The Leviathan, the Hand, and the Maelstrom
An institutionalist theory of social media and the smartphone
Note: I’ve decided to add a TLDR to the top of this post, both as a pitch to encourage folks to read the whole thing, and as a partial substitute for those who don’t have the time. For those who found my work via my reply to Dan Williams (“The Case Against Social Media is Stronger than You Think”), this is a less polished proof-of-concept of some bigger ideas I’d like to develop more carefully in the future. It also contains earlier versions of that post and my more recent one on social media and adolescent mental health.
The basic argument is that we need to reframe the new digital media ecosystem made possible by social media and the smartphone as a nascent institution that is, in effect, ‘modernizing’ civil society. I see this process as analogous to how the now-familiar institutional forms of ‘the state’ and ‘the market’ once modernized other important domains of human affairs (roughly, the domain of top-down governance and the domain of goods-production and exchange).
The idea is that we are living through a similarly important episode of modernization in the realm of more informal communicative exchange encompassing media, entertainment, academia, NGOs, political-activist groups, and so on, as well our private social lives; in short, most everything outside of ‘government’ and ‘business.’
Civil society writ large, or what is sometimes called ‘the public square,’ is being compressed into a globalized, direct-democratic, hyper-competitive market for ‘content’—our new term for discrete instances of digital communication—hosted on the major social networking platforms, these amounting together to a kind of semi-unified institutional environment (certainly no less unified than the analog market for goods and services). Within this environment, producers of content ‘sell’ their wares, and consumers of content ‘buy’ them by expending some quantity of attention. Content-instances (‘posts’) are in turn ‘priced’ (or ‘valued,’ or ‘ranked’) according to how much attention they garner.
In other words, the rise of social media and the smartphone has remolded not just the internet, but increasingly civil society as such into a more horizontal, more structured, more surveillable digital marketplace for communication, one that values its chief commodity—content—via metrics that measure attention.
My claim is that most of the major effects of social media and the smartphone—on face-to-face socializing, on education, on politics, on mental health—are helpfully understood through this lens, this ‘institutionalist’ account of social media and the smartphone. It is also that this new institution is having variously corrosive effects on the other legacy institutions that make up civil society.
My argument is partially inspired by the political scientist James C. Scott’s work on high-modernist institution building and its often disastrous effects (as in e.g. Soviet collectivization, forcible “villagization” in Tanzania under Julius Nyerere).
The point is not that social media is as morally awful as e.g. Soviet collectivization, but that it represents an analogous kind of dangerous high-modernism in action, albeit one enacted by a network of private companies rather than the the state.
As in James’s case studies, the new institutional form founded on social media and the smartphone—which I elect below to call ‘the Forum’—is corroding the tacit knowledge associated with the forms of social organization that have preceded it, knowledge we have relied on to build social bonds, to educate ourselves, to cooperate politically, and broadly to live well together.
I see this particular line of work as being in its early stages, and so am eager for any and all feedback. I appreciate that the essay below is long, but it’d mean a lot if you gave it a read, and even more if you got in touch with your thoughts / reactions! Thanks.
1. Introduction
Over the last fifteen years, it has become an article of common sense that American institutions are under strain. The dysfunction extends not just to formal institutions—government agencies, legacy media, the electoral system—but also to cultural ones, ranging from reflexive optimism about the country’s global influence to a once widespread faith in democracy. Virtually all of the above have suffered a massive and concurrent loss of public confidence. There is broad agreement that the country has fallen into a pessimistic, angry morass, if not a more existential downward spiral. The reelection of Donald Trump—and the flood of disruptive changes he and his allies have already made in Washington—has only reinforced the idea that something deep has gone awry in America’s collective psyche.
As sweeping as this regression has been, though, it also poses an explanatory puzzle. There is little evidence to suggest, for instance, that it is the result of declining material wellbeing. Though Americans were justifiably upset by the Covid-era inflation as well as the expiration of its attendant increases in social spending, and while they continue to face salient cost burdens at the grocery store, in the housing market, and in their pursuit of college educations, their finances have nonetheless reliably improved since the ’08 crash, whether in terms of median income, net worth, or hourly earnings. That’s not to deny there have been pockets of rising hardship, but considered in aggregate, the American economy is, without exaggeration, the envy of the world (note: at least it was; this essay was published before Trump’s Liberation Day Tariffs). The twin narratives of a country hollowed out either by inflation or globalization are almost entirely myths.
Matters of international politics don’t carry much explanatory weight either. Though a small subset of Americans is wracked with ‘climate anxiety,’ that this might account for widely distributed misgivings about the country’s politics and culture is inconsistent with the public’s relative lack of concern for climate change. Replace it with other global crises—war in Ukraine, war in the Middle East, economic and geopolitical competition with China, recent advances in AI, falling global fertility rates—and a similar argument follows. It is an unfortunate fact that these issues are low on most Americans’ priority lists. That isn’t because they’re unimportant; the polar opposite is true. But if Americans profess not to care much about global issues, then those issues probably don’t underly our grim national mood.
It is instead time we take more seriously another major candidate explanation for the last fifteen years of disharmony. As Democratic strategist James Carville once said of the economy, so his successors may very well say, teeth no doubt gritted in painful retrospection, ‘it’s the internet, stupid.’
Since its state-sponsored birth as ARPANET, the internet has transformed human social experience in strikingly short order. But it has also gone through transformations of its own, not least those represented by the more recent rise of social media and the smartphone. In the aftermath of the public releases of Facebook in 2006 and the iPhone in 2007, social media and the smartphone grew to become, in effect, privately owned utilities, with the former acting as the de facto public forum of the digital age and the latter acting as its primary access point, one uniquely tactile, mobile, and ever-present.
90 percent of Americans now own a smartphone and use it (on average) 5 hours a day, and 70 percent are on social media and use it (on average) 2.5 hours a day. Teens spend 1.5 hours on their smartphones during the school day alone, and almost 5 hours a day on social media. Half report being online “almost constantly.” And relative to the normal pace of technological diffusion, this all happened in an instant. The smartphone and social media are two of the fastest adopted technologies in human history.
The public discussion they’ve inspired has quite understandably treated them as just that—technologies. Among other things, smartphones and social media have been called “communications technologies,” “information technologies,” “social networking technologies,” and “digital media technologies.” Hence comparisons to television, videogames, the personal computer, the (analog) telephone, and even the printing press. But this lens is incomplete. It risks downplaying the sheer scale of the social transformation social media and the smartphone have brought about, a transformation that greatly exceeds the impact of any of their predecessors.
Social media and the smartphone haven’t just created new kinds of communication. They’ve created a new communicative institution, new ‘rules of the game’ for communication as such. Just as the state and the market have, over their lengthy modern histories, claimed imperfect monopolies over distinct realms of public life, so the new digital ecosystem created by social media and the smartphone—what I will call “the Forum”—has begun to stake its own such claim over the once hallowed realm of the public square.
It has done so by routing an ever greater share of written, oral, and visual communication through a narrowly optimized sieve: a digital marketplace for communication designed above all else to sate major tech conglomerates’ hunger for advertising revenues. The Forum is rapidly replacing networks of dialogue concentrated at the local level—supplemented, of course, by carefully gatekept national and supranational networks in media, academia, and government—with a flattened, hyper-competitive, global market for ‘content,’ one in which acts of communication are bought with, and sold for human attention.
