I wanted to agree with Jonathan Haidt, because I share many of his views of what went wrong, how current social media is detrimental to not only teen mental health, but to a wide array of societal functions. His solutions, however, will most likely further cement the current powers and lead to more social ills, not less. Furthermore, he has had such an impact that it is difficult to speak about more comprehensive solutions to the problems. It had been easier to just try to ride the wave that Haidt set in motion, but it is fundamentally flawed in so many ways that I must rather speak up.
I have not been able to get my hands on The Anxious Generation, but Haidt has elaborated on his views in several podcasts, on “Your Undivided Attention” and on the Ezra Klein Show. Haidt prescribes four norms:
- No smartphone before high school.
- No social media until 16.
- Phone free schools.
- Far more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
I wholeheartedly agree with number 4, I’ll get back to that later. I can also generally support number 3. As of today, seen in isolation, it is easy to make the case for the first two also, but it completely misses the point.
The extent to which the point has been missed lies in the rhetorical question that Haidt posed with emphasis in both podcasts:
At what age are you old enough to sign a contract with a giant corporation to give away your data and your rights and let them stuff stuff into you chosen by their algorithm? At what age?
I’m astonished that the neither he nor the hosts attempted to give the only reasonable answer to this question: No-one should ever be compelled to sign that contract under any circumstances! That there are powers in society that can compel people to do that is one of the central dysfunctions in society, that is what leads to ills such as a floundering public debate, information disorder, innovation stagnation, poor mental health, lack of attention to issues that matter, etc., etc. At least to not make it worse, but the task before us is really to challenge that power. These companies are the abusers!
Haidt is not willing to do that, to the contrary, he celebrates an Australian approach which grants the power to collect the data to the very giant corporation that is abusing the teens to begin with! So, now it is not only by contract, now the law will force people to share data with those corporations. What could go wrong?
The cookie-banners we all have to click through every day have been used to undermine human agency by conditioning us to consent to anything. And it is not like third party cookies weren’t known to be a terrible idea: In the first standards document from 1997, it was treated as a security problem. Every law on the books have the potential to be abused, like they did with consent. With the naive Australian approach, which Haidt celebrates, the law will be used for nefarious purposes, it will clearly be used to extract much more data, because, of course, there will never be a very reliable way to assess someone’s age from just a few attributes. A less naive way to do age verification is to rely on government attestation, you can even make a system that only gives a yes/no answer. However, that does not challenge the fundamental causes of harm, that there exists entities that are so powerful that they can compel you to turn over your rights. It can also cause new harms, since it is not just kids who will need to give up data, everyone has to, which can have chilling effects on freedom of expression.
The two first norms are just techno-solutionism in a new wrapping. The belief that if you just let loose technologists, technology will emerge as a cure to the problems you see, is still surprisingly prevalent. Age limits, that require a technological quick-fix in the form of age verification, is just yet another round of techno-solutionism, albeit coming from a other sources this time.
There are several misunderstandings that have to be addressed. The first, I think is that current social media is so entrenched that it is hard to get out of our lives. My assertion is that it is much easier to topple the giants than to design a responsible age verification system. But first, another misunderstanding is around the “screens”. When people talk about screens, they talk as if there is a screen that causes all the ills. It isn’t. If you are to understand technology, the first thing is to break it down to components and understand what each component does, only then is it possible to intervene sensibly. A screen is a device that displays red, green and blue dots. That’s all. It has very little, if any impact. The things that should be of concern are elsewhere, usually, they are not even on your phone or on your computer at all. Haidt’s focus on screens have been strongly detrimental to public discourse, it has become very difficult to talk about the deeper problems.
Now, recall what legacy social media platforms actually are: They are surveillance and influence machines. The parts that are actually in some cases socially useful, the part where we can debate each other and coordinate with other parents in school are tiny bits. Those parts are just there to trap us, it is just there for exploitation. To replicate their function is no big deal, it can be done in a matter of weeks. Haidt calls these surveillance and influence machines a “miracle of technical innovation”, to which I disagree very strongly. These have no societal function, if they disappeared, we would need different ways of bringing products to market, but there would be no loss.
