Mind Poison

Why Social Media is the Disease, Not the Symptom, of the Millennial Generation

This week, I saw Heroes of the Fourth Turning, an Off-Broadway production in its current run in New York City. It is an endlessly compelling, two-hour long debate that touches on religion, morality, politics, culture and entertainment, all from a conservative perspective. The audience was a homogenous gathering of upper middle-class white liberals, and before the play began, I scanned the crowd to find scant a person of color. I eavesdropped on conversations between the elegantly dressed attendees about the recent tumult at Deadspin and preferences among the upcoming Democratic primaries.

In the play, the audience is confronted with four characters with whom they largely disagree. The characters are old friends, reunited at their Catholic college under the starry skies of Wyoming, and in the years since their graduation (in 2010), their ideologies have shifted, but remain profoundly conservative, religious, and at times, virulently hateful. They recite classical poetry by memory, debate contrasting merits of the writings of Plato and Aristotle, seamlessly operate modern weaponry and drink copious amounts of whiskey.

The play serves as an allegory for modern conservatism from a religious point of view. Three of the friends possess immense moral clarity. They have found a grounding in Catholicism to guide their worldview, and despite their admitted hypocrisies, the guiding light of religion has allowed them to remain firm in a changing world. When they graduated college, today’s vast panopticon of social media had barely entered American consciousness, and as they’ve been forced to confront competing viewpoints in the years since, their intense religiosity has brought them home. The fourth friend — drunk, depressed and occasionally incoherent — has no idea where he stands, and he is where the real answers lie.

Each one has his or her own contradictions. Justin, a former Marine, believes homosexuality is a hedonistic scourge upon American society and urges true Catholics to withdraw from urban environments where its influence has spread without restraint. Yet he expresses a humble desire to write a children’s book called “The Grateful Acre”, a story about a plot of land that is grateful for its existence on the Earth, despite enduring an unending cycle of human destruction.

Emily, an ALS patient who refrains from using curse words, voted for Trump despite referring to him as a monstrous and vile pig. In her past job, she worked at a pro-life women’s advocacy group in Chicago, urging victims of sexual assault against abortion. She contorts her brain to find a rational defense for her friendship with a woman named Olivia who works at Planned Parenthood.

Theresa, the firebrand protege of Emily’s mother, possesses a vast vocabulary and insists on a forthcoming political war, referring to Olivia as a murderer and Trump’s advisors as intelligent, well-intentioned Republicans. She lives in Brooklyn, will soon be wed to a liberal and had pre-marital sex in college (for which she received clemency).

And finally, there is Kevin, a lost soul who works for a Catholic textbook company where he “writes about Saints all day”. He wavers between his contrasting desires to become a priest and to find a girlfriend, and he whines about his lust for sex and his addiction to his cell phone and social media. He voted for Trump and regretted it immediately. He doesn’t understand why he is supposed to hate gay people, or why Catholics have to be conservative. Of the characters, he is the most empathetic, and in a room full of cosmopolitan Democrats, he is the only window into an ideology that at one time was doctrine, but has wavered out of a lack of moral clarity. He is the character that best represents the millennial Right, and the symbol for new age conservatism in the Internet era. He knows what he’s supposed to believe, but he doesn’t know why, and in his existential confusion, the Internet is his only escape.

It is through Kevin’s eyes that I came to a hypothesis about the toxic culture of the Internet and social media in our times. From a left-leaning perspective, I thought I had identified social media as the root cause of the myriad ills my generation faces. His cultural counterpart, a friend of mine whom I will present next, was the genesis of my previous position. However, when viewed in concert, the opposite political viewpoints create a more crystallized conclusion — social media is not the symptom of the millennial generation. It is the disease.

When John McCain died in August 2018, I lost one of my best friends. In the aftermath of the news, I took to social media to gauge the reaction of my Twitter feed, an oddball collection of friends, public figures, athletes, sports gamblers, media personalities and comedians. I was politically opposed to McCain’s agenda and retweeted a crude joke about the late Senator as the news of his passing was still fresh. To me, the event of his death did not absolve decisions that I viewed as mistakes throughout his life, and I felt comfortable leveeing criticism regardless of the timing.

After sharing the joke, I received a text from my friend, asking to explain why I would be so crass so soon. We grew up together in the suburbs of New York City, and after graduating college, we both moved to Manhattan and were together every week. We texted daily, shared the same social circle, and were ostensibly the closest of friends. He wasn’t an overtly political person, and as far as I knew, we had generally similar viewpoints. Politics was not a subject we discussed often, but he was certainly no card-carrying Republican, and to my knowledge he had no strong opinions in either direction towards McCain.