In a historical instant, this new social architecture has transformed American life almost beyond recognition. Among other things, our social lives, education system, politics, and mental health are being degraded along multiple fronts at once, with few signs of reform or slowdown in sight.
It is well past time that we see our new digital media ecosystem for what it is: a systemically significant institution in its birth-throes, one corroding precisely those preexisting institutional and coordinative capacities necessary to control it.
2. Clearing the forest
The political scientist James C. Scott begins his masterwork, Seeing like a State, with a parable that nicely captures our current predicament. Scott’s story is a long one, a succession of tragedies over hundreds of years and multiple continents in which the blunt imposition of order on complex, naturally occurring systems led to disaster. His first case study concerns (bear with me) the early application of scientific forestry in eighteenth-century Europe.
At the time, Scott writes, “the … European state viewed its forests primarily through the fiscal lens of revenue needs … [in particular] the revenue yield of the timber that might be extracted annually” (p. 11-12). This was of course antithetical to the conflicting ‘viewpoint’ of nature itself. The forests were filled with complexly interactive, but fiscally useless flora and fauna, including many of in-kind value to human poachers, fishers, and farmers. But since none of this seemed pertinent to the state’s timber interests, foresters were made to clear and replace the forests with what Scott describes as “serried, uniform ranks … to be measured, counted off, felled, and replaced by a new rank and file of lookalike conscripts” (p. 15). Extraordinarily lush ecologies, in other words, were replaced with something akin to industrial timber farms.
As it turned out, this program of unbridled demolition and artificial recreation was a disaster in waiting. The foresters had underestimated how interdependent timber yields were with the parts of the forest they’d destroyed, such as the once prevalent underbrush and animal life, which, among other things, had maintained the nutritional qualities of the soil, increasing yields beyond what would otherwise be possible. The practice of monoculturing—only planting one variety of tree—also meant the redesigned forests were easy prey to storms and disease, threats more diverse crops are better able to resist.
The result was that, in the worst cases, whole forests withered away. The Germans coined a new term, Waldsterben—'forest death’—to describe the resulting desolation (p. 20). This of course came at enormous cost to the state, not to mention the plants, animals, and other humans who relied on the resources the forests provided. In a dynamic that would be repeated throughout modern history, arrogant men with dreams of panoptic control destroyed systems whose beneficence depended on their self-propelling, organic integrity.
Scott is very explicit about the moral of this story: “[it] illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations … in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value” (p. 21).
Perhaps this sounds familiar. Scott might well have said the exact same thing about America’s last fifteen years. Like the forests in Scott’s parable, our civil society is it itself a vibrant and dizzyingly complex ecosystem. It has persisted at its healthiest on the informationally rich bonds of face-to-face interaction, a foundation of widely accepted liberal norms, and the guiding hand of a diverse subset of publicly accountable elites acting in good faith—albeit not flawlessly or in the most glamorous fashion—to advance the public good.
Over the last decade and a half, major tech corporations such as Google and Meta have begun to supplant this now outmoded vision of American life with their own, one designed, as with the state and its timber yields, to maximize their ad revenues above all else. What early scientific forestry was to the forest, ‘the Forum’ is to our social reality. And fittingly, we are in the midst of our own version of Waldsterben.
3. The discourse economy
In one sense, the Forum is something we are all acutely familiar with: the digital ecosystem of major social media and entertainment platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, as they are accessed via smartphones in particular, but also tablets, computers, smart T.V.s and so on. But it is also something more.
Far from just referring to the platform economy as conventionally understood, ‘the Forum,’ at its core, refers to that economy’s distinctive nature as a set of digital markets for communication monetized by attention. Within these markets—the major social networking platforms—users ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ instances of public communication across modalities (i.e. text, image, video, and audio), not with traditional currencies, but their attention, as quantified by their time, views, likes, reposts, and comments. Advertisers in turn pay tech companies in hard currency to ensure that a large portion of this attentional pool flows to ads. This is the business model that made platform companies the titans they are today. For reference, advertising accounts for 97% of Meta’s revenue, 80% of Google’s, and 80% of TikTok’s.
Not unlike other markets that have arisen in analog environments, certain aspects of these systems are so ingenious they couldn’t possibly have been planned from the beginning. Platform companies have not only accumulated a vast captive audience for advertisers to pick off, like fish in a barrel. They have also tasked that audience with competing, at their own cost, to produce whichever media most effectively keeps them in that barrel.
From advertisers’ perspective, platform companies and their users jointly perform the functions once assigned to T.V. networks. The key difference is that whereas networks once produced programing that would attract consumers so that they could be shown ads, now the consumers do everything themselves: they create the programming and watch the ads. Instead of entertaining the public at their own cost, platforms in effect host massive contests in which members of the public compete to entertain each other. As evinced by the enormous profit margins of the major tech giants, this yields a large economic surplus, one that can be traced back to externalizing various costs of production on the public at large.[1]
That does not mean, however, that the content-creating public is working for free. The platform economy’s genius lies precisely in the fact they are not. Rather, instead of paying their billions of de facto workers in a preexistent currency, platform companies performed an economic magic trick: they created a new one. Creators are paid, not in dollars, not in crypto, but in attention.[2] On the digital content market(s), attention has all the defining properties of money:
Attention is a medium of exchange because individuals must ‘spend’ some of their scarce attentional resources by definition to engage with a given piece of content. On the ‘sell side,’ content creators are incentivized to make their content by the attention they receive in return for it.
Attention is a unit of account because it is measured so as to, in effect, ‘value’ pieces of content. This is what engagement metrics do—they quantify how much, and also what kind of attention a given piece of content has received. They price that piece of content in attentional terms. Although, unlike regular prices, attentional prices don’t convey information about the cost of consumption to the consumer—the time any one person must spend to engage with the content at issue won’t be reflected in its engagement metrics, only how much attention in aggregate it is has received. This an important difference, but it doesn’t mean attentional prices aren’t genuine prices. All it means is that they aggregate different information to prices in the traditional economy (the question of whether this stretches the notion of ‘price’ too far I put to the side for now).
Attention is also a store of value. When a given creator receives a certain amount of attention, they can reuse it later. Now, it is of course not their attention—content creators are not vampires sucking attention from their followers, so that they can live longer and disburse more attention themselves—but they can still disburse other people’s attention in a manner analogous to how an individual might spend money they first received from someone else. They can do this, for example, by telling their followers to watch something made by another creator, or by showing their followers an ad—something they can get paid for in hard currency.
Much else we expect of money we can also expect, in some form, from attention as it is exchanged in the Forum. We regularly ask of other forms of money, for instance, what ‘backs’ their value. When we ask this question of attention, we find that its value is backed by the fact humans intrinsically enjoy it for social, psychological, and biological reasons. Attention’s value is also backed by hard currencies (and so transitively backed by states), since platforms pay creators in hard currencies in proportion to the attention they get, and advertisers pay platforms in hard currencies to direct some of that attention to ads.
Similar examples abound. The interesting notion of an ‘attentional recession,’ for instance, is also suggestive of the parity between attention in the Forum and traditional currencies. If, for whatever reason, many people left social media, this would mean less attention to go around, and so creators might be more hesitant to direct their remaining attention away from themselves. They might collaborate less with other creators, for instance, and focus more on their own siloed projects. They might also take fewer risks, and focus more narrowly on doing whatever it is their viewers would like to see most. These behaviors are analogous to how individuals and firms tighten their purse strings during traditional market downturns.
