e have become convinced that modern technocrats are mighty, brilliant, or exceptional because of their empires and their inventions. But I challenge this notion. These people are no more exceptional than ticks and leeches. Like these simple creatures, the technocrat minds operate only to satisfy a single need. They are not brimming with intelligence. Is it intelligent to corrupt an entire generation of youth just to grow your own enterprise? Is it brilliant to proliferate misinformation and so hatred within a society? No, it is not. It is stupid. And those who act in this way are stupid people. They are the weakest, most pathetic sorts of humans evolution has ever produced. Through their stupidity, they have encouraged us to surrender our world. We know that social media use is bad for the mind, for attention spans, for self-confidence.

This is all wellknown, welltrodden ground. But we seem to overlook the broader consequences at play. These are the consequences which have moved the world without us even noticing and will continue to do so as long as we remain ignorant to their existence. Recently, a Reuters Institute report found social media overtook TV as the main news source for Americans. People no longer trust institutions. They trust personalities like for example Joe Rogan who is now one of the most influential figures in American media. His 2024 interview with Donald Trump has been credited for boosting Trump's presidential campaign more than any traditional network. While each side has their own take on that moment, it's clear that traditional media has failed us. And when trust in institutions breaks, people follow whoever sounds right, even if they aren't the wisest voice in the room.

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The Alien Wars Begin!  

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Smartphones are not bad, not inherently. Instead, there was one development, one monumentous shift which turned these pieces of technology against us, which since its inception has fractured our culture to its very core and pushed us onto a very dangerous road. The first iPhone announced in June of 2007 was a harmless device. It was little more than a phone with a few useful everyday tools. But then Apple created the App Store. In 2008, when it launched, the App Store featured 500 apps. By 2013, there were over a million available. This was mostly due to Apple's introduction of SDKs, or software development kits.

With SDKs, third parties could produce applications for the iPhone and sell them on the App Store. As with any sort of free market model, this introduced enormous competition. Large tech startups began pouring millions of dollars into their apps and settled upon an advertisingbased model. Within this model, the longer an app held on to a person's attention, the more ads they would see and the more money the company would make. So there emerged a now welldocumented race to manipulate users into maximizing time spent on the app. Children are easier to manipulate than adults. So they became the primary victims of these companies. This can be seen when we examine some early developments in social media platforms like Facebook.

In 2009, Facebook introduced its like button. Twitter created the retweet feature. Suddenly every post became gamified. their success quantified. At the same time, Facebook introduced an algorithmic news feed and the potential for viral posts emerged. The platform, which had originally been used for reconnecting lost friends, became something else entirely. It was performative, a source of validation, a game which one could win or lose. This era added about 3 hours of additional screen time per day for an American child. If we fast forward to today, few research has found nearly half of teens use the internet quote almost constantly.

In his book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt points to the realworld effects of social media obsession. Young people do not spend as much time with their friends anymore. When they do, they allow their time to be interrupted by push notifications, and they signal that their phone is more important than their friendship. Young people get on average 192 push notifications per day. It is impossible to focus under this barrage, and so ADHD rates and symptoms have worsened in a causal way with the advent of social media.

The people who run these companies use longestablished psychological methods of coercion to keep young people returning to their apps. Of course, none of this is particularly groundbreaking. Quite the opposite. It is the same old song. Algorithms bad retweets dangerous teens using their phone too much. It is material which has been repeated so many times that even saying it here feels tremendously mundane. You see, often this conversation is centered around the individual. Phones create problems for a person. But we all live on this planet together and we must all work with one another towards some better moment in time. As it turns out, this phone obsession is not just detrimental to the individual. It is pushing us entirely as a collective away from progress.

