The Arkadia™ Blog

These catastrophic results from social media disinformation campaigns only represent the tip of the iceberg because our social media addiction and the way these deceptive algorithms work also have a profound effect on the average citizen. By offering content that appears to match postings that we like or videos that we watch, Facebook and YouTube engineered a way to feed us more of the same. Since social media have eclipsed the reach of more traditional news outlets in the past ten years and amplify this polarizing trend exponentially, you’re likely to end up in a sealed opinion silo before too long because you won’t find any alternative viewpoints and differing interpretations of social and political events.

These opinionated clips and snippets have little resemblance with the legendary reporting of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, who considered it their public duty to deliver the news impartially and to break down complex political issues for their audiences in a fair and measured manner. Today, many users live in a fantasy world that is increasingly detached from reality, and that is equally true whether you’re on the political left or the right. The culture wars that began in the 1990s have taken on an extremely vitriolic spin due to social media amplification, with the result that this country is more torn and divided than at any time since the Civil War. A siege mentality seems to have descended on the nation, encouraging audiences to retreat into their own echo chambers by shielding themselves from any opposing viewpoints, happy to be fed constant validation of their own ideological grievances.

Taking a step back from these phenomena, it all looked to me like a big circus for an increasingly immature audience. And of course that’s what it is: today’s social media conglomerates have turned news into entertainment, into a partisan variation of reality TV. The fact that a former host of “The Apprentice” was elected to the highest office in the country is symptomatic of that development. Spectacle and outrage trump substance. Or put more succinctly: Social media encourage escapism and loneliness at the intersection of resentment and addiction. Our ever greater appetite for amusement, distraction, and indignation is leading to our ever greater infantilization and tribalization.

Make no mistake: these trends have a truly disastrous effect on the cohesion and functioning of our society. In the wake of this digitalized tribalization, we’re witnessing increased strain within families and communities, as well as an erosion of trust with regard to news media and political institutions. Family members break off contact with each other, Democrats wouldn’t date Republicans anymore and vice versa, and good-willed, decent citizens increasingly behave like manichaean culture-warriors with a holy code to uphold.

When exactly did political affiliations, religious views, and self-ascribed identities become a litmus test for whom we have a conversation with? There used to be a time when it was considered impolite to even touch on subject matters like politics or religion in a conversation. When exactly have we lost the ability to listen to each other and to appreciate the life experiences that have shaped the other person? When exactly has self-ascribed ideological identity become more important than genuine interest in the other person and her own life?

In addition to that, our phone use has had a disastrous impact on our attention spans. Ask yourself: when was the last time you immersed yourself in a single activity for one hour without interruption? And even if you did, how tempted were you to reach for your smart phone and check messages, news alerts, or social media feeds? These days, even humanities professors at Ivy League colleges don’t hand out assignments to read entire books anymore because the millenial undergraduates don’t have the necessary attention to read a book cover to cover. A recent poll found that the proportion of Americans who never read a single book per year has tripled between 1978 and 2014, with the result that now 57 percent of Americans don’t read any book at all in a given year. Reading is by far the most elementary activity for personal growth and the acquisition of knowledge. Reading fiction allows us to delve into unfamiliar worlds, to mind-travel to foreign countries, to learn to empathize with a variety of different characters. What does it say about our civilization and the future of our society that a majority in our country has largely abandoned that activity in order to spend an average of 5.4 hours a day looking at their phones?

As if these worrying social effects weren’t enough, social media have also failed us on their core promise: to bring individuals together and foster a new sense of community. So far, the digital revolution hasn’t had the effect that we grow closer together and develop and maintain better relationships. In fact, it’s made us lonelier, angrier, and more divided than ever.

Social media platforms found out that by far the greatest factor to keep customers scrolling and hooked to their ad content was outrage. This phenomenon is based on a psychological phenomenon called “negativity bias” — we’re hardwired to focus far more intently on something threatening and upsetting than at something beautiful and pleasant. So the Silicon Valley corporations designed algorithms that would feed their users postings that they knew were hot button issues to these individual customers. It wasn’t their intent to intensify hatred and resentment, it was purely a business decision to generate more clicks and screentime. Yet that decision proved to have deadly consequences.

It is well documented that the Russian government employed a highly-skilled troll army to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Posing as average Americans, they flooded Facebook channels with postings and fake news stories that were geared towards generating outrage and resentment. At a far deadlier level, Facebook’s algorithms stoked the flames of the genocide of the Rohingya in Burma in 2018 that resulted in the deaths of 25’000 people, with over 700’000 being violently displaced (the UN found that Facebook played a “determining role” in these massacres). Facebook disinformation also contributed to the victory of President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018, which led to scores of indiscriminate police killings in favelas. And of course we’re all familiar with the images of the mob, whipped up by false social media claims of a stolen presidential election, that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January, 6^th, 2021.