There is much more to say here that would take us too far afield. Whole theoretical edifices might be built making sense of such ideas as attentional credit markets, capital investments, banking institutions, and so on. In any case, the point is that since attention in the context of the Forum walks and talks like money, we shouldn’t hesitate to treat it as money proper.
In similar fashion, the transient acts of communication typical of the Forum—i.e. ‘posts’ on social media—can be treated as ‘commodities’ of a kind, purchasable at the cost of some quantity of attention. Like commodities classically defined, posts on social media have both ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ values. That is, they have concrete properties we desire, such as being funny or informative, as well as abstract ones that quantify convertibility into other things we desire, like views, likes, reposts, and so on—metrics we can think of as together constituting a multidimensional ‘attentional price’ (or if this is too confusing, since engagement metrics don’t represent the cost of engagement like prices normally would, ‘attentional values,’ or ‘ratings’).
Put another way, while posts range widely in medium and significance, they are still all ‘content,’ in its cynical contemporary sense. What is ‘content’ in the way we now use this term if not an instance of communication with a semantic ‘use value’ of secondary importance to its attentional ‘exchange’ value? ‘Content’ is to the Forum as the commodity is to capitalism. While communication has an inordinately rich variety of ‘uses’ it is ultimately the attention it garners that determines its ‘price’ online, not its capacity to transmit sympathy, report facts, express happiness, or whatever else. One can of course ‘purchase’ content that does any one of these things, but it is not of incidental significance that, rather than arising in the course of some organic conversation, it will have been for sale.
Projecting these developments forward, there is good reason to think we are on the cusp of a transition very similar to that experienced by the premodern exchange in goods. Premodern societies exchanged goods for a much richer variety of reasons—to mark rites of passage, to welcome outsiders, to send diplomatic signals, to pay feudal or religious tribute—only for the vast majority of these to be displaced by the formalized, Pareto-improving market transaction. The rise of the Forum heralds something similar with respect to exchange in communication.
It is not that the old communicative practices will cease to exist. Even in the wealthy Western world, the practice of gift-giving survived modernity. But just as we do not know, or care to know most of the people we buy goods (and services) from, just as we often occupy completely different normative, cultural, and geographical spheres from them, our communicative behavior on the Forum—a rapidly rising proportion of our communicative behavior as such—is impersonal and transactional. When we shop around on the Forum, the subtext is: I give you attention; in return, you give me what I want to hear.[3] The old ways of communicative exchange—the kinds we associate with such ideas as democracy, community, and friendship—are on course to occupy much smaller niches than they once did. In hindsight, this is a natural development: why do the messy work of sustaining these things when you can frictionlessly see, hear, or read anything you want instead?
In short, the rise of the Forum represents much more than our adopting a new set of communications technologies. What it represents is the rise of whole new parallel economy for trade in discourse, one undergirded by the commodification of communication and the monetization of attention.[4]
4. The Forum and its social costs – a stylized review
As with similarly significant economic transitions, the rise of the Forum has imposed large costs on preexisting forms of social life. Some of these costs are associated with the creation of the Forum, and some with the dynamics internal to it.
More concretely, the Forum can be understood as a pair of distinct, but mutually supportive ‘layers.’ There are a set of mechanisms driving social behavior out of analog communication networks and into the digital ones represented by the major social networking platforms; and then there are a set of mechanisms responsible for the kinds of content created and promoted within these platforms. Call these two layers the Forum’s ‘exterior’ and ‘interior,’ respectively.
On the Forum’s exterior, the major tech corporations (Apple, Google, Meta, TikTok, etc.) have employed a range of often manipulative strategies to cement our individual and collective dependence on their products, with serious consequences for our social lives, educations, and cognitive faculties. In the Forum’s interior, that is, on social networking platforms themselves, the same companies have created a hyper-competitive environment that rewards attention above all else, leading to a profusion of content designed to induce fear, anger, and status anxiety, with serious consequences for our politics and mental health.
What follows is a stylized review of the Forum’s major social costs that, while not comprehensive, should at least bear out their reality and their urgency.
4.1. A visit to the exterior
Pursuant to the creation of large, liquid markets in content, the major platform companies have competed aggressively for the past decade and a half to make their products as dependency-inducing as possible, trying both to outdo each other and the attractions of the outside world. That competition is only continuing to intensify as their market broadens and technological change unveils dark new vistas in the art of user manipulation.
Most platforms have embraced a now-standard set of addictive design features, such as ‘infinite scroll,’ frequent push notifications, and algorithmically tailored content feeds.
Infinite scroll in particular—the practice of displaying new content in unending succession, rather than in paginated form—has played a central role in fostering excessive dependence on social media, and its main conduit, the smartphone. The vast majority of users, whether they prefer to or not, engage routinely in what has been called ‘dopamine-scrolling,’ the trance-like habit—named for the neurotransmitter’s connection to reward and novelty-seeking behavior—of swiping through one’s phone for overlong periods in search of new content.
The technology ethicist Tristan Harris has compared infinite scroll to playing a slot machine because of the variable reward schedule associated with scrolling over and over in search of new information. As with slot machines, the fact that rewards are intermittent, rather than constant—not every post is something you want to see—makes them more likely to lead to compulsive use, in line with previous research on gambling.
If infinite scroll and its other addictive counterparts weren’t bad enough, platform companies are now preparing to take advantage of new AI capabilities in text, image, and video generation to make their products even more enticing. Meta, for instance, is exploring the possibility of filling Facebook and Instagram with fake, interactive users, and offering personally tailored AI “friends” to meet what Mark Zuckerberg has described as unmet demand for personal companionship.
Beyond their addictive design, platforms also owe their success to network effects, the fact their products become more attractive the more people use them. When social media was still in its infancy, there were few disincentives associated with logging off. But now because of social media’s colossal scale, failing to continue using it means losing contact with friends and family, not to mention the wider cultural zeitgeist.
It turns out that this disincentive is so strong that even users who are being harmed by social media will opt to continue using it. Bursztyn et. al. (2023) found that large swathes of social media’s user base are caught in what the authors call a “product market trap,” a situation in which consumers are made worse off by a good or service, relative to a world where it doesn’t exist, but would prefer to use it rather than not in a world where it does. In social media’s case, while users wish they could log off, the benefits of doing so are outweighed by the costs of social exclusion.
The prospect of any notably large group detaching themselves from social media is made even more unlikely by the fact that, rather than living in a faraway realm only accessible from the fixed point of a desktop computer, our content feeds are with us at all times, bleating their Siren calls from our pockets and the palms of our hands. While the role of platforms in our current social transition can’t be overstated, their effects would be much more muted absent support from the smartphone.
Among all the innovations in consumer electronics from the turn of the millennium onward, it is this one that is most responsible for our new more digitized social reality. Smartphones have become almost cyborg-like extensions of our bodies and minds, granting us access, wherever we might be, to a swirling hivemind of humanity’s knowledge, sentiments, and self-amusements—a double-edged privilege that, once one gets acclimated to it, can be very difficult to go without. While some of the time we now spend on our phones might otherwise have been spent watching T.V. or using the computer, the smartphone has buried itself much deeper in our psyches than these technologies ever could.