Obviously, we should have much higher ambitions for social media. Social media should first of all enhance our capability for coordinated action, it should provide us with a much more deliberative democracy, it should bridge our narratives and bring people closer together. It should be good for our mental health. Martin Seligman mentioned a meeting with technology companies in his 2011 book “Flourish”:
I commented on Facebook’s possibilities for instilling well-being: “As it stands now, Facebook may actually be building four of the elements of well-being: positive emotion, engagement (sharing all those photos of good events), positive relationships (the heart of what ‘friends’ are all about), and now accomplishment. All to the good. The fifth element of well-being, however, needs work, and in the narcissistic environment of Facebook, this work is urgent, and that is belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self — the element of meaning. Facebook could indeed help to build meaning in the lives of the five hundred million users. Think about it, Mark.”
Those present chose to do the opposite, but it was a choice. We can make a different choice.
Haidt celebrates TV, and again I disagree strongly. At its worst, TV is a pacifier, TV cannot build engagement and positive relationships in individuals. It plays no role in accomplishment, is a venue where narcissists get more exposure than what is good for them, and meaning is hard to make out of it. It cannot help to build bridges between individuals with differing opinions. Also, consider Carl Sagan’s remarkably prescient book “A Demon-Haunted World” from 1995:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
At its best, then certainly, I too enjoy a good Pixar movie with my kids and talk about it afterwards. I just can’t follow Haidt in elevating something as passive as TV to contrast with what social media could be. It is purely misplaced nostalgia, as the quote from 1995 shows.
Social media could play a role in getting kids out again. I strongly agree that it is critical that they do. I also exchanged a few emails with Haidt’s cofounder of Let Grow, Lenore Skenazy, because here in Norway, it was just a short period in the 90-ties that we had the same panic in the US. Playgrounds would be sterilized and the lower branches of trees would be cut to keep kids from climbing them. Gen Z has not been subject to that madness here in Norway. Norway is different, it shows in advertising and in that the host of a popular TV show reminds kids that they have the right to jump in icy water in school. While visiting New York City, my kids laughed at the idea that someone their age shouldn’t be allowed to ride the subway on their own. And still, they do appear to be as much victims to deteriorating mental health as their US peers. That may be because they aren’t out as much as I was at their age, but it is not due to parenting or societal pressures. It seems to me that the US got liberty all wrong: You shouldn’t need to enact free-range kids laws, kids’ right to roam should be a part of the liberty that everyone is afforded and that right shouldn’t be infringed upon. That’s how it is here in Norway.
Which brings me to another bizarre idea in this debate: That it is appropriate for the state to direct its power against their own citizens, that it is appropriate to regulate the behavior of victims and not their abusers. Changing social media must be an emancipation project. Tech giants have taken essential liberty from the people, and democracy must return liberty to the kids in particular and to the people in general. It must again make it possible to innovate. The reality of the matter is that innovation is just an empty buzzword in Silicon Valley, what they actually build is literally “moat“. This is how social media will look with the proposed regulation:
As a technologist, I reject techno-solutionism. I call on media studies to similarly understand that media literacy programs do not by itself help and policy makers to similarly realize that only writing down regulation and expect it to be followed is not the solution.
That is not to say that technology isn’t part of the solution. It is, but some technology must be developed but with a democratic mandate rather than just a commercial one. Crucially, it must not be just about the technology, but about the new societal institutions we require, where governance and technology development come together in large international ecosystems, guided by cross-disciplinary teams. Surely, it is much harder to set up, but not as hard as you may think. Digital Commons is already available for essential infrastructure, and various initiatives begin to emerge. The first feature of new social media must be to enable collective action, and using that, it must bring together many parties around a common goal of creating social media that are truly liberating.
Now, it may be that age verification can be done well within new social media. It may be that age limit is a reasonable approach at that point to certain problems. However, I would much rather see children and parents coming together over a shared understanding and morality of what is needed for kids to flourish and build their shared rulesets based on that.