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People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more

People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy factors, crime, drugs, values and taboos changing too fast, uncertainty about the future. We will probably won't find a culprit, but if I had to bet, I would say that far reaching event like the Vietnam war, reagonomics, the downsizing mania from the 80's are probably more important factors than the recent creation of social networks. If we have to blame someone, maybe we should be looking at figures like Lee Yacoca, Carl Icahn, and Jack Welch instead of Mark Zukerberg.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
>We will probably won't find a culprit It's capitalism. That's the answer you're looking for
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > It's capitalism We had capitalism for a LONG time before we had the international teen mental illness epidemic.
  - spunker540 3y ago
    And this teen epidemic would be the first complaint I’ve heard lodged against capitalism. Can’t be that.
  - jampekka 3y ago
    Not this level of capitalism. The post-war consensus economy of the west had heavy state intervention and economic involvement. Things started to change towards "free market" neoliberalism (AKA voodoo economics) in around the 1970's, and the rate of the change exploded after the fall of Soviet Union.
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    Yes but we didnt' have the entire thing uploaded into our heads. To use Byung-Chul Han's phrase, you're both master and slave in one now. You're not even a subject any more (that has some places to escape to) but a project. To tie it into the article, the social media dynamic, young girls seeing themselves as never-ending beauty projects that have to get lip-fillers, more clicks, more likes, compete with each other, is just the logic of capital without even someone needing to subject them to it, they're doing it themselves. Capital's eaten all the physical space, it's still hungry so it's gobling up all the mental space, and information tech was the vector to jump from one to the other. And it does to the mental environment exactly what it did to physical spaces once its done harvesting them.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  So long as we're making sweeping claims without any attempt at supporting them, you're wrong, this is all downstream from the Protestant Reformation.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Capitalism (an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit) was invented prior to written history so the reformation only exists in the context of private property being a core assumption of society. That assumption is NEW in the history of humanity, the concept of "property" has only existed for about 50,000 years The protestant reformation then was an attempt to wrest property away from the catholic organization and distribute it. The goal being to eliminate the primary economic organization and "democratize" it. The concept of hoarding property flowed from scarcity anxieties that are only socially maintained and hoarding property is the root issue You can read my proof here: https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
    - chasd00 3y ago
      anti-capitalism ideas, so great they're mandatory and a wall built around you so you can't flee to somewhere else - everywhere it's been tried
      - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
        I’m sorry that you’re ignorant of every single indigenous culture but that’s really not my problem No matter, you’ll simply make the following argument: that might makes right because those indigenous cultures couldn’t stand up to the genocidal domination tactics of property based thought right?
        HideousKojima 3y ago
        I know this may come as a shock, so you may want to sit down for this one: those indigenous tribes and cultures were genociding each other for millennia before Adam Smith ever wrote The Wealth of Nations.
- cynicalsecurity 3y ago
  Comrade, have you ever studied the history of the USSR? Give it a try, it's fun. It tells a story how 1/6 of the planet's land surface for 80 years was turned into garbage. They did it with one simple trick.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    This is such a predictable response I’ll say it for the millionth time: The Trotskiest-Leninist State-Command Economy (aka USSR) is not the opposite or even that much different than State Capitalism. I won’t fight this strawman
    - cynicalsecurity 3y ago
      So far, nothing else exists. Communism/socialism failed like Chernobyl reactor number 4. Adopting a new socio-economic system some young cocky pal imagines in his head? Nope, thank you. I'm too old and experienced for that. Not in a million of years.
coolThingsFirst 3y ago
> never ask why social media is like that. Because they value profits over anything else? The only thing they care about it is having people spend more and more time on the webpages. You'd be surprised at the caliber of talent that spends their valuable years optimising for this. More ad revenue at the expense of mental health is totally acceptable for interwebs comps. During COVID when the world got inside we just realised how sick 'social connection' sites are, from doomscrolling to outsourcing self-esteem to Tinder. It's an organised system of hijacking attention and minds.
brvsft 3y ago
> People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. This is the kind of worldview that comes from years of navel-gazing in a therapist's office. "Why do I beat my kids? ...Because my father beat me! Now that I understand why I do it, I can stop beating my kids..." Or, you could just stop beating your kids. It doesn't matter why it happens, it just matters that it happens. But instead of preventing or discouraging kids (or people in general) from using social media, you can blame the ghost of Ronald Reagan--the gift that keeps on giving.
- truculent 3y ago
  > This is the kind of worldview that comes from years of navel-gazing in a therapist's office. "Why do I beat my kids? ...Because my father beat me! Now that I understand why I do it, I can stop beating my kids..." Or, you could just stop beating your kids. Which of these approaches is more likely to result in someone changing their behaviour? Is there any evidence that advice to “just stop X” is as or more effective than causally aligned methods? What an unusual attitude for an engineer to have. I suppose you fix bugs by “just not writing bugs in the first place”, too.
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    > s there any evidence that advice to “just stop X” is as or more effective than causally aligned methods? There is clear evidence that taking longer to stop beating your kids is more harmful to them so less effective than just stop beating them.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - truculent 3y ago
      … which is irrelevant if advice to “just stop” has no effect
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  This is funny because most therapists these days practice CBT or one of its variants, which is explicitly focused on behaviors and outcomes and gives minimal weight to investigating "root causes" like that. The kind of worldview that comes from never doing therapy I guess.
Podgajski 3y ago
[flagged]
- achrono 3y ago
  Is there a reliable overview of all such evidence that you can recommend? >I know you’re all gonna laugh at this Alas it is this attitude itself that might become laughable. I don't get what is so incredibly unbelievable about EMF interacting with biology, and I certainly hope we don't discover this the wrong way.
  - Podgajski 3y ago
    Unfortunately, there’s not, annd unfortunately a lot of it is really bad. I would just keep up with the studies that are being published and the sources of their funding. The website the environmental health trust has a lot of material that I would categorize as mostly reliable. https://ehtrust.org/ https://ehtrust.org/
    - meiraleal 3y ago
      I think it is very unfair that your reply was flagged while the same level theory of OP comment is top ranked.
      - Podgajski 3y ago