Melumad and Pham (2020) found as much in their aptly-named paper “The Smartphone as a Pacifying Technology.” As they put it: “smartphones are endowed with a unique combination of properties that lead them to be viewed … as sources of comfort for owners—not unlike pacifiers for children” (p. 239). Those properties include their “portability, highly personal nature, the sense of privacy [they invoke] when engaged, and the haptic pleasure users derive from handling their device” (p. 251). Across a large-scale survey, two structural equation models, and three different experiments, the pair found substantial evidence that smartphone users use their devices as palliative ‘comfort objects’ in stressful moments, and that this effect was unique to smartphones as compared to other electronics like laptops. Consistent with these results, study after study shows that when even moderate smartphone users are separated from their devices, they experience significant[5] and persistent spikes in anxiety.
4.1.1. On social displacement
It is no wonder, given our almost childlike attachment to these devices, as well as the addictive properties of the platforms they help us access, that smartphones and social media have begun to displace face-to-face socializing on a national scale.
This is borne out by a large body of statistical evidence. Twenge et. al. (2019) found that adolescents began socializing in person significantly less throughout the 2010s, in close correlation with their increased use of digital media. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, analyzing data from the American Time Use Survey, found that in-person socializing declined by more than 20 percent from 2003 to 2023, with that number rising to 35 percent for unmarried men and people younger than 25. Across roughly the same period, Sharkey (2024) found that the time Americans spent home rose by an hour and 39 minutes a day.
These changes are being felt in the fraying of important social bonds. The American Survey Center (2021) found that almost half of Americans had three or fewer close friends in 2021, compared to only about a quarter in 1991; this despite the fact that they are of course interacting through the internet with more of their peers than ever before. As the Center put it, “the role of friends in American life is experiencing a pronounced decline.” We are living through what the Surgeon General’s office has called an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.”
Note: if you are already convinced that these are consequences of smartphone and social media use, feel free to skip to the next section; the rest of this one is dedicated to rebutting a few remaining skeptics in academia.
The evidence of a link between these trends and digital media use is not without controversy. Skeptics will be quick to point out that none of this research establishes a causal link between social media or smartphone use, and the frequency with which we socialize face-to-face. Twenge, Thompson, and others in their argumentative camp, like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, can at best point to strong correlations between the increased use of these technologies, and reductions in face-to-face socializing, but nothing more.
Not only that, but there is a large body of evidence running in other direction. Much of the recent literature on what is commonly called the “social displacement hypothesis” has found that neither social media use writ large, nor smartphone use in particular displace face-to-face socializing. For instance, one prominent experiment that assigned varying degrees of social media abstinence to its participants found that instead of spending their extra time with friends, they spent it on other internet use, work, and chores. This would seem to raise the specter of irrational moral panic. Maybe social media is a welcome new extension of our larger social lives, rather than a hollow substitute.
On deeper investigation of the displacement literature, though, it becomes clear that its claim to have cast doubt on the link between digital media use and (reductions in) face-to-face socializing is misleading at best. Research on social displacement almost uniformly compares individuals within the same social media and smartphone-native cohort, i.e. teens and young adults all sampled in the recent past. But the question of whether heavier social media or smartphone users do less face-to-face socializing than their immediate peers is not the only question at issue. In fact, it is arguably not the main question most participants in the public, rather than the academic discourse are interested in. The main question is whether the entire cohort of longtime social media and smartphones users does less face-to-face socializing than previous cohorts who lacked these kinds of media altogether, and the answer to that is unequivocally yes.
To be sure, skeptics are right to observe that the research supporting this claim is largely non-causal. But one reason for that is the practical challenge of designing a study that models the large-scale changes brought about by the initial introduction of social media and the smartphone. What one would ideally like to do is a massive randomized control trial whose participants had neither used social media or smartphones themselves, nor interacted with others who do. This group would be randomly divvied up into treatments and controls, the treatments would all be given smartphones and social media accounts (and also somehow cordoned off from the controls), and then both groups’ behavior would be monitored over—again, ideally—several months, if not years. This would be a decent proxy for what happened to Americans in the late aughts and 2010s.
An experiment of this kind, though, would face huge practical and ethical challenges, and so causal and correlational research alike have had to occur within cohorts already heavily exposed to digital media. While this is unavoidable, what isn’t is the problematic form of intellectual displacement it might inspire. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that differences within cohorts are a good guide to differences between them. That is in reality rarely the case.
The literature on social displacement is itself a demonstrative example. It tells us that among those who use social media and smartphones, heavier users do not socialize in person less than lighter ones. But there may be incidental reasons for that. For one, extroverted people use social media more, and also socialize more in-person, meaning that even if displacement does occur it may be eroded in the data by a small group of especially outgoing people. Cross-cohort data solves this problem by telling us whether extroverts and introverts alike socialized more in person before the rise of social media and the smartphone than they do after. Again, we already know that, at least on average, they did.
Another problem for within-cohort research is network effects. Once smartphone and social media use become ubiquitous, a single person’s cutting down on their own use may have little positive effect on their social life if their friends fail to do the same thing. These technologies are habit-forming, and since face-to-face interaction obviously takes two-to-tango, we learn little by finding out that one person’s social media abstinence didn’t lead, within a few short weeks, to a convalescent bloom in their social calendar. If their friends weren’t abstinent themselves, there’s no reason to think that would happen.
Oddly, some of the best available evidence for social displacement comes from a study claiming to find no evidence of it. Hall, Kearney, and Xing (2018) found, using data from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (N = 2774), that a one standard deviation increase in participants’ social media adoption in 2009 was associated with a two standard deviation decrease in their direct social contact in 2011 (p. 6, fig. 1), a large negative effect by any account. Yet the authors wave this striking result away by claiming that, since the same increase in adoption wasn’t associated with decreased social contact in 2010, and because more frequent social media use in 2011 wasn’t associated with decreased social contact in 2011, the data “[do] not support the social displacement hypothesis” (p. 8).
In reality, though, this timeline would make sense if social displacement takes a long time to manifest rather than co-occurring with changes in short-term social media use, as the displacement literature unfairly assumes it must. Nonetheless, the authors conclude on the basis of the LSAY data, and a second set on passive social media use collected from 116 people over a paltry 5 days, that belief in social displacement is likely the result of “public perceptions,” rather than thorough research. (p. 15).
Further evidence in favor of social displacement comes from a specific strand of micro-level research from the literature on smartphones. One of the better-established results in this area is that using one’s smartphone during a given social interaction lowers the perceived ‘quality’ of that interaction by reducing subjective feelings of enjoyment, empathy, and/or connection. Combine this with the fact that 89% of Americans used their phones during their most recent social activity, and that the average user interacts with their phone every five minutes, and it becomes plausible that face-to-face interaction has become much less enjoyable over the last decade and a half, leading people to prefer spending time on other activities.
If this is one of the mechanisms behind social displacement, it further underscores why it is unfair to expect displacement to show up over shorter time spans. It wasn’t until several years after their introduction that smartphones became omnipresent in our social lives. It would’ve taken a couple more years at least for us to reallocate our time to account for the lesser relative appeal of socializing face-to-face. Moreover, even if heavier social media and smartphone users do not engage in fewer discrete face-to-face interactions, they may spend less time within those interactions actually socializing, as opposed to using their phones. In addition to comparing distinct cohorts, accounting for this more subtle form of smartphone-based displacement might yield very different results from the preexisting literature.
Though we have a lot more to learn, the balance of evidence favors that social displacement between cohorts, if not also within them, is very real. Over the last fifteen years, the frequency with which we socialize in person has plunged. There is a good chance that the relative enjoyment we get from socializing has fallen as well. Though certainty is hard to come by, it at least seems very likely that smartphones and social media deserve a large share of the responsibility.
