longer exists. There can be no public and, therefore, no politics, no acting as a group for common goods, without a “consensus reality,” as Jon Askonas has called it, that is seen and heard collectively.29 Arendt puts it this way in The Human Condition: to “be deprived of the reality that comes with being seen and heard by others”30 is to be cast into “worldlessness.”31

To be worldless is to be in the objective state of isolation that Arendt famously described as a powerlessness that preconditions one for ideological manipulation. She says the following in the concluding pages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, her monumental study of the rise of Stalinism and National Socialism:

Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together . . . isolated men are powerless by definition.32

Though radicalism and totalitarianism are different things, Haidt shares an analogous concern that the isolation bred by social media makes individuals vulnerable to ideology and “radical political movements.”33

To catch a small glimpse of how manipulable people are when isolated, see how they flock to the social media trends—which are no more than a list of terms with high-frequency use—and polarize imme­diately, thoughtlessly adopting the “takes” of large accounts that are positioned in conflict with one another. Without common grounds on which to solidly stand, individuals are swept to and fro, and lacking any interiority with which to block the passage of messages, they act as mere conduits for their profusion.

This should come as some surprise to readers, because social media networks were supposed to democratize discourse by drawing users out of their shadowy private spheres and into greater public standing by giving them a “platform.” That is, social media were supposed to bolster and strengthen their individuality. But the reverse has happened. The disappearance of the public has exposed the content of our private lives to exploitation by—what Christopher Lasch called, decades ago—“the forces of organized domination.”34 Back then, the forces of organized domination were, according to Lasch, the mass media’s invasion of the home, as well as the reach of bureaucratic forces into the daily conduct of life. Lasch’s observations were characteristically prescient. “[T]his invasion of private life,” he wrote in The Culture of Narcissism, “has become so pervasive that personal life has almost ceased to exist.”35 Today, moments shared with loved ones and the stray movements of our minds have become fodder for posts, incorporated into the algorith­mic feed, which valorizes personal experiences into corporate commodities. And rather than peeling back the encrusted layers of the public to reveal our domestic pleasures in their golden glory, our private lives have been swept into society’s auto-destruction. “Our society,” Lasch says,

far from fostering private life at the expense of the public life, has made deep and lasting friendships, love affairs, and marriages increasingly difficult to achieve. As social life becomes more and more warlike and barbaric, personal relations, which ostensibly provide relief from these conditions, take on the character of combat.36

Our private lives, says Lasch, quoting Thomas Hobbes, have descended into a “war of all against all.”37 This might sound histrionic, but how much truer are Lasch’s words today? See, e.g., Tinder and the “body count,” the pervasiveness of online predators, as well as the flooding of the internet with child sexual abuse material. See, also, Haidt’s observation that Gen Z exists in a perpetual state of anxiety over the omnipresent threat of social death. These barbarities are being regularly perpetrated via globally popular social media platforms with hundreds of billions in market valuation. Rather than foster connection and provide a platform for individuality, Silicon Valley has engineered the Hobbesian state of nature.

The famous Hobbesian description of “the life of man,” before Leviathan’s founding, is that man’s estate is “solitary, poor, nasty, bru­tish, and short [emphasis added].”38Our equality inheres, at least in part, according to Hobbes, in men being equally born into a state of solitude (this is, notably, totally opposed to Haidt’s description of the natural interrelatedness of parents and children). The general condition of war, “where every man is Enemy to every man,”39 contributes to, and flows from, this original isolation, because—not having a preexisting political community to which one owes one’s life (nor, apparently, a family or tribe to which one is devoted)—men are born without duty to anyone, save themselves. Life is only competition for the same limited set of goods; there are no just deserts for anyone by virtue of their relations, station, or accomplishments. So all men, deplorably, are free to murder or commit any violence against anyone to fulfill their appetites. For Hobbes, man’s violence and isolation precedes and, due to its intolerableness, induces men to form the “Covenant” that institutes Leviathan, wherein these conditions are transformed, because men are incorporated into a commercial society where the state is granted a monopoly on violence to police them.

InOrigins, Arendt gave Hobbes a renewed, troubling relevance. In her study of the rise of totalitarian regimes, it was rather the decline of the state—and the total failure of the political system of class-based parties—that resulted in mass loneliness. This loneliness,contraHobbes, comes afterthe breakdown of political life. As Arendt explains,

What prepared men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our [twentieth] century.40

But Hobbes was not wrong; he may not have depicted pre-political life, yet he anticipated the characteristics of post-political life. The theory of the state of nature actually predicts the way twentieth‑century mass men would come to perceive reality. So, following Arendt, we can see that the state of nature is not pre-political at all. It is engineered among the political ruins. We are again on the road that Arendt laid out; Silicon Valley’s power is both a symptom and cause of this trajectory.