        I’m not, I’ve been at this for a while. It’s very strong bias of those in the tech industry that there’s no problem with radio frequency electromagnetic radiation. I was the same way. I was a network engineer for Cisco Systems from 1996 to 2000. I would’ve said the same thing before I realized it affected me in the late 201Os. There’s been such strong propaganda from the telecommunications industry because of the money involved. Just the fact that people keep saying “radiation comes from the sun as well” is proof of this fact sis, it ignores the fundamental science of how radio frequency telecommunications work. Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to comment about my post being flagged. I’m not gonna post on hacker news anymore, there’s just too much noise.
slowmovintarget 3y ago
Social media is an amplifier of negative aspects of social interaction. We've not had anything like that before. The algorithms are aimed at farming attention for the paying customers; advertisers. To do that, the algorithms shovel outrage, instant trends, negativity, and massively amplified in-group out-group dichotomies... They do all of this on purpose. This is new. None of today's teenagers are impacted by the Vietnam war, by Reagan, or anything from the 80s at all. Gen X felt those things. But a teenager today was born between 2003 and 2010. Most of them don't even know who Jack Welch is or that Chrysler used to be one of the "Big 3" (and used to be called Chrysler). But they know what TikTok is, they know Twitter, and Twitch, and YouTube, and Instagram. And they suffer from interacting with a system designed to manipulate attention. These systems are far more immediately detrimental to mental health, especially for someone entering adolescence when negative emotional complexes arise naturally as a neurological consequence of maturing, than any of the business or political activities of the 80s. Zuckerberg's own company had studies that showed this to be true. Studies that showed dramatic increases in suicidal tendencies among teenage girls on social media as compared to those who avoided it, for example. They know their systems are harmful. Social media is this generations Big Tobacco. If we have to blame someone, maybe we're looking at exactly the right people in 2024 when we cast our gaze at Zuckerberg, Pichai, and the government running TikTok.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Yeah, it is just weaponized 24/7 always online peer pressure and bullying that follows you around in your pocket. Kids have always been awful and now its harder to escape them than ever before. Unless someone has convincing evidence that the obvious cause isn't the real cause there's no need to start getting so counterintuitively clever by searching for other explanations.
api 3y ago
This is like trying to dismiss cigarette/cancer links by pointing out that we have also built more power plants and have more cars and our lifestyles have changed and that must be why we have more lung cancer. No, it's cigarettes. I refer to social media companies as "tobacco companies of the mind."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
WalterBright 3y ago
> reagonomics Now Reagan caused teen mental illness, too? What's next, Reagan caused Covid?
- groby_b 3y ago
  He's responsible for a ton of AIDS deaths, so we'll let him be with one pandemic.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Now Reagan caused the worldwide epidemic of a mysterious disease of unknown origin?
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      No, he just ignored it. https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
    - selimthegrim 3y ago
      "Crack, me. AIDS, me. Reaganomics? Come on, I'm in the name." https://youtu.be/jRNCpD3xhsY?si=TwzclIZJqZnifjFz&t=78 https://youtu.be/jRNCpD3xhsY?si=TwzclIZJqZnifjFz&t=78
- slantaclaus 3y ago
  Don’t forget The War In Vietnam
fullshark 3y ago
It truly incredible how every bad thing is caused by the politicians and leaders I hate. What a coincidence.
nonameiguess 3y ago
I think the wide gist of this point is correct, but then you're going and doing something a lot of people responding are also doing, which is ignoring the finding and pointing to specific historical factors that apply to your country. The only real constant I can see across all countries is increasing interconnectedness, human movement, and rate of change. Kids increasingly find themselves living in a world far different from their parents and even more radically different from their grandparents. Laws, culture, school, and parenting all can't adapt quickly enough. If social media is doing anything on its own, it's the same as what regular media was doing but bigger and faster. More information is coming at you from more directions, your parents and family don't know about it, it's increasingly less trustworthy (compare viral Tweet to Nighttime News to wisdom handed down from a grandparent), the perspectives are increasingly divorced and different from what your family or culture would have presented to you. It's a lot. None of it is necessarily bad. But it's a lot. If dealing with anything at all presents a challenge, then dealing with more of it presents more of a challenge. The threats humans face are increasingly benign, threats to beliefs and identity even as health, hunger, and survival are mostly taken care of. But there are nonetheless more of them and they come at you faster, at least if you stay connected and pay attention, and the human psyche is not equipped to deal with that. We do well with one major threat every few days that is familiar. It may be a tiger lurking in the trees that can kill us, but we know they're there and there aren't a lot of them. Four mean kids at school can't kill you, but they may torment you every single day. A social media feed full of bad events, people telling you the world is terrible, people telling you your culture is terrible, whatever it is, may be "words" rather than sticks and stones, but even if they hurt less, they do hurt, and there are so many more of them. Think of differences in experience from living on an island with a few giant predators who might attack once a month on average, mostly in a specific season, and you're good all the rest of the time, compared to being perpetually covered in mosquitoes and rats. It's breaking a leg but healing compared to chronic pain that never goes away. Modern life, first with newspapers and cities, then with schools and office politics and rat races, then with 24 hour news cycles and political horseraces, now with social media, and trending toward the latter. The threats are individually tiny but there are so damn many of them that people feel overwhelmed if they can't step back and disconnect. This is true everywhere and has nothing to do with unions disappearing or the breakdown of family values in the US. These are just the manifestations of modernity as they happened here, but something analogous and equally anxiety inducing happened somewhere else.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
diob 3y ago
Yeah, I'd be more willing to say it's the collapse of community oriented society in a lot of places along with a general feeling of economic despair (you'll own nothing and be happy).
slantaclaus 3y ago
Please explain to me how The War In Vietnam is causing a mental health crisis today
- iamthirsty 3y ago
  I'm really not sure how OP meant with the "Reaganomics"; In regard to the Vietnam War, it caused a major mental health & drug crisis in the U.S. that greatly increased homelessness, addiction rates, issues with child rearing that is being felt today now that those kids are adults, etc. Vietnam was terrible on the home-front.
- crmd 3y ago
  Undermining trust in institutions. Prior to the truth of the Vietnam war coming out, ordinary Americans tended to gave the benefit of the doubt to the government. They lost the baby boomer’s trust with Vietnam. Bush 43’s Iraq war did the same to Gen X. For Millenial Americans it was the government’s ruinous response to the 2008 financial crisis. Then the COVID debacle happened. Fast forward to the present moment where the vast majority of Americans have never seen functional institutions in their or their parent’s or grandparent’s lifetime. A shockingly high percentage of gen z colleagues I speak with see government institutions, the American government itself, healthcare, tech, banking, capitalism, etc to be a giant scam. They believe they’re on their own and cannot count on society in any way for support. They feel like they’re alone in the woods. I think it contributes to their anxiety.
  - chasd00 3y ago
    and yet all we hear is how the only answer to any problem is more government.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
freddie_mercury 3y ago