Our world has shrunk considerably in the 21^st century. It has contracted so much that we think we can hold the whole wide world in our palms by looking at our six-inch screens. We’ve witnessed an unprecedented communication revolution in the past 20 years, with the Internet and smart phones becoming ubiquitous features of our lives. We can’t even imagine how a life without them would look like anymore. And we use them a lot: on average, we touch our smart phones a staggering 2’617 times a day. Teenagers send out a text message every six minutes, again on average. When I walk the streets of Santa Monica and notice that nearly everybody coming my way is staring at their handheld devices, I always feel reminded of old black and white movies in which people smoke incessantly. Think of all those Humphrey Bogart films: barely a scene without the characters puffing away on their cigarettes. Knowing what we do now about the grave health threats posed by smoking, this behavior strikes us as odd and outdated. I wouldn’t be surprised if future generations will similarly look at us and shake their heads given the unacknowledged mental health issues caused by our addiction to smart phones.

And make no mistake, the dopamine hits administered in a steady drip by social media platforms are addictive by design. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok — all these corporations are effectively drug dealers vying for your attention to prolong screen time and run even more advertisements by you. They know exactly what they’re doing. That’s their business model. That’s why they’ve invented the infinite scroll. Yet there’s an even more disconcerting aspect to the operating practice of these platforms, and that’s the fact that these corporations harvest a staggering amount of data from their customers, creating digital avatars as to better target you and me with tailor-made ads — which allows them to ask even more money from advertisers. Even if you use their apps only sporadically, social media platforms can fairly quickly construct an extremely detailed consumer profile of you based on your location, movements, friends, likes, shopping habits, and use of other applications. Just imagine what an outcry by civil rights activists we would have witnessed if the government had issued a law 20 years ago requiring every single citizen to wear a tracking device around the neck. Yet as long as we can garner likes on Facebook and hearts on Instagram, we’re kind of OK with that. We indeed live in a brave new surveillance world.

Apart from encouraging addictive behavior and collecting vast amounts of individual consumer data, these platform also have a devastating effect on our social fabric. First of all, check your daily screen time and ask yourself what you could have done during the time that you were busy scrolling through your feeds. Think of the friends you could have actually met in person. Think of the hobbies you could have pursued. Think of the skills you could have acquired. Our smart phones have become extremely effective time-wasting machines at the expense of us engaging in something meaningful that would enrich our families and communities, like learning that instrument you’ve always wanted to play, like teaching your dog new tricks, like reading your child a second good-night story.

If you look at a few publicly available statistics on the U.S., you can see that the heralded technological progress of recent decades did not necessarily have an elevating effect on the general public in the past decades:

• The real median income of middle-class families has stagnated since 1970. Globalization, automization, and digitalization threaten to aggravate that trend for the Generation Z and beyond.
• In 2021, the nation’s birth rate has declined for the sixth straight year. 44 percent of adults under the age of 50 say it’s unlikely they’ll ever have children.
• The number of yearly suicides has reached astronomical heights, particularly among young males.
• Casualties of drug overdoses are at an all-time high. In 2021 alone, the country counted more than 100’000 overdose deaths, mainly from opioids.
• For the first time since World War II, life expectancy among Americans has decreased for two consecutive years (even if you discount deaths from covid-19).
• 54 percent of Americans say they sometimes or always feel that nobody knows them well.

Letting these statistics sink in, you can’t help but observe a growing sense of despair, anguish, and hopelessness descending on the nation. The limitless optimism and can-do attitude so characteristic of the United States in the past has taken a big hit. The future seems no longer bright and promising, but blurred and threatening. There seems to be a distinctive disconnect between technological change and our actual individual and social needs.

With rising workloads, young professionals and particularly young families don’t find the time anymore to socialize, foster community ties, and enter meaningful friendships. The days when a single middle-class paycheck was sufficient to feed and raise an entire family are definitely gone, and they’re not coming back. Demands on employees’ mobility have often uprooted families, with young adults finding themselves separated by thousands of miles from their immediate kin. Many towns and cities in the Midwest have been hit hard by the loss of industrial jobs, with the result that communities have frayed and middle-aged workers, unable to find adequate replacement jobs, slid into poverty. Yet by far the most important factor contributing to the atomization of society in the past decade has been a technology that was supposed to bring us all closer together.