Haidt sets out to explain why the technical design of devices and social media exploit the ingrained instincts of the human species, but the book’s most important contribution is how it points to a broader analysis of the unfolding process of social atomization. It will not be lost on the reader that Haidt is not the first to be concerned with the problems of rootlessness, the collapse of embodied community, and the decline of social groups as bearers of solidarity and expressions of common interest. If, in the year 2000, Robert Putnam had us worried over “bowling alone,” today, Haidt raises the specter of something far worse: scrolling alone.

This is helpful context because—even though Jean Twenge’s famous demonstration of the connection between the rise of ubiquitous smartphone use and the shocking rise of Gen Z’s mental health crisis is thoroughly convincing41—it is also true that these devices were invested with great hope as being vehicles for overcoming America’s crisis of community. These technologies did not dominate the market in a golden era of healthy families and social solidarity, but rather, they emerged in a time of broadly perceived communal breakdown. In response to a gen­eral worry about fragmentation, Silicon Valley marketed its products as offering human-to-human “connection”—indeed, connection “world-wide.”42 In reality, Big Tech corporations exploited (and monetized) the very anomie they claimed to be addressing, and may have worsened it beyond repair.

Social Media and Mass Media

Haidt writes in the vein of theorists that see social breakdown and mass uprootedness as being intertwined with the psychological need for technologically mediated relationships and the mechanical reproduction of culture. When families, traditions, and public institutions—which give structure to personal identity—become like quicksand, alternatives emerge to provide the solidity they lack. As the embodied world becomes fundamentally unreliable, the faux concreteness of the photo­graph (or the “pic,” as we say today) becomes especially appealing as an anchor for selfhood (see, e.g., Instagram). If embodied community loses its power to give meaning and order to life, human experience becomes a muddy slosh of sensory perceptions. In the confusion, the photographic image proposes to freeze time into solid moments, certifying one’s existence with the perspective of industrial machinery.

One cannot understand the character of social media without considering that it comes after mass media. What television replaced was an endless panoply of local folk cultures, where art was performed by and for the community. Mass culture swept these local practices of storytelling and beautification away, consolidating the attention of whole national populations around a set of centralized media points. In the United States, Hollywood, New York, and, with the rise of political celebrity, even Washington, D.C, dominated the national mind. Later, social media shattered this concentration of culture, but rather than allowing for local, embodied culture to reemerge, as discussed above, it commodified its fragmentation.

James Poulos, in a probing essay for the New Atlantis, sees the root problem of “digital discourse” as being “a problem of televisuality pushed to the extreme.”43 For Poulos, social media exists in continuity with mass media, but the dynamics are so accelerated that media takes on a radical form. In a passage strikingly resonant with the analysis of Christopher Lasch (whom Poulos references), he observes that “Our discourse overwhelms us with a barrage of images and fantasies, which are increasingly difficult to distinguish from the trivia and ‘news’ of the real world.”44

Lasch did not live to see this fragmentation, having died in 1994, and it would be false to imply that he somehow prophesied it. Nonetheless, he captured the close relationship between communal decline and the siren calls of what today we call the “selfie.” For Lasch, the story begins in a familiar place. In Haven in a Heartless World (1977), Lasch showed how, during the Progressive Era, the household—already weakened after being stripped of economic function under modern industrial capitalism—was subjected to a new therapeutic elite that co-opted the family’s educational and moral authority and transformed it into bureaucratic technique. With parenthood devalued and the family reduced to a hollow vehicle for consumption, marriage was left without a coherent purpose, and the family soon collapsed. This process, Lasch later argued in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), as well as in its sequel, The Minimal Self (1984), was part of a larger pattern in the Western liberal democracies, in which the transference of power upward to paternalistic bureaucrats—who absorbed practically all rule-making, planning, expertise, skills, and the right to individual and collective action—was repeated across communal life as a whole. Importantly, this co-optation has direct parallels with the monopolization of cultural practices by corporatized media. Practically no social institution escaped the grasp of the “new ruling class of administrators, bureaucrats, techni­cians, and experts” who govern us invisibly.45

Lasch’s particular contribution to this otherwise familiar history was to explain how the loss of agency to top-down forces psychically misshapes Americans and primes them to rely upon an inflated sense of self-celebrity and industrialized image production to stabilize their identity. (These were the very same impulses that later drove millions to social media.) Lacking a coherent social structure to give form to personality, Americans retreated, Lasch famously argued, into a “narcissistic self,” characterized by having no definitive sense of person­al outline and an inability to distinguish oneself from external objects. For Lasch, social decline, the encompassing and invasive nature of the media environment (which only accelerated in Big Tech’s hands), and the psychological crisis are interconnected. “[T]he prevailing social conditions,” wrote Lasch, “not only encourage a defensive contraction of the self but blur the boundaries between the self and its surroundings.”46 This arises, he says, “out of a . . . fundamental social transformation”; namely, “the replacement of a reliable world of durable objects by a world of flickering images that make it harder to distinguish reality from fantasy.”47