> People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that The linked substack frequently asks why social media is like that.
ta8645 3y ago
[flagged]
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Do Danes, Norweigans, Swedes, and Finns agree with you? I doubt it.
  - jampekka 3y ago
    The idea of the welfare state is so popular around here that even the rightest of the right can't really criticize it much. Almost all economic reforms are done "to save the welfare state". Especially reforms that slowly dismantle it.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Danes, Norwegians*, Swedes, and Finns will have the opinions that their governments tell them to have. Pretty much everywhere in the world and at any year of history, the average citizen will say that his government/president/king/warlord/chairman/pope is the best that has ever been. So "popular opinion" doesn't mean much.
    - jampekka 3y ago
      Nowadays it's mostly commercial outlets and interests that tell us what opinions to have.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Whenever anything bad happens, there's always a cry for "there oughtta be a law against it!" and laws get crafted and passed when emotions are running high. This doesn't make for good laws.
- anothernewdude 3y ago
  You seem to have formed your conclusion first.
- virgildotcodes 3y ago
mathgradthrow 3y ago
People are quick to blame social media because there are exceedingly plausible mechanisms by which social media could cause such a phenomenon, and there is tremendous profit in doing so and not just of the money variety. State level actors run secret influence campaigns on facebook, and more recently, just create and control whole social media platforms without oversight. The time for skepticism about the scale of the effect of social media has passed.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  s/social media/books/g
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - api 3y ago
    Social media is nothing like books. It's also nothing like eBooks, Wikipedia, regular discussion forums, telephones, etc. Modern social media has some completely novel characteristics that are responsible for its damaging effects on mental health. - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. - It does this by sorting content to present "engaging" content first, which due to how humans' brains are wired tends to be content that is emotionally triggering in some way. - It's primarily consumed on a device that people carry with you and that has an interface that makes infinite scrolling easy, replicating the basic design of a slot machine. There were dumb panics about books, but citing those to dismiss concerns over social media is intellectually lazy. They are very, very different things. Books don't watch you while you read them and fine-tune their content in real time to maximize the amount of time you spend reading them.
    - maxwell 3y ago
      Sounds like the rack of newspapers and magazines that have now disappeared from the newsstands, which now sell consumer packaged goods. Fair point comparing infinite scroll to slot machines. Books end, newspapers and magazines get thrown away. Always more to scroll.
xwolfi 3y ago
None of these ring a bell here in China. My Indian friends are probably unaffected by Carl Icahn, yet the problem is present there too. Social media is an artifact of the internet spreading, it will fade away or we'll adapt to it, but during the transition period, people who cannot deal with it are being rejected, somewhat violently. It's like blaming the depression of horse riders on the war policies of the time.
huytersd 3y ago
Social media is like that because people are like that. The only way you’re changing based human instincts is through punishments like we’ve done in real life or gatekeeping of information.
mondrian 3y ago
[dead]
woooooo 3y ago
The medium is the message.
- brohoolio 3y ago
  For folks who don’t know, this is a great read and explores how we are connected and communicate is more important than what is communicated. Highly highly recommend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage The slightly alternative title is a play on words that was originally an error.
  - lazyasciiart 3y ago
    I have to say that I was very interested in the ideas but found the book barely readable.
meiraleal 3y ago
No, what you are saying is factually wrong. Now if you are lying or just wrong would depend on how much of your income depends on it. The culprit is manipulated mass media, the current version of it is social media so before mark Zuckerberg the culprit was television owners, not whatever excuse you are trying to find to not blame media.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Social sciences and psychology are not physics or math. Your extreme confidence in your preferred explanation is not warranted by the current record of social and psychological sciences. You may well be right, I concede that I also believe that mass media is at least part of the explanation, but I don't think we should act so certain and refuse the debate. The current state of psychology and social sciences don't warrant by now this extreme level of confidence in a handful of studies that seems to corroborate this hypothesis.
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    > Social sciences and psychology are not physics or math. Your extreme confidence in your preferred explanation is not warranted by the current record of social and psychological sciences. My preferred explanation (and the post preferred explanation) is the one with most evidence available. Yours is a very strange theory that got ranked above all the discussion about the negative influence of social media and the responsibility of the owners and workers. We are past the time to think that this is coincidence.
mbgerring 3y ago
Social media is like that because it was deliberately designed to be addictive and we have a decade of documentation to back that up.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  That is something I've been think about, what if social media wasn't designed to be addictive? There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook, so what if all the doom scrolling, likes, and corporate profiles where removed from Facebook? Would it be safer? I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made safe, at all, or that it has been made dangerous in order to make a profit. Either way is terrifying and should lead to a larger skepticism of new technology. The horrible reality of social media, and the ad funded Internet is what has fueled my reluctance to accept crypto currency and AI into my life, as much as it is within my control to do so.
  - dahart 3y ago
    > There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook I’m curious, what if there is something inherently wrong with having too many superficial connections? What if it’s replacing all deep connections, and part of the reason people are feeling unfulfilled?
    - tivert 3y ago
      > I’m curious, what if there is something inherently wrong with having too many superficial connections? What if it’s replacing all deep connections, and part of the reason people are feeling unfulfilled? Or maybe there's also a problem with social media removing friction. E.g. I want to find out what my old high-school buddy is up to, but instead of meeting up of having a phone call, his updates are pushed to my feed, removing the impetus for real social contact. Software engineers can be weird people (e.g. hyper-introverted) who are averse to thinking through the impacts of the technology they're building. Then there are entrepreneurs whose search for successful products effectively turns them into psychopaths. These are the people who are architecting our society.
alienicecream 3y ago
More likely the libertine social movements of the sixties leading to a breakdown of social standards and family life.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  While it may be taboo to say so, I believe this is a strong factor. Most changes in life have tradeoffs, winners and losers. Divorce may be great for the general happiness of the adults involved, but despite all boomer rationalizations in the line "I can raise happy kids if I am not absolutely happy", it generally sucks for kids.
  - weakfish 3y ago
    Idk, as a young adult with divorced parents, I can say with utmost certainty I was better off with them separate rather than putting up with each other in the same house I grew up in