His position was not a complicated one: the joke was unfunny and in bad taste. McCain was a revered veteran and to share such commentary while the country mourned was disrespectful. I understood. Politics aside, McCain was a prisoner of war and spent his life in the military and as a public representative, and the joke was absolutely in poor taste. But I stood by it, and I felt it was worth initiating a constructive disagreement about when exactly it becomes acceptable to speak ill on someone you disagree with after they pass away.

The conversation continued with some barbs back and forth about McCain’s final acts in Congress, his inflammatory comments about Asians, the immediacy of the news, the general respect engendered by political foes, and the definition of a public hero. Suddenly, the disagreement turned personal.

I was called immature, a piece of shit, a lost person, idiotic, deluded and generally undeserving of respect. I couldn’t leave politics at the door, he said. The insults came in quick succession. I bobbed and weaved but things had gotten away from me. I tried to steer the discussion back to substantive debate but was rebuffed. Eventually, he expressed what seemed to be a long-harbored feeling that our relationship gave him nothing of value, and that I was an indecent person who he’d no longer interact with. I woke up the next day to find that he had blocked me on Twitter and Instagram, and for the next four months, we didn’t share a word.

I broke the ice some time later, and while the entire ordeal was bizarre and confusing, we moved on as if it were a blip in our friendship. We relapsed into our previous ways, spending significant time together and pretending nothing ever happened. I assumed I had touched some political nerve that I would never understand, and made it a point to avoid the subject moving forward.

It was during those intervening months that I considered publishing some version of this piece. I was convinced that Twitter and the Internet had taken hold of his mind, transforming his rational brain into a vitriolic sewer of political discourse, infecting him like a virus that was spreading throughout my generation, inciting hostility and polarizing competing factions. The Internet has been destroying our collective mentality for years, I had thought, but the media frenzy and hyper-attentive news cycle surrounding the Trump Administration had amplified the ills of social media and its impact on the populace. Instagram, once a place of artistic expression, morphed into a vehicle for multinational corporations to hawk their products and services on a platform where the entire economy of advertising rests upon the contributions of a wave of young women posting pictures of themselves in bikinis. Snapchat had endured a similar fate. Once a low-budget operation whose shoddiness and simplicity were core to its charm, it had relinquished itself to the thralls of capitalism. Open Snapchat and swipe to the right to find a torrent of companies desperately hoping to win your attention for 30 seconds, all in the name of ‘engagement’.

Much like Instagram and Snapchat devolved over time, the verbose mediums of Twitter and Facebook became the ideological battlegrounds. There is nothing more American than conviction, and these platforms were the perfect combat zone for the Culture War. Humans desperately seek validation in their beliefs, and 10,000 likes can give a person the endorphin rush of recognition that was hidden away from billions over generations. Social media provided belief reinforcement on steroids, creating a toxic environment now corrupting an untold number of minds, and I simply thought my friend was the latest one.

I held off on publishing that piece, knowing deep down that there was something I missed. Twitter alone could not have turned my best friend against me. I looked inward and analyzed our interactions since college, and I felt that I was always consistent in my personality and our relationship. I thought I’d let the time pass, rebuild our friendship, and just move on.

Following my olive branch, our friendship stayed tight until July, when he fatefully drunk-texted our group chat one night dismayed that I, along with another of our close friends, had neglected to ‘like’ his last two Instagram posts. I had started to spend less time on the platform and I hadn’t even seen the posts when I got the texts. The absurdity of the conversation that followed was beyond comprehension. He began speaking in a dialect that he’d never used before. We had broken the “bro code”, he said, and the behavior was so abnormal that I genuinely thought it was a comedic bit.

Quickly, we realized he was serious, and once again it devolved into a personal spat in which he told us that our souls were lost and that he needed to leave Manhattan and make new friends. To him, Instagram was a forum for public support, and our decision not to like the posts was a rebuke of the highest order. In his opinion, we were fake, unsupportive and spiteful, and once again, he left the conversation and blocked us on every social media platform. We haven’t spoken since.

While the behavior I’ve described makes my former friend out to be some kind of maniac, and myself to be somewhat of an asshole, I genuinely like him as a human being and feel sorrow when I think back on these petty fights. I hesitate to tell these stories because they are embarrassing, revealing and shameful. But I genuinely think they teach a valuable lesson. I do not resent him, nor do I believe him to have some undetermined social illness. I think that he is a victim of a pervasive societal sickness, one that will only grow and spread like a virus unless it’s confronted correctly. The disease of social media has symptoms that go much deeper than Trump’s rhetoric or the hardline of the #Resistance, and defining those symptoms is vital.