The Myth of the Free

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The internet was once free information. That was fine for a time. But as Jordan Lanyard pointed out in the book, Who Owns the Future? This idea starts to fail when information becomes our economy. When the biggest movements of money take place for the sake of these social networks or the information on them, we can no longer use the word free. Now the stakes are higher. So too is the cost for this information. We often think of social media as an idle thing to do to pass time or perhaps waste time. It is the opposite of work. But perhaps this isn't true. When we are using social media, someone is reaping the rewards of our time. People are making money off of us. Be them advertisers or the CEOs of these platforms. Every tap, every video, every swipe is building and improving these platforms and their algorithms. As we use social media platforms, we are quite literally building them. We are engaging then in a form of unpaid labor.

This is a strange labor because it is a labor leisure hybrid while providing the benefits of neither. We do not earn capital nor are we allowing ourselves the benefits of idle leisure. It is during this sort of idle time when we reflect on and consider our truest selves. There is an off-re repeated joke about the frightful perils of those moments before a person falls asleep when they are alone with their thoughts. This joke comes from truth. It is at these kinds of moments those of pure relaxation when we are flooded by the most severe, serious and consequential lines of thinking. Although daunting and not even always enjoyable, these minations are crucially important in our selfdiscovery. Attending to push notifications and news feeds interrupts and even severs us from the beauty of empty mental clarity. It is mighty unfortunate to surrender an opportunity like this to abdicate our own selves for the sake of rich men becoming richer men. And so of course this type of surrender has consequences.

Lost and misguided, on purpose

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In his book, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, author James Williams provides a metaphor for our modern social media landscape. Imagine you purchased a GPS device and put it in your car. You punch your desired destination into the device and it provides directions. But as you travel along its route and arrive, you realize it has taken you to a place entirely separate from where you asked. You needed to go to the grocery store, but you have arrived at a golf course or a movie theater. Perhaps once or twice, you would tolerate this and chalk it up to a simple glitch. But imagine that over the course of a dozen instances, the same thing happened each time. The GPS would only take you to the wrong destination. You would, of course, never use that device again. Now, I ask the reader of this article to consider their goals in life. Where would you like to go? What would you like to be?

With those in mind, the question is now, does Facebook share that goal for you? Does Tik Tok, does Instagram or Google or Apple? Are these companies goals aligned with yours? Certainly not. The goals of social media companies are not your goals. For whatever reason, we do not think about the story of our lives in the same way we think about physical space like the GPS example. This is because companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple, as Williams suggests, are not only in the business of making devices. They are too in the business of making users. They engineer people to cast off their values and replace them with those of the company. The addictive nature of these devices and platforms trains our minds. Williams further points to what he calls "Starlight". That is the ability to navigate towards one's goals and ambitions by only the stars in the proverbial sky of our minds and our souls. Social media trains us to chase immediate short-term satisfaction and in doing so places clouds in the sky. It blocks our starlight, our ability to navigate by our own spirits. This changes a person's habits, but also their ultimate destination, their values. You begin to value things which have no value. You are conditioned to think that likes, reposts, followers are watermarks of fulfillment. So even when removed from the screen, you search for such mundane pleasures. Periods of rest, contemplation, and reflection are replaced by time spent chasing instant gratification on your phone or otherwise.

Let us examine culture at large to see this. The functional details of political processes go mostly unnoticed. But when a liberal governor roasts Donald Trump on Twitter, the result is breaking news. In America, they have elected twice a president who has said and done things which violate universal moral values we all hold in the hopes of him fulfilling some short-term political promises. We shop from major corporations who we all know actively harm our planet and exploit laborers around the globe.
## Polarization
Polarization is regarded as a major problem of our times. Perhaps, as Williams notes, we have become something much more profound than polarized. We have more than a disagreement about simple ideas. We have a division about who we fundamentally are as a people. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau cautioned against this, noting that as a population is misled by elites and subdivided into opponent groups, that population abandons their membership to an original, larger group.

