Smartphones, social media help foster societal despair

American teenagers, and especially American teenage girls, are increasingly miserable — more likely to feel beset by “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” to quote a survey report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As cataloged by New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, a leading alarmsounder, in indicator after indicator you can see an inflection point somewhere in the early 2010s, where a darkening begins that continues to this day.

Haidt thinks the key instigator is the rise of social media. Other causal candidates, enumerated by Derek Thompson of The Atlantic in his helpful essays on the subject, tend to have a stronger ideological valence — a liberal might point to teenage anxiety about climate change or school shootings or the rise of Donald Trump, a conservative might insist that it’s the baleful effects of identity politics or the isolation created by COVID-era lockdowns.

The timing of the mental health trend fits the smartphone’s increasing substitution for in-person socialization, while the Great Awokening and Trumpism are more chronologically downstream. And the coronavirus era exacerbated the problem without being a decisive shift.

But when you’re analyzing the effects of a technological shock, it’s also useful to analyze the society that existed just as the shock arrived. On the internet, “we could have built any kind of world,” Thompson writes. “We built this one. Why have we done this to ourselves?”

One answer is that social media entered into a world that was experiencing the triumph of a certain kind of social liberalism, which the new tech subjected to a stress test that it has conspicuously failed.

By “social liberalism,” I don’t mean the progressivism that took off in the Trump era — anti-racism and diversity-equity-inclusion and #MeToo. I mean the more individualistic liberalism that emerged in the 1960s and experienced a second takeoff across the first decade of the 2000s. Its defining features were rapid secularization (the decline of Christian identification accelerated from the 1990s onward) and increasing social and sexual permissiveness.

In the early Obama years, many liberals assumed that these trends were positive and healthy, or at least sustainable and manageable. They weren’t yielding the social disorder that conservatives always fear, crime was low and the decline of the two-parent family could be treated mostly as an economic problem.

But then the smartphone revolution asked people raised under these conditions — raised with less family stability and weak attachments to religion, with a strong emphasis on self-creation and a strong hostility to “normativity” — to enter and forge a new social world. And they went forth and created the online world we know today, with its pinball motion between extremes of toxic narcissism and the solidarity of the mob, its therapy-speak unmoored from real community, its conspiracism and ideological crazes, its mimetic misery and despairing catastrophism.

All of which has made social liberalism look much more unsustainable and self-undermining than it did in 2008. It’s threatened not just by political radicalism and returning disorder, but by a collapse of familial and romantic and even sexual connection, a terrible atomization and existential dread, a chasing ever-stranger gods.