If Lasch were alive today, he would see the social media user who endlessly unleashes words and images as defending himself from the disappearance of a reliable world and convincing himself, by a profusion of text, that he is real. To believe that practically everything one thinks and does is worthy of posting is, of course, delusional. But more importantly, it is to adopt the persona of a celebrity in an attempt to stave off one’s own annihilation. That this character has become a general American type is no accident. “[T]he narcissist depends on others to validate self-esteem,” Lasch wrote. “He cannot live without an admiring audience.”

Part of Lasch’s analysis was inspired by Susan Sontag, who observed in her seminal study On Photography that the celluloid picture (today, it would be digital) was critical to the narcissist’s psychic survival. People “in industrialized countries . . . feel that they are images,” she wrote, “and are made real by photographs.”48 Seeking a view from the outside to certify themselves as facts, Americans rely, Sontag said, upon the camera for “self-surveillance.”49 This chilling assertion has been totally vindicated in the decades since. And it raises a critical question for us today: can such an American people possibly resist the expansion of public and private surveillance systems, which grow in cooperation and power by the minute? Or are we, rather, able only to welcome their ascent toward total hegemony? The merger of the surveillance state with surveillance capitalism—a phenomenon that came into full view during the Covid pandemic—may be a fitting political form for a people that doubts its reality when lacking the scrutinizing eye of the camera.

Politics in an Anxious Age

Lasch was writing in the time of mass media, so however much the withering of civil society may have given rise to the narcissistic personality, back then, it necessarily had a vertical expression. One’s dependency on the fandom of adoring crowds was played out vicariously by one’s own fandom over Hollywood stars or athletes, which—appearing on the silver screen, television, in the tabloids, and on nightly news—were vessels for the celebrity aspirations of society as a whole. One’s thirst for self-certification, likewise, was alleviated by a few albums (or boxes) of family photos, but was more fully slaked by the society of spectacle that overlay the world in a collective act of social certification. Today, with smartphones in the palm of one’s hand, we are all celebrities, everyday life is a television broadcast, and every moment is a photo-op. And whereas under the TV democracy (to borrow from Carl Schmitt) there was still enough cohesion for Lasch to title his book The Culture of Narcissism, today, there is no such thing as “the culture.” What was left of it in 1979—the year Lasch released his book—fell into the hands of Big Tech in the 2010s, which collected the shards and formed them into an anti-cultural force against embodied life.

Haidt, as a result, emerges as the surer guide to the question of “how should we now live?” Lasch’s politics harkened back to a nineteenth-century populism of muscular institutions bound together by common interests, especially unions and other radical experiments in democracy, striking a blow against the elites to wrest from them material concessions and a dignified status. The populism that Lasch wanted to see has, in fact, returned (at least in some form), and the elites he wanted brought low have been clearly outlined and targeted for defeat by a broad political uprising. The interests of these elites, furthermore, have been fully exposed as being intrinsically tied to the technologies of Silicon Valley. But the possibility of a meaningful response by populism against Big Tech is radically undermined by our anti-cultural condition. There is little narrative glue today (beyond memes) to hold a populist politics together; and with so little at hand to underwrite cooperation and oneness, common objectives are essentially impossible to articulate.

Haidt, being unwedded to the people as a savior, and being a bona fide elite himself, posits more realistic political options in a fragmentary age. For better or worse, he does not need a culture to mediate between him and others to coordinate action—he can draw, instead, on elite networks, which remain durable (at least somewhat) in our anti-cultural age.

At the conclusion of Anxious Generation, in collaboration with several advisers, Haidt lays out in long passages exactly what policies federal and state governments can pursue “right now” to keep kids off smartphones and social media, freeing them to genuinely encounter reality and one another perhaps for the first time. These include: assert­ing a duty of care upon social media companies to design their platforms to be nonaddictive to kids (like the Kids Online Safety Act); raising the legal ageto sixteen for an adolescent to open a social media account;forcing platforms to verify the age of their users to seriously enforce the elevated age (which, under current law, is presumptively thirteen years old);and requiring that schools be phone free (like Florida did in 2023). To parents, he exhorts them to wait as long as possible before giving their kids a smartphone.50 (Though we go unmentioned, several of the policies that Haidt offers originated with my organization, the Institute for Family Studies, along with some institutional friends.51) In commending these policy suggestions, and the entire book, I encourage readers to heed the words of Haidt’s conclusion: “There is so much that we can do, today, to turn it around.”52

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 2 (Summer 2024): 68–85.

Notes