The modern manifestation of this could be a result of our lost starlight, our goals, the grand narrative we seek to weave, those are the things which truly make us who we are. So as we lose track of them, we also lose track of our identities. Without an idea of identity, we cannot know what we share with one another. How can we possibly see mutual values if we can't even see our own? Instead of this connection to one another, we are now connected to the world outside of our world, to events we can do nothing about, and to people who are irrelevant to our lives. We are closer together than ever and yet vastly removed from the very people which populate our day-to-day existences. It's like we've moved into a highrise in a densely populated city. In theory and abstract, we are closer to other people, but we do not even know our neighbors or the people we see every day coming to and from our homes.

The Big Machine

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In our western capitalist society, money follows money. In fact, most things follow money. Time, labor, resources, the massive amount of money chasing its own tale. And the social media world rearranges our actual world. Given the money and power and social media networks, those who operate them effectively control the culture of our society. So it has become bizarrely quite normal to see tech leaders rubbing shoulders and cowtowing to a given present administration. These people bend at the waist and drop to their knees for the promise of fiscal growth at the hands of whoever is in political power. They give the president and his follwers the girlfriend experience. They say what they want to hear. They whisper compliments in the form of donations. They changed their dress, speech, and selves for their clients, for the administration in power. All of this behavior takes place in a sort of modern era elites only gold rush. But instead of gold, these people seek data. They are obsessed with it because data produces capital. Indeed, it has been suggested that we are living in an era of dataism.

In an article for the New York Times, Chris Anderson wrote,

If you asked me to describe the rising philosophy of the day, I'd say it is dataism. We now have the ability to gather huge amounts of data. This ability seems to carry with it certain cultural assumptions that everything that can be measured should be measured. That data is a transparent and reliable lens that allows us to filter out emotionalism and ideology. That data will help us do remarkable things like foretell the future. The data revolution is giving us wonderful ways to understand the present and past.

Contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han has discussed this dataism in his work Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. He notes that in theory big data promises a sort of liberation a freedom from arbitrary notions about humanity. It is a truly objective glance at our species. But to make this reality, big data has morphed into something entirely unprecedented. As Han has suggested, big data, big business, and big brother have long existed as three separate ideas. But in today's world, big data has absorbed these other two. And the three together are now a singular entity. This entity spies on the consumer like big brother. It harvests information like big data and it monetizes this data and trades it freely on a marketplace like big business.

For the purpose of this essay, we will refer to this entity as "The Big Machine" or "Machina ex Machina". Within The Big Machine, the lives of human beings like you and me have become commodities. Commodities have grading systems. diamonds, corn, wheat, beef. These each have rigid classification systems whereby the individual piece is determined to have a poor or outstanding value. Now, thanks to the work of the big machine, humans have such a system even if you do not know about it. AcXiom is a data brokering company which trades the personal data of 300 million US citizens. The company has a grading system for individuals in which humans are divided into 70 categories based on market value.

In this system, the top market valued customers are put in a group titled "Shooting Stars". People with low economic value are in a category literally called "Waste". And so, as Han notes, the big machine has created a new digital class society. Those with low credit scores, low income, or who otherwise are either useless or harmful to the market system are cast out of it. Those who are valuable are welcomed with open arms, valued and lusted over.

One of the groups who fiends over such data is of course politicians. They desire to get this dataist promised crystalclear objective assessment of the public. So they buy data with the help of donations from that same public, I may add. They tailor messages not just to groups or regions, but to individuals. Though we may wish to resist, we are often powerless in this fight. If a politician tailor his campaign to you, you precisely, and tells you everything you want to hear, why would you not vote for that candidate? And so I wonder where this fits into the concept of free elections. We are free to vote for whoever we please once our brains have undergone a targeted 24-month election cycle and our minds have been bent and squished and manipulated like pieces of clay. I consider those mice who are tested on and experimented on, who are given cheese each time they press a button. The mouse is certainly free to not press the button, but why wouldn't he?