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    I grew up in a dysfunctional family, and while the breakup was tough, it was miles better than listening to my parents screaming their heads off at each other (after drinking) every night. Maybe the boomers thought divorce was good not because of their own happiness, but because many of them experienced the "stick together at all costs" culture of their parents and didn't want to put their kids through that.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > While it may be taboo to say so What does that even mean? You just said it, and it's also been said by countless people ever since the aforementioned 60s. It's not taboo, it's trite.
    - throwaway98797 3y ago
      it’s taboo because they are advocating a limitation of rights for one party to benefit another others the us isn’t a collective society but an individualistic one
j4yav 3y ago
Social media is like that because a dopamine slot machine is about the best way to get people wired up ton stare at their phones all day, which it turns out is profitable for the people making the slot machine.
atoav 3y ago
While I agree with the point that the causes of the current trend might be intergenerational, I think that this very important to mind fact is irrelevant for the topic. Social media is a problem to in societies and economies that are wildly different to the US, unless you mean us forming modern societies with groups bigger than 100 people is the problem or you mean those factors lead to the shape of social media as we have it today. I would imagine that social media would fuck with teenagers in ancient Rome in a similar way than it would with todays teens. There is something universal there. The problem is that social media in the way they are structured have zero incentives to build good structures for young adults to thrive in and 100% incentives to keep them in a state where they can be influenced. And that is an astable state of insecurity. Which is why many want to be influencer, because then at least you are the one doing the influencing.
imadierich 3y ago
[dead]
leksak 3y ago
What would reagonomics and the Vietnam War have to do with teen mental health in say northern Europe?
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Everything US spreads to Europe. If you follow American politics, you'll notice the talking points dripping down with some delay of some months or year.
- softfalcon 3y ago
  A lot, I recommend finding a library subscription to read a portion of "Diplomatic History - Europe and the Vietnam War: A Thirty-Year Perspective" [0]. The effect was quite dramatic for all of Europe. Way too many things to even enumerate here. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24915113 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24915113
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Nothing, except that the poster was probably at an age where his or her worldview became cemented around that time. There will be people in 50 years from now blaming everything bad that happens in 2074 on Trump.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  Everything.
  - 4h 3y ago
    Please explain?
  - weakfish 3y ago
    (Username not related)
benreesman 3y ago
There’s very little doubt that social media is hard to use in a positive way these days, and very little doubt that a race to the bottom on all our worst impulses is a big part of that. But the causal arrow is trickier. The exact time period over which social media has become front and center in daily life is the same period of time in which we’ve watched financial crisis (massive net wealth transfer to the richest) move into loony ZIRP stuff / asset bubbles and attendant massive net wealth transfer to the richest, explode into a cultural war that seems pretty clearly about wealth inequality and social mobility underneath the tribalism paint job (the tribalism stuff is real but people living great don’t go in for populism in insane numbers) slide into a disastrously mishandled pandemic (during which we blew through all previous notional and discounted measures for what rich means), and now everyone is being told that inflation and unemployment are good (they’ve been cooking the CPI forever, that was going on in the 90s that I’ve seen, this made up stuff about abundant good jobs is new). So whether it’s teens or Gen Z or whatever the case: they have parents and older siblings and can guess about their prospects. Your parents going crazy from economic stress or your adult sibling moving back home has got to be at least up there with unhealthy kinds or amounts of screen time as a stressor. Now AI is looking like nothing but the biggest lever for hockeystick inequality in history and is overwhelmingly controlled by a few people who give many the creeps. Is an unhealthy retreat into screen time (and fentanyl) the cause of social collapse? Or are people embracing escapism, tribalism, and substances while eschewing social activities and even sex because the donor class is going for the jugular and they’re looking to pull it off? So yeah, I think you’re on to something looking a little further back, but it at a minimum very correlated with mortgage meltdown to the present.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  China, India, Poland, Australia and Brazil weathered the 2008 financial crisis relatively well. Poland and Australia avoided a recession entirely. Yet the rise in teen mental health is still in parallel in all of the above nations with those heavily affected by the crisis.
  - naasking 3y ago
    Also retrospective studies of areas that adopted smartphones well after the financial crisis showed delayed effects that make it implausible to tie them to the crisis.
Tainnor 3y ago
Social media is of course not responsible for all our problems, but I do blame specifically social media for making people (including myself) who are materially well off and live a comfortable life irrationally angry about things outside of their control and think that everything is going to get worse and worse (which is a reinforcement loop because then some of these people start exhibiting destructive behaviour which does make things worse).
- nox101 3y ago
  I know the various social media companies supposedly optimize for engagement and angry posts supposedly do best as that ... I can't imagine an entirely neutral social media platform would be any different. people are going to follow whoever engages them the most. the inventives, regardless of the algorithms used, are exactly the same. no manipulation by the social media companies required. all that's needed is a public voice and followers
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    Of course, people are people and react to certain stimuli. But I still remember the internet of old. Not only the small, semi-gated internet forums, but at also when Facebook just started out and you would just talk to your friends and not everything would be about polarising subjects. This is clearly something that has changed due to social media algorithms, though maybe as a society we're now already brainwashed by it and I'm not sure if we can go back.
Fricken 3y ago
11 years ago I visited Lombok, and island adjacent to Bali in Indonesia, where people generally lived very traditional village lifestyles and most adults over 30 were illiterate. They had recently been provided 4g cellular coverage, and all the teenagers and young adults were lounging around doomscrolling Facebook lite on their $50 android phones. There was no multigenerational transition for them.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  > most adults over 30 were illiterate Literacy was over 95% in 2010 in Indonesia. It takes 5 seconds to Google for it. Since most of Indonesia are Moslems, they learn to read the Koran at an early age. Yes, I know that small parts of Lombok are Hindus.
  - Fricken 3y ago
    I was going off what the family I stayed with in Kuta told me. The mother of the family could not read. Indonesia is quite diverse. There are many isolated ethnic groups. On Lombok material quality of life can vary quite a bit from one village to the next, as can their commitment to Islam.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      Kuta? Now, I am completely lost. You stayed in Bali (where Kuta is located) and the family was telling you about life in a the next island (Lombok). Strange. I would have not believed it unless they had intimate ties to Lombok.
      - Fricken 3y ago
        You really are lost, you're on the wrong island