Many millennials were young in the late 90s and early 2000s, and the rise of technology helped magnify a new class of societal ills. Online forums, video games, and the general ubiquity of information led to an increase in social anxiety, attention deficit disorder and loneliness (specifically among white males). The youth read fewer books and had less sex. Their brain chemistry was slowly altered by the omnipotence of screens, and motivations began to shift away from that of the generations before them. They got jobs later, started families later, and graduated college less frequently. There was an entire world on the web, and when the recession came, the destructive cultural impact of the world online began its vice grip on the millennial generation.

A majority of millennials spent some portion of their formative years with Barack Obama in office. From a left-leaning perspective, this was a time shrouded under a progressive veil, as our country moved past the specter of Racism into a new era of acceptance and liberalism. For the Right, this was a destructive scolding, a betrayal of American ideals and the dawn of an age of recidivism. These two poles paved the way for a pair of simultaneous vapid worldviews, where each side’s perspective was largely predetermined based on a (literal) black-and-white depiction of right and wrong. It allowed for most people on each political platform to operate on a surface level, rarely engaging with the rational underpinnings of their belief systems. We didn’t know it at the time, but this, combined with the pervasiveness of the Internet, was a catastrophic development.

Trump’s election shattered the illusion of a progressive wave in this country, leaving in its wake an exalted Right and traumatized Left. Most millennials were shell-shocked, regardless of their political leanings. Education had failed them, and they had no true intellectual moral compass from which to help sort the chaotic existential confusion that confronted them in the face of Trumpism. The only people that grew of age in the Obama years that remained ‘sane’ following the rise of Trump were those whose worldview was previously grounded in a firm belief system. From a progressive perspective, that meant multiculturalism or leftism. From a conservative one, that meant religion, racism, or Capital. Those people knew where they stood and they knew why they stood there. Those who lacked a firm belief system prior to 2016 sought solace, and most found it in the thing they knew best — the Internet.

The world we see today is a result of the lack of institutional control over the forces that dominate the Internet. It’s easy to forget that the dawn of social media was a pleasant one. From 2007 to 2010, Facebook was a playground. People had public feeds, posting videos and wall messages for all their friends to see. Teenagers posted Instagram photos with no concern for the amount of likes it would receive. Imagine sending a personalized video message on a public forum to your best friend or significant other in 2019, at the risk of embarrassment and social shame? Today, those are reserved for DMs or fake spin-off accounts. The early days of these platforms were a terrain of personal expression, not a data-mining conglomerate or representation of social status.

In the years that followed, Facebook, Twitter and Google were allowed to operate with free reign, and their systemic abuse of the power of the Internet had undue influence on the brain chemistry of millions of Americans. We are now addicted to scrolling, swiping and tapping. The morphine drip of information is inescapable, and it has created a society with corrupt incentives. This has resulted in a direct correlation between the political climate online and the Internet’s social impact on millennial relationships.

The theory goes as follows: The superficial political normalcy under Obama’s America was replaced by a malicious online culture during and throughout the rise of Trumpism. That led to a burning desire for escapism, which led an even greater number of people to the Internet in search of answers. The predetermined polarity after the recession and the election of Obama only led to stronger groupthink as factions mobilized in larger numbers online, leading to an even more powerful decline in intellectual moral clarity among a generation that was already facing a crisis in that very respect. As factions got further and further apart without a true philosophical underpinning for the true reasons why, they increasingly required validation from their peer groups. Since their entire world had moved online, that validation increasingly came from social media. Therefore, the incentive structure of social media platforms grew progressively corrupt, and an entire generation lost its grip on the foundation of human connection. Kevin of Heroes of the Fourth Turning doesn’t know why he is supposed to hate gay people, or why his Catholicism necessitates his conservatism. My friend doesn’t know why he’s supposed to respect John McCain and why I don’t have to, nor does he know why Instagram likes aren’t actually important to our friendship. This isn’t because of social media, but social media is how it has been manifest.

The question remains: how do we dig ourselves out of this cultural and intellectual rut? Can we reverse this pattern and save our generation? Probably not. Sure, you can delete your social media accounts and probably enjoy a general improvement in your quality of life. But realistically, that’s an impossible expectation for a mass movement and a fool’s errand. If my personal experience is to be any guide, my advice is to find a philosophical North Star. Find a political, religious, moral or even capitalistic grounding in which you can define how you move about the world. It shouldn’t matter if you support Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. It gives you a foundation, an intellectual motivation for your beliefs, and lets you sort through the existential chaos that the Internet has bestowed upon us. Without that foundation we are lost, doomed to spiral further in the wake the next inevitable epochal cultural event, and the results of that spiral could be catastrophic.