We are perhaps posed against the technocrats much more like this mouse than we may think. Psychologist Carl Jung was the first to identify the concept of the Collective Unconscious. On a personal level, we each have our own unconscious desires. That is things we want or even need without really knowing it. These can manifest in behavior, speech, or actions. The most clear examples are in children. One adolescent may misbehave upon the arrival of a newborn child in the household stemming from jealousy, but certainly the child would not be able to identify that as the source of his misconduct. So too there exists a broader collective unconscious. Humans in a culture act in certain ways driven by things we may not recognize or understand. We may not even as individuals notice these broad patterns of behavior, but The Big Machine can.

It's entirely possible that the big machine even possesses an understanding of ourselves which is more accurate and objective than our own. Data mining unveils the scope of human actions. It draws lines between groups and the things they do. But certainly there is no reason for the big machine to share the results of these findings. Instead, it can and will use this data to generate capital and exercise power. Through the use of data mining, the big machine can break into our collective unconscious entirely undetected and it can see truths which we ourselves cannot. It can thereby manipulate our unconscious and our behavior. It can change the trajectory of the society or the world without us ever knowing.

The Big Machine is also a little machine, a Smartphone if you will. It offers ways for the individual to datify their existence. How many hours spent sleeping? How many steps taken per day? What is your resting heart rate? And so on and so on. These things are useful and important, but much less useful are the ways we can datify our lives through social media. How many likes did your last photo get? How many friends do you have? How many DMs did you get this week? These metrics reveal nothing to answer the very base question of who are you. In fact, they do much more than nothing. They actively push us away from discovering our true selves through the datification of our lives.

The previous concept of Starlight is relevant here again. Added to that, as Han notes, data counts numbers. It does not recount. It does not reflect. It does not re-examine events at different times in life with earned perspective of living in the real world. The understanding of ourselves comes from exactly this process, repeated serious consideration and reconsideration. Instead, we surveil our lives through the lens of hard data, making assessments and judgments upon ourselves like some nightmarish out-of body experience. When we make these judgments and decisions based upon these numbers, it is no wonder they fail to provide peace or happiness. But still, we pursue further such decisions under the guise of self-improvement. When in truth, we are just closing the door of a prison built with our own hands. Like Han suggests, we become both the guard and the inmate.

There exists another flaw in the big machine. Another fundamental gap in the understanding of the human experience. Han notes the big machine can tell us about A and B. It can tell us A causes B or B has some determinant effect on A. It can tell us that as A goes up so does B or that B is reversely proportional to A. But it leaves out a third variable that is C. That is the human spirit or as psychoanalysis George E. Atwood and Robert Stolorow called it the Intersubjectivity. It is the arena in which A and B exist. It is the chaotic, complex, unknowable human element which provides that landscape for all other things. This is why the big machine is so often wrong. It can only predict what is predictable. Consider the most cataclysmic events in the course of history. Those that realign society, several of which we have experienced in the past 20 years. Consider more acutely the events which impact an individual on the most foundational level. Those which change your life. These events are of course the most important that we experience as a society or an individual. The big machine cannot predict or prepare us for these things. So instead, they occur. And the big machine is like a vulture which just feeds on the chaos they create.

So the answer to all of this, one might think, is simple: "Stop using your phone(?)".

The Problem of Agency

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The idea of stop using your phone sounds good. It sounds simple, but it pins too much blame on the individual. Older generations may say kids these days are on their phones too much. Those with harsh libertarian sensibilities might declare that you can just put down your phone. However, such ideas are formed in a vacuum in an imaginary world which rejects the material realities of modern life. In some cases, anxiety-ridden helicopter parents need to know at all times what their children are doing. So, they give them phones to keep the children safe. But the pedophiles and offenders of the modern world do not linger in parks and playgrounds. They are now in fact in the digital world on the phone.