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

>We will probably won't find a culprit It's capitalism. That's the answer you're looking for

commandlinefan 3y ago
> It's capitalism We had capitalism for a LONG time before we had the international teen mental illness epidemic.
- spunker540 3y ago
  And this teen epidemic would be the first complaint I’ve heard lodged against capitalism. Can’t be that.
- jampekka 3y ago
  Not this level of capitalism. The post-war consensus economy of the west had heavy state intervention and economic involvement. Things started to change towards "free market" neoliberalism (AKA voodoo economics) in around the 1970's, and the rate of the change exploded after the fall of Soviet Union.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  Yes but we didnt' have the entire thing uploaded into our heads. To use Byung-Chul Han's phrase, you're both master and slave in one now. You're not even a subject any more (that has some places to escape to) but a project. To tie it into the article, the social media dynamic, young girls seeing themselves as never-ending beauty projects that have to get lip-fillers, more clicks, more likes, compete with each other, is just the logic of capital without even someone needing to subject them to it, they're doing it themselves. Capital's eaten all the physical space, it's still hungry so it's gobling up all the mental space, and information tech was the vector to jump from one to the other. And it does to the mental environment exactly what it did to physical spaces once its done harvesting them.
HideousKojima 3y ago
So long as we're making sweeping claims without any attempt at supporting them, you're wrong, this is all downstream from the Protestant Reformation.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Capitalism (an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit) was invented prior to written history so the reformation only exists in the context of private property being a core assumption of society. That assumption is NEW in the history of humanity, the concept of "property" has only existed for about 50,000 years The protestant reformation then was an attempt to wrest property away from the catholic organization and distribute it. The goal being to eliminate the primary economic organization and "democratize" it. The concept of hoarding property flowed from scarcity anxieties that are only socially maintained and hoarding property is the root issue You can read my proof here: https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
  - chasd00 3y ago
    anti-capitalism ideas, so great they're mandatory and a wall built around you so you can't flee to somewhere else - everywhere it's been tried
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      I’m sorry that you’re ignorant of every single indigenous culture but that’s really not my problem No matter, you’ll simply make the following argument: that might makes right because those indigenous cultures couldn’t stand up to the genocidal domination tactics of property based thought right?
      - HideousKojima 3y ago
        I know this may come as a shock, so you may want to sit down for this one: those indigenous tribes and cultures were genociding each other for millennia before Adam Smith ever wrote The Wealth of Nations.
cynicalsecurity 3y ago
Comrade, have you ever studied the history of the USSR? Give it a try, it's fun. It tells a story how 1/6 of the planet's land surface for 80 years was turned into garbage. They did it with one simple trick.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  This is such a predictable response I’ll say it for the millionth time: The Trotskiest-Leninist State-Command Economy (aka USSR) is not the opposite or even that much different than State Capitalism. I won’t fight this strawman
  - cynicalsecurity 3y ago
    So far, nothing else exists. Communism/socialism failed like Chernobyl reactor number 4. Adopting a new socio-economic system some young cocky pal imagines in his head? Nope, thank you. I'm too old and experienced for that. Not in a million of years.

coolThingsFirst 3y ago

> never ask why social media is like that. Because they value profits over anything else? The only thing they care about it is having people spend more and more time on the webpages. You'd be surprised at the caliber of talent that spends their valuable years optimising for this. More ad revenue at the expense of mental health is totally acceptable for interwebs comps. During COVID when the world got inside we just realised how sick 'social connection' sites are, from doomscrolling to outsourcing self-esteem to Tinder. It's an organised system of hijacking attention and minds.

brvsft 3y ago

> People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. This is the kind of worldview that comes from years of navel-gazing in a therapist's office. "Why do I beat my kids? ...Because my father beat me! Now that I understand why I do it, I can stop beating my kids..." Or, you could just stop beating your kids. It doesn't matter why it happens, it just matters that it happens. But instead of preventing or discouraging kids (or people in general) from using social media, you can blame the ghost of Ronald Reagan--the gift that keeps on giving.

truculent 3y ago
> This is the kind of worldview that comes from years of navel-gazing in a therapist's office. "Why do I beat my kids? ...Because my father beat me! Now that I understand why I do it, I can stop beating my kids..." Or, you could just stop beating your kids. Which of these approaches is more likely to result in someone changing their behaviour? Is there any evidence that advice to “just stop X” is as or more effective than causally aligned methods? What an unusual attitude for an engineer to have. I suppose you fix bugs by “just not writing bugs in the first place”, too.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  > s there any evidence that advice to “just stop X” is as or more effective than causally aligned methods? There is clear evidence that taking longer to stop beating your kids is more harmful to them so less effective than just stop beating them.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - truculent 3y ago
    … which is irrelevant if advice to “just stop” has no effect
giraffe_lady 3y ago
This is funny because most therapists these days practice CBT or one of its variants, which is explicitly focused on behaviors and outcomes and gives minimal weight to investigating "root causes" like that. The kind of worldview that comes from never doing therapy I guess.

Podgajski 3y ago

[flagged]

achrono 3y ago
Is there a reliable overview of all such evidence that you can recommend? >I know you’re all gonna laugh at this Alas it is this attitude itself that might become laughable. I don't get what is so incredibly unbelievable about EMF interacting with biology, and I certainly hope we don't discover this the wrong way.
- Podgajski 3y ago
  Unfortunately, there’s not, annd unfortunately a lot of it is really bad. I would just keep up with the studies that are being published and the sources of their funding. The website the environmental health trust has a lot of material that I would categorize as mostly reliable. https://ehtrust.org/ https://ehtrust.org/
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    I think it is very unfair that your reply was flagged while the same level theory of OP comment is top ranked.
    - Podgajski 3y ago
      I’m not, I’ve been at this for a while. It’s very strong bias of those in the tech industry that there’s no problem with radio frequency electromagnetic radiation. I was the same way. I was a network engineer for Cisco Systems from 1996 to 2000. I would’ve said the same thing before I realized it affected me in the late 201Os. There’s been such strong propaganda from the telecommunications industry because of the money involved. Just the fact that people keep saying “radiation comes from the sun as well” is proof of this fact sis, it ignores the fundamental science of how radio frequency telecommunications work. Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to comment about my post being flagged. I’m not gonna post on hacker news anymore, there’s just too much noise.