When we learn in school that history is driven by progress, it is the history of technological progress. As we all know, homo sapiens has evolved from our shared primate ancestors to become the most powerful species on the planet. Humans embarked on the Agricultural Revolution at around 10’000 BC to transform themselves from hunters and gatherers to farmers and city dwellers. In the course of that seismic shift, empires sprang up, and the bureaucratic elites at the time developed the written word to keep track of inventories and tax collections. The Bronze Age followed the Stone Age, and the wheel was invented. The Iron Age saw Romans perfecting the rule of law and military strategy, while their infrastructure such as roads, sewers, and aqueducts set new standards. After the Middle Ages the modern era has seen a cascade of scientific discoveries and technological inventions for the past 400 years, shaping the world we live in today. We’ve invented the steam engine and the aeroplane, we split atoms and sent a man to the moon, we’ve developed penicillin and can transplant hearts. And the 21^st century has seen the arrival of the Internet and a whole array of ever more encompassing digital networks. Scientific discoveries enable inventions, thus creating, layer by layer, an ever greater accumulation of knowledge and a wider array for its technological applications. Our smart phones, after all, also become smarter and smarter each year.

This is, in a nutshell, the story of technological progress that we’ve absorbed in school and that a majority of us would instinctively agree with. Yet even though that history of technological progress may be largely accurate, we should pause for a moment and also acknowledge what has been lost. Because every innovation, every invention eclipses a trait or a skill that appears no longer necessary.

Sure, many of us know how to type with ten fingers on our computers these days — yet the handwriting of somebody a hundred years ago was surely more elaborate and beautiful. We’re very good at rapidly responding to e-mails — yet the quality of our prose and our spelling has been impoverished. We send out hundreds of text messages a day — yet have long lost the skill of dinner conversations. We can look up any fact and detail on the Internet within the blink of an eye — yet don’t bother to remember anything because that knowledge is so easily retrievable. We probably know more about sex than any generation before us — yet have forgotten the art of writing love letters. We have access to a near limitless supply of cheap Chinese consumer products — yet we’ve lost our appreciation for durable and well-designed quality items that last. Modern cars with all their electronic helpers make driving more effortless — yet who still knows how to drive stick or check the engine oil?

So if you start to look at technological inventions not only through the lense of “bigger, better, faster,” but in terms of what kind of effects these innovations have had on our minds, habits, and skill sets, the case for everlasting progress cannot be made so easily. We should question what consequences specific technological advances have on our health and well-being, as well as on the cohesion and functioning of our societies. Because that is how real progress should be defined. And in that context it is important to note that — down to the atomic bomb — every invention that proved technically feasible was eventually realized. Not once did humanity take a step back and thought about the possible effects of developing a new innovation once it was technically and financially realizable. Which of course opens the question whether we humans are actually the driving force of progress, or if it may not be the other way round: that technology drives us on a relentless path of progress as long as we reach a spiritual awakening and a collective state of maturity that would allow us to occasionally say: No, we don’t want that. This will not serve our needs as society. This will be potentially harmful to humanity.

As I am writing this, we’re slowly emerging from a 24-month long global pandemic and regain a sense of normalcy. Now that mask mandates are waning and schools are reopening, there’s a unique opportunity for all of us to realign our lives and discover our true purpose.

As the economic ramifications and the social hardships caused by covid-19 generated much suffering, not to speak of the staggering number of people who lost their lives, we all made a unique, once in-a-lifetime experience: We saw the world quieting down in the weeks after shelter-at home orders were issued in March 2020.

For the first time, many of us were stripped of our daily routines. The familiar patterns of commuting to work and spending our days at the workplace were upended, leaving us stuck at home while everything around us came to a virtual standstill. The sense of breathlessness that is so characteristic of our hustling modern lifestyle was suddenly replaced by a great calmness. It felt as if God had hit the pause button.

The days felt unstructured and like jelly, and the weeks rushed past. The routines and habits that provided the scaffolding of our daily lives collapsed, leaving us to ourselves with unusually much time at our hands. In that quietness, there was now room for existential questions that we’d become very good at evading:

Do I live the life that I wish to live? Am I happy in my chosen profession? Is my love relationship fulfilling? Why do I feel that there’s something missing in my life? If I could start all over again, what would I do differently? And do I really want to return to the life that I had before the pandemic?

We strongly believe that there’s a silver lining to the global devastation and rupture caused by the covid-19 pandemic. As much as the past 24 months have atomized us and separated us from our social circles, they also showed us how interconnected we all are. Simply returning to how things were before would be a colossal missed opportunity. With the effects of that vicious respiratory disease waning, we now have the unique chance to reclaim our breath, to realign our lives, and to shape our existence with enhanced focus, purpose and commitment.