Young people are immensely more susceptible to peer pressure. Friends and culture discuss social media discourse. Kids do not want to miss out on these things and be otherred. While such a claim, a worry from a child may seem melodramatic, it is not. Social media is a huge part of the modern youth experience, unfortunately. So, there is some merit to the child's worry. This peer pressure mounts on parents. Children say perhaps truthfully, they will be outcasts without a phone. And no reasonable parent wants their child to be an outcast. And so as each parent gives into this pressure and buys their child a phone, each other parent feels the mounting pressure to do just that. We may also be tempted to say that parents should just send their kids outside. I suppose that is true to a degree, but the modern parental landscape does not really endorse this type of thing. If a child is running around by himself through a neighborhood or a wilderness, this can raise eyebrows. Suddenly, a neighborhood is a wash with gossip about some mother being an irresponsible parent. Perhaps a particularly harsh individual even calls social services. It's a difficult situation. Not being a parent myself, I cannot expound too much on these issues responsibly, but the point may rest that it is difficult for both parents and children to shun social media.

On top of this, billions of dollars and years of research go into making these apps. Do we really genuinely earnestly expect a 16-year-old child to defeat such an army? This is such a ridiculous notion that I don't think it deserves much more coverage. It is thinking from an old world. The child of today is exposed to everything adult with their phones. Global catastrophes, pornography, lust, cruelty of man. Then they are simultaneously thrust into a classroom which suggests information and education exists in a tidy order with schedules, lessons and subjects and structure. It should really be no surprise that this fractures the child's ability to parse information and process the world around them. If we earnestly want young people to thrive in a new landscape, we must give them the right tools. We must teach them to do so.

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Rebuilding

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As I write this, I can recognize two major discrepancies in this whole thing. The first is the fact that social media has done some good. Social media can in theory provide community and connection, self-exression, or even relationships, especially among those who may be marginalized due to race, ethnic, gender, or sexual background. But when we search for more hardline data rather than assumptions like these, we find a lack of evidence that there is any long-term benefit to social media use. Certainly, as hate notes, there is no wave of mental health currently sweeping across the developed world. Quite the opposite. Perhaps social media can alleviate loneliness from a baseline of absolute zero. But this kind of company is far worse than the in-person relationships it continues to replace. This is indeed the broader point. Not that social media is pure evil, but it is currently on the whole more bad than good. Many bad things have good effects. It feels good to snort cocaine. It may feel good to punch someone you don't like. But we would not say that cocaine or physical violence is good.

I can also feel the shouts of the audience. They remind me that oneself is in fact the emblem of participation in this social media landscape which I simultaneously deem so harmful. What can I say to this? What argument can be made? What excuse can I find? Of course, the answer is really none. But I do think when it comes to these platforms, we can either work for them or they can work for us. My hope is that I can produce things which encourage the latter, which encourage people to consider social media, the world within it, and the world without it.

I'm extremely hopeful where the future is concerned. In the past, large-scale societal issues have been corrected. Everyone used to smoke cigarettes. Now they do not. Civil rights movements have made massive gains. Even if there is work to be done, despite our current environmental issues, collective green action has won countless victories. There are many feasible solutions for change. The government could take action, could establish some oversight. They could, as some have suggested, raise the online adult age from 13 to 16. There are two cultural issues which could be sorted. Perhaps we should reassess the idea of childhood independence. Parents often fear letting their children run free in the world from the consequences on the child or the social consequences on they themselves. If we are being profoundly optimistic, a practice which I think is not always misguided, we could look at the ever swinging pendulum of culture. Perhaps with generation alpha or future generations, the prospect of being always online will simply be regarded as uncool and elderly. Perhaps these young people will on their own accord shun social media. The fact is that media and life within it has changed. Everything is different now.

Old people in power are incapable of understanding the depth of that change. Young people, however, are powerful. They are smart. We must ignore the ongoing generational shouts that declare the youth to be perpetually stupid. These shouts are arrogance and cynicism. They are the rot of age on stale minds. It is and always has been the youth who perceive the world most accurately. And it is the youth who fuels changes. In time, the youth of today will control the world of tomorrow. They will not must not forget the harsh indecency enacted upon them upon their world by current era technocrats. The youth can be more than idle participants in the digital playground. They can take it upon themselves to rip the land apart and rebuild it. Rebuild it into something which does not exploit them but fills them with joy.

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