slowmovintarget 3y ago

Social media is an amplifier of negative aspects of social interaction. We've not had anything like that before. The algorithms are aimed at farming attention for the paying customers; advertisers. To do that, the algorithms shovel outrage, instant trends, negativity, and massively amplified in-group out-group dichotomies... They do all of this on purpose. This is new. None of today's teenagers are impacted by the Vietnam war, by Reagan, or anything from the 80s at all. Gen X felt those things. But a teenager today was born between 2003 and 2010. Most of them don't even know who Jack Welch is or that Chrysler used to be one of the "Big 3" (and used to be called Chrysler). But they know what TikTok is, they know Twitter, and Twitch, and YouTube, and Instagram. And they suffer from interacting with a system designed to manipulate attention. These systems are far more immediately detrimental to mental health, especially for someone entering adolescence when negative emotional complexes arise naturally as a neurological consequence of maturing, than any of the business or political activities of the 80s. Zuckerberg's own company had studies that showed this to be true. Studies that showed dramatic increases in suicidal tendencies among teenage girls on social media as compared to those who avoided it, for example. They know their systems are harmful. Social media is this generations Big Tobacco. If we have to blame someone, maybe we're looking at exactly the right people in 2024 when we cast our gaze at Zuckerberg, Pichai, and the government running TikTok.

lamontcg 3y ago
Yeah, it is just weaponized 24/7 always online peer pressure and bullying that follows you around in your pocket. Kids have always been awful and now its harder to escape them than ever before. Unless someone has convincing evidence that the obvious cause isn't the real cause there's no need to start getting so counterintuitively clever by searching for other explanations.

api 3y ago

This is like trying to dismiss cigarette/cancer links by pointing out that we have also built more power plants and have more cars and our lifestyles have changed and that must be why we have more lung cancer. No, it's cigarettes. I refer to social media companies as "tobacco companies of the mind."

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

WalterBright 3y ago

> reagonomics Now Reagan caused teen mental illness, too? What's next, Reagan caused Covid?

groby_b 3y ago
He's responsible for a ton of AIDS deaths, so we'll let him be with one pandemic.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Now Reagan caused the worldwide epidemic of a mysterious disease of unknown origin?
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    No, he just ignored it. https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    "Crack, me. AIDS, me. Reaganomics? Come on, I'm in the name." https://youtu.be/jRNCpD3xhsY?si=TwzclIZJqZnifjFz&t=78 https://youtu.be/jRNCpD3xhsY?si=TwzclIZJqZnifjFz&t=78
slantaclaus 3y ago
Don’t forget The War In Vietnam

fullshark 3y ago

It truly incredible how every bad thing is caused by the politicians and leaders I hate. What a coincidence.

nonameiguess 3y ago

I think the wide gist of this point is correct, but then you're going and doing something a lot of people responding are also doing, which is ignoring the finding and pointing to specific historical factors that apply to your country. The only real constant I can see across all countries is increasing interconnectedness, human movement, and rate of change. Kids increasingly find themselves living in a world far different from their parents and even more radically different from their grandparents. Laws, culture, school, and parenting all can't adapt quickly enough. If social media is doing anything on its own, it's the same as what regular media was doing but bigger and faster. More information is coming at you from more directions, your parents and family don't know about it, it's increasingly less trustworthy (compare viral Tweet to Nighttime News to wisdom handed down from a grandparent), the perspectives are increasingly divorced and different from what your family or culture would have presented to you. It's a lot. None of it is necessarily bad. But it's a lot. If dealing with anything at all presents a challenge, then dealing with more of it presents more of a challenge. The threats humans face are increasingly benign, threats to beliefs and identity even as health, hunger, and survival are mostly taken care of. But there are nonetheless more of them and they come at you faster, at least if you stay connected and pay attention, and the human psyche is not equipped to deal with that. We do well with one major threat every few days that is familiar. It may be a tiger lurking in the trees that can kill us, but we know they're there and there aren't a lot of them. Four mean kids at school can't kill you, but they may torment you every single day. A social media feed full of bad events, people telling you the world is terrible, people telling you your culture is terrible, whatever it is, may be "words" rather than sticks and stones, but even if they hurt less, they do hurt, and there are so many more of them. Think of differences in experience from living on an island with a few giant predators who might attack once a month on average, mostly in a specific season, and you're good all the rest of the time, compared to being perpetually covered in mosquitoes and rats. It's breaking a leg but healing compared to chronic pain that never goes away. Modern life, first with newspapers and cities, then with schools and office politics and rat races, then with 24 hour news cycles and political horseraces, now with social media, and trending toward the latter. The threats are individually tiny but there are so damn many of them that people feel overwhelmed if they can't step back and disconnect. This is true everywhere and has nothing to do with unions disappearing or the breakdown of family values in the US. These are just the manifestations of modernity as they happened here, but something analogous and equally anxiety inducing happened somewhere else.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

diob 3y ago

Yeah, I'd be more willing to say it's the collapse of community oriented society in a lot of places along with a general feeling of economic despair (you'll own nothing and be happy).

slantaclaus 3y ago

Please explain to me how The War In Vietnam is causing a mental health crisis today

iamthirsty 3y ago
I'm really not sure how OP meant with the "Reaganomics"; In regard to the Vietnam War, it caused a major mental health & drug crisis in the U.S. that greatly increased homelessness, addiction rates, issues with child rearing that is being felt today now that those kids are adults, etc. Vietnam was terrible on the home-front.
crmd 3y ago
Undermining trust in institutions. Prior to the truth of the Vietnam war coming out, ordinary Americans tended to gave the benefit of the doubt to the government. They lost the baby boomer’s trust with Vietnam. Bush 43’s Iraq war did the same to Gen X. For Millenial Americans it was the government’s ruinous response to the 2008 financial crisis. Then the COVID debacle happened. Fast forward to the present moment where the vast majority of Americans have never seen functional institutions in their or their parent’s or grandparent’s lifetime. A shockingly high percentage of gen z colleagues I speak with see government institutions, the American government itself, healthcare, tech, banking, capitalism, etc to be a giant scam. They believe they’re on their own and cannot count on society in any way for support. They feel like they’re alone in the woods. I think it contributes to their anxiety.
- chasd00 3y ago
  and yet all we hear is how the only answer to any problem is more government.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

freddie_mercury 3y ago

> People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that The linked substack frequently asks why social media is like that.

