Sometimes Things Get Worse

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