4.1.2. On education and cognition
Social displacement is only one of the serious casualties plausibly attributable to social media and the smartphone. It is not only our relationships that have changed since the advent of these technologies, but our basic capacities for processing and navigating the world. In particular, there is worrying evidence to suggest we are having a harder time learning, and that this is not only a surface-level phenomenon, but one with deeper roots in our neurology.
Several meta-analyses on the effects of smartphone and social media use on educational attainment have found small, but significant negative effects across students’ GPAs and exam scores. While a lot of the underlying research is cross-sectional (i.e. based on data taken at a single point in time), the negative association appears in more robust longitudinal studies as well (although results are more mixed in social media’s case).
While some of these effects are likely due to social media and smartphones acting as distractions from learning, there is also evidence of longer-term impacts on cognitive functioning. Horvath (2020), for instance, found that smartphone addicts—which make up 12-28% of the user population (pg. 3)—showed significantly lower grey matter volume in the insula, and significantly lower activity in the right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), regions of the brain associated with craving and addiction. The ACC, for instance, is associated with inhibitory control and tends to show lower activity in those with substance use disorders experiencing withdrawal (pg. 11). In other words, especially heavy smartphone users appear to exhibit structural neurological differences similar to those whose capacity to override strong impulses or emotions has been weakened by substance abuse. ERP studies (which use EEG to measure neural responses to specific stimuli) on both excessive smartphone and social media users have also found that both groups perform worse than non-excessive users on tests of inhibitory control.
We should note of course that these results are only correlational. They may suggest that those who already have poor inhibitory control are more likely to become excessive smartphone or social media users. But what little experimental evidence exists on this question suggests causality runs the other way too. In one of the only randomized control trials to date on smartphone use and cognition, Hadar et. al. (2015) gave smartphones to a group lacking any previous experience with them for three weeks and compared their performance on a suite of cognitive tests to another control group of nonusers. Those in the treatment group “showed a significant decrease in information processing capacity compared with their baseline [before the intervention, while] no such effect was observed in the control group.” The treatment group, but not the control also exhibited “greater delay discounting” after the treatment, meaning an inability to delay gratification in pursuit of a larger long-term reward (p. 318). While this was study was small (N = 38), its high-quality design makes it worthy of close consideration.
Even supposing smartphones don’t have shorter-term neurological effects, and are no more harmful than other screen-based electronics, the simple fact of their increasing the amount of time children spend looking at screens could be the cause of enormous harm by itself. That was the conclusion reached by Manwell et. al. (2022) in a review of 37 studies in the Journal of Integrative Neuroscience. The authors’ central warning is worth reading in full:
We hypothesize that excessive screen exposure during critical periods of development in Generation Z will lead to mild cognitive impairments in early to middle adulthood resulting in substantially increased rates of early onset dementia in later adulthood. We predict that from 2060 to 2100, the rates of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) will increase significantly, far above the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) projected estimates of a two-fold increase, to upwards of a four-to-six-fold increase … [enough to] result in widespread societal and economic distress and the complete collapse of already overburdened healthcare systems in developed countries (pg. 1, my italics)
The authors note that the disparity between the CDC’s estimates and their own is driven by the former’s basis in “factors related to the age, sex, race and ethnicity of individuals born before 1950 who did not have access to mobile digital technology during critical periods of brain development.” They add that, “compared to previous generations, the average 17-19 year old spends approximately 6 hours a day a on mobile digital devices … whereas individuals born before 1950 at the same age spent zero” (pg. 1). In other words, because the CDC projections are based on the number and demographics of current Alzheimer’s patients, they fail to account for the unique risk factors faced by those in the future from growing up amid heavy digital media use.
Recent data on literacy and numeracy lends credence to the idea that Generation Z is on track for at least “mild” cognitive impairment. 9 and 13 year olds’ scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress—often referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card”—have seen historically unprecedented declines in reading and math in recent years, and while they’ve been steeper since 2020, the overall trend precedes the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The same thing has happened across the OECD, with reading, math, and science scores on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, also showing unprecedented declines, all of which line up disturbingly well with the 2010s era social transformation brought on by social media and the smartphone. Nor have American adults been spared, with the most recent round of PIAAC results showing marked declines in literacy and numeracy across age groups.
Recent commentators on these trends, also citing the broader drop in recreational reading among children and adults, have gone as far as suggesting we are reverting to something like a pre-literate oral culture, one that, because of its preference for speech over writing, is both less able to sustain the generation and transmission of complex ideas, and also more likely to prioritize the social-signaling functions of language over those to do with the neutral transmission of knowledge. While this concern may be exaggerated somewhat, is does seem directionally correct. We don’t need to experience a wholesale regression to oral culture for it to be true that our capacity to internalize and transmit complex knowledge is getting worse. Anecdotally, many people seem to admit as much about themselves, and the data seems to bear it out too.
Over the last fifteen years, companies like Apple, Google, and Meta have succeeded at migrating a massive and ever-growing share of human social behavior into publicly unaccountable systems they control. This has quite plausibly come at the cost of things we place great value on, and yet it has happened nonetheless. While a transition of this kind would once have required a period of great social upheaval, this one’s technical basis in consumer-facing media and electronics made it much faster and more cost-effective to carry out.
The strange and unstable world we have found ourselves in was built, in a darkly comic twist, on gizmos and gadgets, on cat videos and rage comics, on that app that used the iPhone accelerometer to make it look like you were drinking beer, on TikTok dances and Bitmojis and Overwatch porn. It was built on a fact the tech elite have exploited to world-historical effect, that we are animals easily diverted from our own flourishing, that like many of our smaller-brained counterparts, we will give up everything for depthless bursts of instant gratification.
4.2. Entering the interior
As a consequence of the predatory mechanisms hard at work on the Forum’s exterior, we have for the most part been successfully corralled into the enormous markets for communication represented by the major social networking platforms. It is now a matter of daily routine for us to visit these platforms in order to exchange our attention for content, or our content for attention.
Attention, recall, is like money in this context: it is a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. You can accumulate it, measure it, and spend it like hard currency (e.g. by directing your followers to an advertised product, or another piece of content). But attention is obviously very different from other forms of money. It is neither an object we manufacture, nor a number on a digitized ledger. It is something we disburse using our bodies. As a result, it is a form of money more intimately connected to human biology than any other. We have evolved to distribute our attention according to certain patterns, and if you understand those patterns then you can exploit them for your own gain. From this principle flows much of the what goes on in the Forum’s interior.
Successful content creators are well aware of our attentional biases and have taken advantage of them by relying, in various guises, on the same strategy: exploiting the extremes of human emotion. Inciting heightened excitement, surprise, jealousy, anger, and so on—these are the quickest paths to super-virality. This dynamic is apparent in the exaggerated facial expressions now typical of video thumbnails, and the associated phenomenon of “YouTube voice,” the over-the-top, car-salesman-like tone now widely used in video content. It is also apparent in more disturbing places, such as in the viral success of misogynists like Andrew Tate and Adin Ross, the “skinny influencers” promoting disordered eating on TikTok, and the “pedophile hunters” movement, whose members stream themselves catfishing, and then beating up men looking for underage sex.