ta8645 3y ago

[flagged]

throwaway2037 3y ago
Do Danes, Norweigans, Swedes, and Finns agree with you? I doubt it.
- jampekka 3y ago
  The idea of the welfare state is so popular around here that even the rightest of the right can't really criticize it much. Almost all economic reforms are done "to save the welfare state". Especially reforms that slowly dismantle it.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Danes, Norwegians*, Swedes, and Finns will have the opinions that their governments tell them to have. Pretty much everywhere in the world and at any year of history, the average citizen will say that his government/president/king/warlord/chairman/pope is the best that has ever been. So "popular opinion" doesn't mean much.
  - jampekka 3y ago
    Nowadays it's mostly commercial outlets and interests that tell us what opinions to have.
WalterBright 3y ago
Whenever anything bad happens, there's always a cry for "there oughtta be a law against it!" and laws get crafted and passed when emotions are running high. This doesn't make for good laws.
anothernewdude 3y ago
You seem to have formed your conclusion first.
virgildotcodes 3y ago

mathgradthrow 3y ago

People are quick to blame social media because there are exceedingly plausible mechanisms by which social media could cause such a phenomenon, and there is tremendous profit in doing so and not just of the money variety. State level actors run secret influence campaigns on facebook, and more recently, just create and control whole social media platforms without oversight. The time for skepticism about the scale of the effect of social media has passed.

2devnull 3y ago
s/social media/books/g
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- api 3y ago
  Social media is nothing like books. It's also nothing like eBooks, Wikipedia, regular discussion forums, telephones, etc. Modern social media has some completely novel characteristics that are responsible for its damaging effects on mental health. - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. - It does this by sorting content to present "engaging" content first, which due to how humans' brains are wired tends to be content that is emotionally triggering in some way. - It's primarily consumed on a device that people carry with you and that has an interface that makes infinite scrolling easy, replicating the basic design of a slot machine. There were dumb panics about books, but citing those to dismiss concerns over social media is intellectually lazy. They are very, very different things. Books don't watch you while you read them and fine-tune their content in real time to maximize the amount of time you spend reading them.
  - maxwell 3y ago
    Sounds like the rack of newspapers and magazines that have now disappeared from the newsstands, which now sell consumer packaged goods. Fair point comparing infinite scroll to slot machines. Books end, newspapers and magazines get thrown away. Always more to scroll.

xwolfi 3y ago

None of these ring a bell here in China. My Indian friends are probably unaffected by Carl Icahn, yet the problem is present there too. Social media is an artifact of the internet spreading, it will fade away or we'll adapt to it, but during the transition period, people who cannot deal with it are being rejected, somewhat violently. It's like blaming the depression of horse riders on the war policies of the time.

huytersd 3y ago

Social media is like that because people are like that. The only way you’re changing based human instincts is through punishments like we’ve done in real life or gatekeeping of information.

mondrian 3y ago

[dead]

woooooo 3y ago

The medium is the message.

brohoolio 3y ago
For folks who don’t know, this is a great read and explores how we are connected and communicate is more important than what is communicated. Highly highly recommend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage The slightly alternative title is a play on words that was originally an error.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  I have to say that I was very interested in the ideas but found the book barely readable.

meiraleal 3y ago

No, what you are saying is factually wrong. Now if you are lying or just wrong would depend on how much of your income depends on it. The culprit is manipulated mass media, the current version of it is social media so before mark Zuckerberg the culprit was television owners, not whatever excuse you are trying to find to not blame media.

elzbardico 3y ago
Social sciences and psychology are not physics or math. Your extreme confidence in your preferred explanation is not warranted by the current record of social and psychological sciences. You may well be right, I concede that I also believe that mass media is at least part of the explanation, but I don't think we should act so certain and refuse the debate. The current state of psychology and social sciences don't warrant by now this extreme level of confidence in a handful of studies that seems to corroborate this hypothesis.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  > Social sciences and psychology are not physics or math. Your extreme confidence in your preferred explanation is not warranted by the current record of social and psychological sciences. My preferred explanation (and the post preferred explanation) is the one with most evidence available. Yours is a very strange theory that got ranked above all the discussion about the negative influence of social media and the responsibility of the owners and workers. We are past the time to think that this is coincidence.

mbgerring 3y ago

Social media is like that because it was deliberately designed to be addictive and we have a decade of documentation to back that up.

mrweasel 3y ago
That is something I've been think about, what if social media wasn't designed to be addictive? There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook, so what if all the doom scrolling, likes, and corporate profiles where removed from Facebook? Would it be safer? I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made safe, at all, or that it has been made dangerous in order to make a profit. Either way is terrifying and should lead to a larger skepticism of new technology. The horrible reality of social media, and the ad funded Internet is what has fueled my reluctance to accept crypto currency and AI into my life, as much as it is within my control to do so.
- dahart 3y ago
  > There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook I’m curious, what if there is something inherently wrong with having too many superficial connections? What if it’s replacing all deep connections, and part of the reason people are feeling unfulfilled?
  - tivert 3y ago
    > I’m curious, what if there is something inherently wrong with having too many superficial connections? What if it’s replacing all deep connections, and part of the reason people are feeling unfulfilled? Or maybe there's also a problem with social media removing friction. E.g. I want to find out what my old high-school buddy is up to, but instead of meeting up of having a phone call, his updates are pushed to my feed, removing the impetus for real social contact. Software engineers can be weird people (e.g. hyper-introverted) who are averse to thinking through the impacts of the technology they're building. Then there are entrepreneurs whose search for successful products effectively turns them into psychopaths. These are the people who are architecting our society.

alienicecream 3y ago

More likely the libertine social movements of the sixties leading to a breakdown of social standards and family life.

