The fact that social media constantly pushes for shallow novelty is rather obvious 1, because the easiest way to keep someone scrolling on them is to feed them an endless amount of new things to be excited about. Whereas thoughtful discussions require attention and invite you to slow down, consider your life and re-examine your choices, social media is designed to be addictive so as to drive as much traffic as possible to them.
But what are the consequences exactly? Noticing a pattern is one thing, but seeing all its implications, from the root to the leaves, is another.
The first thing I note is that addiction is broadly normalized in our times. This has become so ubiquitous that it has sort of become cliché to mention it, and yet if you step back and take it for what it is, what it means is that the average person cannot even be considered sane at this point.
To some degree this latter point might not be a new trend. People have defended the most toxic aspects of civilization for millenia, whether it is slavery, warfare, the extraction of nature, the oppression of people, the widespread forms of child abuse known as circumcision and schooling, and many others. The problem I specifically have with screen addiction is that, prior to everyone being constantly plugged into the schizoid hivemind of the internet, people had some connection to Reality, through their work requiring physical presence, or through their relationships being grounded in some local space, even if ultimately their experience was heavily filtered through their distorted culture and trauma.
Now that the screen dictates people's lives, there is basically no connection to that anymore. It is entirely possible for two people living in the same city, hell, even two people inhabiting the same building, to be stuck in two disjoint solipsistic bubbles, living in parallel to one another.
Because screens have such a strong grab on people's time and sense of reality, what we have are larges sections of the population rendered passive, and stupified in front of the almighty screen, which cannot even be said to project a distorted reality convenient to those in power, because it would ignore the far more mundane reality that people turn on the news because they are bored. Propaganda is one side of social media addiction, but the society of the spectacle is perhaps far deeper, because people love the spectacle.
Since the latter is not concerned with reality, only its representation to an audience, we can no longer take for granted that the average person has views which are somewhat reasonable, because their life itself is untethered from anything tangible. People in the past might have been brutally insensitive and largely ignorant, but they still had to feed themselves through mostly manual labor. Farming, woodworking, hunting, butchering, baking, weaving, all of those activities required direct, physical participation, which meant that people's lives were grounded in a physical context which was whole, and where the link between their work an its results were self-evident.
To contrast, people nowadays are utterly dependent on the system to provide for their own needs, whether it is the network of institutions and governments we call the public sector, or the network of companies—which incidentally also rely on governments—we call the private sector. Therefore, it does not matter whether we are talking about left-wing spectacle or right-wing spectacle, the problem is the spectacle itself, which mediates people's experience to Reality, and which people are engrossed by because it projects back what they wish to be true, as well as what they hate, get outraged by.
This seeming opposition makes perfect sense when you consider the fact that the two forms of low-conscious excitement, one positive and one negative, work together to create a constant wave of up and down—happy today, unhappy tomorrow—which creates constant stream of novelty, as well as an easy distinction between an ingroup—people I like—and an outgroup—people I don't like.
Or as Darren Allen brilliantly observed here, the news is a form of pornography, the negative strand that is, which grips our attention and keeps it narrow by constantly showing us what our self hates, while also doing nothing whatsoever to make us more responsible, more in tune with our conscious I.
Addiction is thus not simply of the positive kind, the crude titillation which people might crave, such as huge breasts, drugs to escape your problems, or food laced with flavor enhancers. The modern forms of addiction employed by social media platforms are even more cunning, because they use a combination of both positive and negative addictions in a randomized manner, eerily similar to the setup of the Skinner box.
What this means is that social media, driven by an incentive for ever more traffic and engagement, is directly promoting addictions in its user base, which not only hijacks their sense of satisfaction and makes them less fulfilled from everyday tasks which might require effort, uncertainty and setbacks, but it also feeds the entire spectacle of society which ruptures people's connection to anything tangible whatsoever, in the process fueling the culture war we find ourselves in.
As alluded to, a society of screens is also a society of solipsistic selves, stuck in their own bubble of reality, with little to no overlap with the people around them. There are a thousand ways in which distractions can manifest in, which is convenient for the spectacle because it means that there is an endless amount of things to catch up on, but for people who wish to take part in a common context from which lasting things can emerge from, our world is worse than a desert, for a desert is natural and whole, it is a schizoid hell.
Conversations nowadays feel like talking to someone who is stuck in their own world, especially for young people such as myself, because there is basically no unifying context anymore. If people try to talk about something in common, what options do they have? They can talk about the news, which is again part of the spectacle, and made to be as negative as it could be in order to suck up attention. Or they can talk about the environment they are within, such as school, or work, which is why people engage so much in petty gossip, since there is nothing else to talk about. Or they can complain about things in general, a very common pastime for older people, which is also a very easy way to relate to others if you have nothing good and conscious in your life.
This is why another type of dreadful conversation consists in one person talking about themselves: their own interests, what they've watched or read recently, things that happened, on and on. To some degree we can't really blame them, as atrocious as it is to pretend to care about someone talking on and on about themselves, because our social contexts have been so eroded that nowadays it's difficult to find a common ground for good conversations to emerge from. At least people talking about themselves are trying to engage with the other person, which is better than just staring at one another in silence, and then turning to our screen.
Modern man resembles more and more an ant working away in its own tunnel, except that we don't even have a common ground, the colony, which could unite our separate efforts. It's already bad enough for a human being, able to consciously experience the astounding breadth of life, to be reduced to a hyperspecialized unit in a byzantine world, but it's made even worse by the fact that the collectives we work on are self-informed.
1 There is always a new thing, and a new thing, and a new thing. Fortunately we can find comfort in knowing that the newest thing is definitely the most important and totally deserves our complete attention. See also Another thing happened by James Ellis
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2025-12-16