Those responsible for these fixtures of our new discourse economy recognize, at least implicitly, that we are animals wired to prioritize certain stimuli over others. The reason our emotional extremes are “extreme” to begin with is because they evolved to feel that way in order to track experiences more likely to affect our (evolutionary) fitness. That is also why the negative extremes—fear, anger, hate, and so on—tend to be even more salient than the positive ones; they were once correlated with genuine physical threats. This is the reason why human psychology exhibits a holistic negativity bias, as well more why we have more specific attentional biases toward negative stimuli. Like other organisms, we are uniquely attuned to anything suggestive of danger.
4.2.1. On politics
Note: a greatly expanded version of this section is now available here.
It is unsurprising, then, given our biological endowment, that much viral content—especially of a political nature—appeals to the darker side of our emotional range. Recent scholarship has shown that posts which are sad, fearful, uncivil, morally and emotionally indignant, hostile towards out-groups, and negatively valenced in general spread much further than their more neutral counterparts.
Brady et. al. (2017), for instance, found that each additional word with “moral-emotional content” (e.g. “duty,” “fear,” “shame,” “war”) increased political Twitter posts’ diffusion factor by 20%. Brady et. al. (2019) later reproduced this finding using the tweets and retweets of over 500 presidential candidates and members of congress. Expressions of “moral anger and disgust,” the authors found, diffused particularly quickly.
What the design of the Forum’s interior does, in effect, is to scramble our normal incentive environment surrounding expressions of extreme emotion. For most of our existence, such expressions have been reserved for rare, risk-laden occasions. But online, the incentives run the other way: the more scared or angry you are in public, the more attention flows to you. Plus the personal risks you run are virtually nil; there is no one in your immediate vicinity who will punish you for crying wolf, or risk initiating a physical altercation.
As bad as these incentives are, though, it is important to guard against the impression that everyone responds to them in the same degree. As Robertson, del Rosario, and Van Bavel (2024) explain:
Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social media has found that, while only 3% of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of all content. Furthermore, 74% of all online conflicts are started in just 1% of communities, and 0.1% of users shared 80% of fake news. Not only does this extreme minority stir discontent, spread misinformation, and spark outrage online, they also bias the meta-perceptions of most users who passively “lurk” online. (pg. 1)
That last point is particularly key: the overrepresentation of extreme content in the Forum, even if it is only originated by a small group, distorts everyone’s perceptions of public opinion. Social media creates, as political scientist Henry Farrell has put it, “publics with malformed collective understandings”—in this case, that perceive themselves as much more ideologically extreme overall than they in fact are on an individual level.
That said, how malformed that understanding is remains an open question. There is some evidence to suggest that what began as a malformed understanding may have become more accurate over time. Those perceiving disproportionate extremism also tend to become more extreme themselves. Kim et. al. (2021) found, for instance, that those exposed to toxic ‘featured’ comments on Facebook posts were more likely to post toxic comments later of their own volition. Brady et. al. (2021) found that Twitter users “conform their outrage expressions to the expressive norms of their social networks,” (p. 1) and become more likely to express outrage when their surrounding social network is itself more extreme (p. 8). And in an as-yet unpublished preprint, Brady and co-authors found that in a simulated Twitter-like environment, “engagement-based algorithms,” promoted morally and emotionally charged political content, changed participants’ perception of descriptive and prescriptive norms surrounding such content, and ultimately made them more intent on posting content of this kind themselves.
As concerning as this research is, it is important not to overstate the reach of any given ‘pathway to radicalization.’ We should note that, first, the baseline number of individuals engaging in more extreme or emotionally charged political activity online is still very low by proportion; second, that only about half of American social media users are politically active online in the first place; and third, that political content is much more typical of some platforms (like Twitter) than others (like TikTok). These considerations are suggestive of a more limited, but perhaps no less dangerous conclusion: that just the most politically active subset of social media users is becoming more extreme, whether in its specific views, or degree of affective investment in politics generally.
While this group only amounts to a small slice of the voting population, it drives many highly significant political outcomes. The most politically active social media users skew much wealthier and more educated than average, meaning that they are also likely to be more politically influential offline. Wealthy, educated elites have much larger ‘megaphones’ with which to influence the wider political culture, whether because they are more connected to political insiders, have more money for lobbying and donations, or appear more often in both establishment and self-styled ‘anti-establishment’ media.
This would appear to land us in the same place, albeit by a different causal channel. Whether social media is making everyone’s politics more extreme, absent substantial mediation by elite influencers, or making elites in particular more extreme, who in turn disseminate their views to the wider public, it is almost certainly a significant driver of what has become an untenably angry, anxious, and chaotic political environment over the last decade and a half.
While its propensity to fuel political outrage is hardly a unique property of social media, actors in other mediums, like the hosts of inflammatory T.V. and talk radio shows, have never been as diverse, unregulated, and numerous as social media users. In the same way more competitive markets for goods squeeze more desirable commodities into existence, so more competitive markets in communication do the same for content. Relative to other sources of media, the Forum is a uniquely powerful incubator of outrage-inducing engagement-bait.
Online harassment campaigns, hate speech, ‘cancel culture,’ ‘doomerism’, and widespread political acrimony are in hindsight the obvious result of restructuring social life as a market where acts of communication are valued by the amount of attention they elicit—few things gets more attention than the ringing of alarm bells. That the attentional demand for the outrageous and hostile exceeds that for the true and the just means the former is what will get made en masse. The latter, in turn, are set to become the informational equivalent of luxury goods.
4.2.2. On mental health
Note: an expanded / revised version of this section is now available here.
It is not only the explicitly political, though, which is to blame for the Forum’s toxic atmosphere. Its competitive market structure makes the Forum a powerful generator of social conflict and status anxiety more generally. It has never been easier to compare oneself to others, to build resentment over those comparisons, and to lash out in response, particularly when lashing out is rewarded by engagement from one’s peer group. It has also never been easier, especially for younger users, to be made to feel lesser-than by the glossy irrealism of others’ lives online. But rather than lashing out, an unprecedented amount of adolescents, the population the spends the most time ‘inside’ the Forum, have fallen into mental health crisis.
Despite remaining more or less constant through the aughts, mental illness among young people in the U.S. began to sharply increase starting around 2010. To give a small, but grim sampling from Jonathan Haidt’s popular book The Anxious Generation, from 2010 through 2020, depression increased by 106% among college students, anxiety by 139% and 103%, respectively, among those ages 18-25 and 26-34, and suicide rates by 167% and 91%, respectively, among girls and boys aged 10-14 (p. 26-31).
There is of course a lively debate as to whether these developments can be attributed to social media. Critics often cite large meta-analyses which they claim show the existing evidence to be equivocal or inconclusive. For instance, Candice Odgers, a prominent critic of the alleged link between social media and youth mental health claims, in her critical review of Haidt’s book, that efforts by researchers to search for the “large effects suggested by Haidt … have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations” (p. 29).
Odgers’s phrasing would seem to suggest a blend of statistically significant and insignificant effect sizes with both positive and negative signs. But that is not a remotely accurate description of the literature. Of the 4 meta-analyses and review articles cited by Odgers in her review of Haidt, every single one, but her own openly acknowledges that the predominant result in the correlational research they review, with respect to adolescent anxiety and/or depression in particular, is a small, but statistically significant association of about r = .1, in other words a persistent, although modest association between social media use and mental illness. Several similarly comprehensive meta-analyses Odgers does not cite all find the exact same thing. The most recent of these—Liu et. al. (2022)—reviewed 21 cross-sectional and five longitudinal studies covering 55,340 participants and found that “the risk of depression increased by 13% for each hour increase in social media use in adolescents” (p. 1). The notion that the correlational research is equivocal or inconclusive on this point is flat-out false.[6]
This of course does not show much in and of itself. It may be that those correlations reflect causality running in the other direction—that more depressed or anxious kids use more social media, rather than the other way around. But it does mean that the hypothesis of a causal link passes initial muster. Social media might well have been associated with reduced anxiety and depression. It might well have only ever had a statistically insignificant association. But instead, most of the correlational research points the same way at a first pass.