elzbardico 3y ago
While it may be taboo to say so, I believe this is a strong factor. Most changes in life have tradeoffs, winners and losers. Divorce may be great for the general happiness of the adults involved, but despite all boomer rationalizations in the line "I can raise happy kids if I am not absolutely happy", it generally sucks for kids.
- weakfish 3y ago
  Idk, as a young adult with divorced parents, I can say with utmost certainty I was better off with them separate rather than putting up with each other in the same house I grew up in
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  I grew up in a dysfunctional family, and while the breakup was tough, it was miles better than listening to my parents screaming their heads off at each other (after drinking) every night. Maybe the boomers thought divorce was good not because of their own happiness, but because many of them experienced the "stick together at all costs" culture of their parents and didn't want to put their kids through that.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > While it may be taboo to say so What does that even mean? You just said it, and it's also been said by countless people ever since the aforementioned 60s. It's not taboo, it's trite.
  - throwaway98797 3y ago
    it’s taboo because they are advocating a limitation of rights for one party to benefit another others the us isn’t a collective society but an individualistic one

j4yav 3y ago

Social media is like that because a dopamine slot machine is about the best way to get people wired up ton stare at their phones all day, which it turns out is profitable for the people making the slot machine.

atoav 3y ago

While I agree with the point that the causes of the current trend might be intergenerational, I think that this very important to mind fact is irrelevant for the topic. Social media is a problem to in societies and economies that are wildly different to the US, unless you mean us forming modern societies with groups bigger than 100 people is the problem or you mean those factors lead to the shape of social media as we have it today. I would imagine that social media would fuck with teenagers in ancient Rome in a similar way than it would with todays teens. There is something universal there. The problem is that social media in the way they are structured have zero incentives to build good structures for young adults to thrive in and 100% incentives to keep them in a state where they can be influenced. And that is an astable state of insecurity. Which is why many want to be influencer, because then at least you are the one doing the influencing.

imadierich 3y ago

[dead]

leksak 3y ago

What would reagonomics and the Vietnam War have to do with teen mental health in say northern Europe?

rightbyte 3y ago
Everything US spreads to Europe. If you follow American politics, you'll notice the talking points dripping down with some delay of some months or year.
softfalcon 3y ago
A lot, I recommend finding a library subscription to read a portion of "Diplomatic History - Europe and the Vietnam War: A Thirty-Year Perspective" [0]. The effect was quite dramatic for all of Europe. Way too many things to even enumerate here. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24915113 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24915113
carlosjobim 3y ago
Nothing, except that the poster was probably at an age where his or her worldview became cemented around that time. There will be people in 50 years from now blaming everything bad that happens in 2074 on Trump.
goodpoint 3y ago
Everything.
- 4h 3y ago
  Please explain?
- weakfish 3y ago
  (Username not related)

benreesman 3y ago

There’s very little doubt that social media is hard to use in a positive way these days, and very little doubt that a race to the bottom on all our worst impulses is a big part of that. But the causal arrow is trickier. The exact time period over which social media has become front and center in daily life is the same period of time in which we’ve watched financial crisis (massive net wealth transfer to the richest) move into loony ZIRP stuff / asset bubbles and attendant massive net wealth transfer to the richest, explode into a cultural war that seems pretty clearly about wealth inequality and social mobility underneath the tribalism paint job (the tribalism stuff is real but people living great don’t go in for populism in insane numbers) slide into a disastrously mishandled pandemic (during which we blew through all previous notional and discounted measures for what rich means), and now everyone is being told that inflation and unemployment are good (they’ve been cooking the CPI forever, that was going on in the 90s that I’ve seen, this made up stuff about abundant good jobs is new). So whether it’s teens or Gen Z or whatever the case: they have parents and older siblings and can guess about their prospects. Your parents going crazy from economic stress or your adult sibling moving back home has got to be at least up there with unhealthy kinds or amounts of screen time as a stressor. Now AI is looking like nothing but the biggest lever for hockeystick inequality in history and is overwhelmingly controlled by a few people who give many the creeps. Is an unhealthy retreat into screen time (and fentanyl) the cause of social collapse? Or are people embracing escapism, tribalism, and substances while eschewing social activities and even sex because the donor class is going for the jugular and they’re looking to pull it off? So yeah, I think you’re on to something looking a little further back, but it at a minimum very correlated with mortgage meltdown to the present.

williamcotton 3y ago
China, India, Poland, Australia and Brazil weathered the 2008 financial crisis relatively well. Poland and Australia avoided a recession entirely. Yet the rise in teen mental health is still in parallel in all of the above nations with those heavily affected by the crisis.
- naasking 3y ago
  Also retrospective studies of areas that adopted smartphones well after the financial crisis showed delayed effects that make it implausible to tie them to the crisis.

Tainnor 3y ago

Social media is of course not responsible for all our problems, but I do blame specifically social media for making people (including myself) who are materially well off and live a comfortable life irrationally angry about things outside of their control and think that everything is going to get worse and worse (which is a reinforcement loop because then some of these people start exhibiting destructive behaviour which does make things worse).

nox101 3y ago
I know the various social media companies supposedly optimize for engagement and angry posts supposedly do best as that ... I can't imagine an entirely neutral social media platform would be any different. people are going to follow whoever engages them the most. the inventives, regardless of the algorithms used, are exactly the same. no manipulation by the social media companies required. all that's needed is a public voice and followers
- Tainnor 3y ago
  Of course, people are people and react to certain stimuli. But I still remember the internet of old. Not only the small, semi-gated internet forums, but at also when Facebook just started out and you would just talk to your friends and not everything would be about polarising subjects. This is clearly something that has changed due to social media algorithms, though maybe as a society we're now already brainwashed by it and I'm not sure if we can go back.

Fricken 3y ago

11 years ago I visited Lombok, and island adjacent to Bali in Indonesia, where people generally lived very traditional village lifestyles and most adults over 30 were illiterate. They had recently been provided 4g cellular coverage, and all the teenagers and young adults were lounging around doomscrolling Facebook lite on their $50 android phones. There was no multigenerational transition for them.

throwaway2037 3y ago
> most adults over 30 were illiterate Literacy was over 95% in 2010 in Indonesia. It takes 5 seconds to Google for it. Since most of Indonesia are Moslems, they learn to read the Koran at an early age. Yes, I know that small parts of Lombok are Hindus.
- Fricken 3y ago
  I was going off what the family I stayed with in Kuta told me. The mother of the family could not read. Indonesia is quite diverse. There are many isolated ethnic groups. On Lombok material quality of life can vary quite a bit from one village to the next, as can their commitment to Islam.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Kuta? Now, I am completely lost. You stayed in Bali (where Kuta is located) and the family was telling you about life in a the next island (Lombok). Strange. I would have not believed it unless they had intimate ties to Lombok.
    - Fricken 3y ago
      You really are lost, you're on the wrong island