Fortunately, we don’t only have the correlational research to rely on. A growing number of experimental and quasi-experimental studies support the existence of a genuine causal link. Some are social media ‘reduction’ studies, in which regular social media users take a break from social media for a period of time, and some are social media ‘exposure’ studies, which assess the impact of gaining access to social media. Both point in favor of genuine causation.
In a recent meta-analysis of 20 social media reduction RCTs covering 10,106 (adult) participants, Liu et. al. (2025) found that the interventions had a common effect size of .233 on overall well-being, a small, but significant positive effect (p. 10). The largest reduction experiment to date, Alcott et. al. (2020), assessed the effects on 2,743 people of deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm election, and found they experienced .09 SD and .1 SD decreases in measures of anxiety and depression, respectively. Another large study, Tromholt (2016), with 1,095 participants, found that quitting Facebook for only one week significantly improved life satisfaction and emotional positivity, and that both effects were larger for both heavy and passive users. Brailovskaia et. al. (2020), Lambert et. al. (2022), Reed, Fowkes, and Khela (2023), and Davis and Goldfield (2025), though smaller in size, all found similar, significant effects in their own reduction experiments. Findings of decreased symptoms of depression were particularly common. Though a number of other small experiments show conflicting results, the balance of evidence, especially when adjusted for statistical power, favors a small, but positive causal effect of reducing social media use on mental health and general well-being.
Reduction studies, though, can at best tell us about the likely effects of reducing social media use in a world where it is already very common. Exposure studies, on the other hand, can help us understand the impact of its initial spread. As one would expect given the evidence reviewed so far, exposure studies provide further confirmation of a causal link between social media use and mental health. Two in particular are worth highlighting.
Braghieri, Levy, and Makarin (2022) took advantage of a natural experiment—the staggered early rollout of Facebook on college campuses between 2004 and 2006—to assess the differential impact of the platform on mental health among college students through 2008. They found that the introduction of Facebook led to a .085 SD increase in an index of poor mental health among college students, a magnitude equivalent to around 22 percent of the effect of losing one’s job, and a 2 percentage point increase in the share of students suffering from depression. They also calculated (on the basis of some relatively strong assumptions[7]), that the introduction of Facebook accounts for approximately 24 percent of the increased prevalence of severe depression among college students over the last two decades (p. 3662).
Guo (2022) also took advantage of a natural experiment—spatial variability in the introduction of high-speed wireless internet to British Columbia—to assess the impact of greater social media access on teenage students. She found both that access to high-speed wireless internet was a good proxy for greater social media use (p. 22-23), and that, while boys did not experience a significant change in mental health in areas with access to high-speed wireless (and if anything saw slight improvement), teen girls in those areas saw a 90% increase in severe mental health diagnoses from 2010 through 2019 (p. 28). This is consistent with previous research finding associations between digital media use and mental health to be larger in girls than in boys.
Guo explains her findings by pointing to research that suggests girls are more sensitive to how social media might reshape their social landscape and interpersonal lives. She also cites internal research done by Meta which found, among other things, that Instagram made “’body image issues worse for one in three teen girls’” and that “’constant comparison on Instagram is the reason why there are higher levels of anxiety and depression’” (p. 9).
Meta’s in-house research team isn’t alone in this conclusion. A number of recent papers have honed in on interpersonal comparison as a key mechanism explaining the link between social media and mental illness among young people, in particular girls. Adolescents are (in)famously attuned to social hierarchies, and whereas they once would’ve only had to worry about local ones, those at their school or in their community, the Forum thrusts them at an early age into a substantially larger, more competitive social pool, one in which the “popular kids” are not just the richest or most attractive in their school, but the richest and most attractive in the world.
Not only that, but engagement metrics in effect serve as ‘popularity scores’ that allow them to compare where they or their peers fall in the pecking order. It makes a lot of sense that 57% of Gen Zers would “become an influencer if given the opportunity,” considering that, for them, this is more or less equivalent to becoming ‘the most popular type of person’ in their now oversized reference group. What is often missed in overspecific debates about the hyper-competitive nature of college admissions is that all of childhood is now much more competitive, including and especially the childish parts. Call it ‘free trade’ in the teenage popularity market. Once localized status competition—subject to various forms of ‘infant industry protection’—has now gone global. Unionized American machinists versus sweatshop workers in Bangladesh? Try being a teenage girl competing for likes with Charli D’Amelio.
Jokes aside, it is straightforward to see how, for the Forum’s heaviest and most sensitive users, constant contact with curated displays of high status might lead to distress. Exposure experiments like Guo’s further reinforce the conclusion implied by every other line of evidence: social media causes small, but statistically significant increases in mental illness.
Those who continue to stubbornly oppose this conclusion are going to find themselves with fewer and fewer intellectual allies in the years to come. Strong evidence continues to pile up, and that is largely before the effects of the much more recent advent of short-from video content have made it into datasets. Though a few academic holdouts will likely continue to harp on the issue of small effect sizes, they would do well to consider the following:
a) much of the literature is cross-sectional or dependent on short interventions, meaning it won’t capture the compounding effects of social media use over time (remember: teens spend almost 5 hours on social media per day—and have been doing so for over a decade);
b) effect sizes are averages, and so consistent with vulnerable sub-populations who fare much worse than the norm, and in turn impose large second-order costs on others (financial, emotional, etc.);
c) the baseline number of adolescents with any one mental illness is low, and so not especially difficult to increase in large percentage terms with an intervention (i.e. social media) applied to 100% of adolescents; and
d) many adolescents may be on the threshold of mental illness, and only need a small nudge to be pushed over.
For these reasons and others, small effects on the individual level can mean very large ones on the national level.[8] While numerous questions of course remain as to the exact nature of social media’s effects on mental health, the evidence of a genuine causal link is strong. If nothing else, the rise of the Forum has at minimum done serious, and sometimes irreversible harm to many of America’s young people.
The interior of the Forum is a vast and hyper-competitive market for nearly every kind of communicative act, whether textual, visual, or auditory. Considering its sheer breadth, it is surprising its impacts haven’t been even larger. What seems clear, at minimum, is that the Forum is an environment most humans are not well outfitted for. We did not evolve to interact with hundreds of thousands of strangers for multiple hours a day, particularly not ones stoking fear, anger, and self-loathing of almost every conceivable variety.
That does not mean we won’t adapt to this environment; history tells us that we probably will. But as it stands—if the trajectory of the last fifteen years is any guide—we have many reasons to fear, and few reasons to remain hopeful, about the sorts of people that will come out the other side.
5. Conclusion – on completing the trinity
There are few processes more emblematic of modernity than the routing of immense tracts of uncodified social behavior through ever more structured, legible, and narrowly optimized filters. The rise of the Forum is in this sense an incontrovertible sign that we never left the long modern period, that history in its most upheaving, spiralic sense is still chugging along.
For James Scott—who died in July of last year at 87—modernity meant, among other things, the loss of vast stores of practical knowledge, or ‘mētis.’ Mētis is that subtle, uncodifiable form of know-how often necessary for performing complex tasks—what is sometimes called ‘tacit knowledge.’ That skills like playing tennis or riding a bike can’t be learned except by repeated practice is because they require mētis, knowledge manifested so subtly in our brains and bodies that its content is indescribable. As the social world undergoes change, Scott argued, many once-important forms of practical knowledge dissipate and are eventually lost.
Though physical, rather than mental or emotional skill are often cited as exemplifying mētis, the truth is that mētis is essential to every human endeavor, both individual and collective. To no less an extent than riding a bike, navigating social and political life requires massive stores of tacit knowledge, knowledge that can’t be accumulated except by participation. There is no instruction manual for how to make friends, or fall in love, or reach consensus. To learn these skills requires practice, and to sustain them requires norms—norms that impart pro-social aptitudes directly, as well as which sustain an environment where people learn them and are rewarded for it.
The world of the Forum, as Scott might have anticipated, is ill-suited to developing the mētis for human social cooperation. Our cooperative tendencies grew from analog soil, grew from contexts in which, without cooperation, we would die, or at least suffer physical harm. The Forum lacks not only these stakes, but the informational richness of face-to-face interaction, the length and depth of conversation, of body language, of place. It also lacks norms that last. To make and enforce a norm is hard. It is costly. That remains so on the Forum. But to break a norm, to spurn it, to ignore it, is easy—because on the Forum, no one can punish you for doing so in any way that matters.[9] More importantly, it is breaking norms, not making them, that gets the most attention.
Recalling the parable with which we began, what is being “dismembered” by the Forum—on a scale without even remote precedent—is our ‘pro-social mētis,’ our basic aptitudes for cooperation, the wealth of intuitive knowledge we have long used to live well together. Across social life, education, and politics, the Forum is either corroding, or displacing altogether the messy, opaque, frictional—but for those very reasons, enlightening—experiences by which we learn to communicate in a manner conductive to the public good. Those experiences cannot and will not survive their being narrowly evaluated on their propensity to win attention to the exclusion of every other goal or value.
We have, for years, been misled by the myopic conception of social media and the smartphone as just another pair of communications technologies, ones easily grouped in with predecessors like the telephone and personal computer. While there is nothing obviously wrong with this perspective, it elides more than it reveals. Much of what has been said about social media and the smartphone suffers from a narrowness of vision, a failure to grok the larger historical forces lurking in what risks seeming like just another round of American consumer indulgence.
The rise of social media and the smartphone has initiated a transition between communicative paradigms, one happening so quickly we’ve barely begun to reckon with its consequences. The social world as we once knew it was anchored in a multiplicity of communicative practices distributed across a wide array of analog cultural and geographic contexts. The social world being born is anchored in the practice of attention maximization, and spans a set of digital markets jointly covering almost 65% of the global population.
This is the world of the Forum, a world that needs to be named, lest we one day forget the world that preceded it.
You may still be wondering about the name ‘the Forum.’ You may be wondering why the discursive economy made possible by social media and the smartphone deserves a name this general, a name that seems at once to risk emptiness and excess. But there is, in fact, a reason for this specific term, with its lofty historical and juridical connotations. The name of the Forum has to speak to its sweeping nature, has to speak to the fact it is not just a set of technologies, but an institution, one no domain of human communication can remain insulated from for long.
But to refer to the Forum as an institution is still to the understate the point. The Forum isn’t just an institution. The Forum is the institution through which public discourse now flows. It is the institution making claim to this this foundational part of our species’ affairs. The Forum is doing to civil society what the state once did to political authority. It is doing to the public square what the market once did to production and exchange. It is modernizing social life.
We are living through the birth of what may well be remembered as a foundational institution of the modern world—and have so far failed to realize it. The great duality of state and market, of public and private, of the political and the economic, are on the verge of becoming a trinity, as modernity extends its reach into uncharted, tempestuous waters.
State, market, and forum.
[1] A similar economic logic explains the appeal to networks of reality and game shows, which offload the costs usually associated with writing and acting to members of the public.
[2] The possibility of creating a massive producer surplus in one currency by substituting the portion of it paid to labor with a previously nonexistent one is a fascinating and underexplored economic phenomenon. This is similar to the dynamic whereby a surplus is created by taking advantage of unpriced natural goods, like the sun and wind in the case of green energy, or, to pick a case more similar to the one at hand, the free labor of slaves. The monetization of our natural capacity to disburse attention is a bit similar to a scenario wherein slaves are made to compete to see who is physically stronger or faster—in return, perhaps, for ‘strength’ or ‘speed’ tokens—by doing some economically valuable work, say, harvesting tobacco crops. Under certain conditions, maybe winning the most such tokens would be seen as reward enough for doing taxing and otherwise uncompensated labor. At the moment, that others might pay them (more) attention seems to be enough for many content creators on social media.
[3] For a very insightful paper on this phenomenon in the context of in online political media, see Williams (2022).
[4] What, then, to make, conceptually speaking, of advertisers purchasing users’ attention from platform companies? Perhaps this is more akin to exchanging currencies than it is to buying goods or services. If so, advertisers are engaged in a kind of temporal currency arbitrage: they trade dollars to platforms for attention in the short term, knowing that this attention is worth more dollars to them in the long term because it leads consumers to buy their products.
[5] Unless otherwise specified or obvious from context, by significant, I always mean statistically significant, not intuitively large or important.
[6] Read Haidt’s own rebuttal to Odgers here.
[7] These assumptions, however, seem more likely to understate than overstate the authors’ case. They are that “(i) Facebook utilization rates among college students did not change substantially after 2004–2005; (ii) the effects of Facebook did not change over time; [and that] (iii) Facebook does not have cumulative effects.” In footnote 23, the authors point out that (iii) is probably false, given that “the negative effects of Facebook on mental health become stronger with longer exposure to the platform” (p. 3675). There are various reasons to think both (i) and (ii) are false as well in ways that would increase the share of depression explainable by Facebook, e.g. that utilization rates have in fact greatly increased since 2005, and that the site has added plenty of new features since then.
[8] For a more detailed defense of the “indispensability of small effects,” see Götz, Gosling, and Rentfrow (2021).
[9] ‘Cancel culture’ may seem like a counterexample, but note that so-called ‘cancellation’ itself involved norm-breaking in the form of imposing harsh informal sanctions most Americans saw as too strong. Also consider that, such as it existed, ‘cancel culture’ was widely maligned precisely because it attempted to impose pro-social norms. Moreover, even if ‘cancel culture’ could occasionally impose large costs for breaking certain norms, many of those norms (depending on the case) were not widely held, and for that very reason, ‘cancellation’ often failed to make or sustain norms among all but a very small population. At most, the Forum can generate, though not sustain norms of a very restricted, dysfunctional kind.
Like many people, I am not especially eager to replace the conversation of neighbors and intellectuals with TikTok and Twitter as a general mode. My instinct is to say that it would be necessarily worse if you are correct that the Forum is becoming an institution. But once I consider the state and the market, I feel a bit better. We (arguably, inconsistently) agree that the state and the market should operate with laws and regulation. If the Forum is the third institution, the same must be true of it. If you can't murder your political opponents or sell heroin to children, we should be able to insist that you can't likewise create a exploitive business models in the attention economy.
Really loved this essay Nathan, thanks for taking the time to write this!