Blinded by the glare
We cannot take on Big Tech because we cannot even see the problem.
Even well-intentioned and well-organized communities have trouble fixing problems for which they lack a general consensual idea of cause. When it comes to social and political complaisance in the face of a tech-driven rewiring of the social order, our problem is not a paucity of explanations — quite the opposite. Just a short list of reasons commonly cited for the near-unchallenged ascendancy of the tech firms would include:
the cumulatively deep depletion of social trust—Robert Putnam wrote the seminal essay for Bowling Alone all the way back in 1995, thirty years ago!—which makes self-propelled community organizing more difficult to start and less robust to sustain even when it can be started;
the shocking erosion of deep literacy, which depletes social reservoirs of empathy and keeps knowledge of social media harms limited to mostly college-educated adults, whose cognitive styles are frequently off-putting to others in a burgeoning populism-friendly cultural environment;
the generally numbing and reality-blurring effect of a culture in the throes of an onrushing entertainment-technology singularity, what David Foster Wallace called Total Noise in his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, defined by a situation in which “the marginal cost of an additive unit of entertainment trends to zero”;
the Gattling-gun level of spectacle-besotted distractions coming from the White House alone;
and more besides.
Most of these factors, however, are peripheral or additive to the main reason for our passivity, which breaks down into two parts: Socially, our cyberaddiction is more widespread and more pernicious — and thus more demobilizing — than is generally appreciated. And politically, the superhuman returns to scale generated by information technology have created an industry that rivals government itself in revenue and power. Neither part of the answer, alas, is simple or obvious to most observers, and that works to compound the problem.
Social media is only one facet of a larger and more generic technological juggernaut — the cybernetic revolution, or what I call the cyberlution. Norbert Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” in 1948 to mark the burgeoning study of information flows in complex systems. Cybernetics is now in digital mode and on the portal of a vast artificial intelligence expansion. We are hurtling toward that future in a culture that has only the faintest understanding of how the cyberlution has already transformed our politics — and our minds.
The doom loop of digital distraction
The key to the passivity most observers espy on the socio-cultural side is that the level and nature of addiction to digital devices, especially smartphones but also gaming systems and certain other gadgets, is misunderstood and thus underestimated. It constitutes a species of Catch-22 paralysis new to the history of attempts to grapple, legally and otherwise, with earlier communications revolutions, including those pertaining to telephony, photography, radio, and television.1 It is important to understand why this is before proceeding further.
What we observe as inherent to contemporary digital communications technology is partly old and partly new. What is old is two-fold. As Charles Horton Cooley, arguably the father of American sociology, argued in a seminal 1897 essay entitled “The Process of Social Change,” communications techniques feed what he called the “social mind,” that cloud-like normative structure in every culture that individuals are socialized into, influence only at the margins usually, and then ultimately pass out of. In that essay Cooley coined the term “social media,” which only hit the big time, beyond the reach of sociology professors, in somewhat altered meaning about a century or so later. And as Harold Innis put it at the portal of the television era in 1951, it is very nearly a law of social dynamics that all “sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances.”2
So much for what is old, not that most people actually understand any of this despite its hoary pedigree. What is new about the digital phase of the internet era can be expressed with reference to just three words: hyperconnectivity, disintermediation, and anonymity.
Hyperconnectivity: The size and transmission speeds of today’s digital communications networks are orders of magnitude larger and faster than before, and their interactive transmission capacities at scale are unique.
Disintermediation: Also unique, essentially no filters exist in the United States on digital communications transmissions, whether professional or governmental, except the very meek and limited ones designed for liability protection applied by the tech corporations themselves.
Anonymity: It follows from radical disintermediation that senders of communications need not, often are not, and usually cannot be accurately identified by recipients of communications if senders so desire. This authorial ambiguity is characteristic of the whole digital internet era well beyond social media, and will only deepen with the rise of artificial intelligence — and the deepfakery we have witnessed thus far, while hardly trivial, will look like child’s play in a few years if current trajectories are left to unfurl unhindered.
The cyberlution has thus teleported us into an information environment of hyper-connectivity with rapid feedback loops, disintermediation that shatters quality control, and anonymity that shreds accountability for content. These features have created an online world of attention-seeking in the form of spectacle — a world, in short, that has gotten most of us addicted to distraction.
This cyberlutional addiction, quite aside from affecting many more people than earlier communications technologies, is different and more pernicious than most realize.
Most addictions are relatively easy for the sufferer to detect, even if he or she chooses to deny them; but once detected and confronted, they can often be treated and overcome. A gambling addict, for example, can see evidence of addiction in a dwindling bank account and an accrual of debt, and often enough in an array of riled up family relationships. Someone addicted to distraction, on the other hand, has a harder task. Timelines disappear for lack of any solid empirical referent that something is amiss, and as soon as a rare sign of a problem begins to dawn on the victim, whoosh, it’s gone, thanks to the next distraction. It short, addiction to distraction describes a virtual closed loop with no easy way out. It certainly does not help that so many people are now affected that addiction’s symptoms seem normal, even though they are anything but. We have long defined addictions as anomalous behaviors, so we are baffled into silence when they turn out to be as common as they have become.
Addiction to distraction describes a virtual closed loop with no easy way out. It certainly does not help that so many people are now affected that addiction’s symptoms seem normal … What’s worse, cyberaddictions do not settle into a grind in the same way as substance and ordinary behavioral addictions.
This is important. The origin of any and every addiction is an illusion, a kind of fiction that some marvelous pleasurable reward may abide in one’s future. A person sets off in pursuit of this reward only to find that the faster he or she runs the more elusive the reward becomes. With substance addictions the usual response is to use more of the substance to sustain the same level of pleasurable hope that the ultimate reward can be grasped. With behavioral addictions like gambling, thrill seeking, and sex the usual response is to escalate the behavior in question. Since the ultimate reward is fictional, however, it will never be attained no matter the level or pace of the pursuit.
The same goes with addiction to digital technology, but differently, because the fiction is honed to near statistical perfection by algorithmic teasing. As Jaron Lanier put it, “The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain … is changing in response to the algorithm’s experiments.” But, continues Lanier, “because the stimuli from the algorithm doesn’t mean anything, because they are genuinely random, the brain isn’t responding to anything real, but to a fiction. That process — of becoming hooked in an elusive mirage — is addiction.”3
So for any practical purpose, all the elements of cyberaddictions are packed into an individual’s headspace, making them more insidious than conventional addictions even as they tend to be both less dramatic, less unhealthy in a manifest bodily sense, and — again — much less socially anomalous.
Moreover, cyberaddictions do not settle into a grind in the same way as substance and ordinary behavioral addictions. They are ever novel and endlessly attractive. One reason is that the push notifications that sparkle and the dings that resound from iPhones do not anticipate only one class of rewards. They can signal a new email, or a new text message, or a new YouTube video, or a calendar notification, or a recorded voicemail — and many if not most of these possibilities raise the expectation of a social connection, a force that in other cases arguably helps to navigate out of addiction. Even incidental, passing social connections seem to be more salient psychologically than most of us realize. So unlike the treadmill psychology of substance addictions in particular — that anticipatory, joyless “oh no, here I go again” feeling — the thrill is not gone (apologies to B.B. King), is never gone, from cyberaddictions.
This helps to explain why so many are in denial about the nature and dangers of cyberaddictions. They do not disable us as readily or as rapidly as do substance and behavioral addictions. They are subtler. They even let us remember the benefits of the technology, which can be real if the user manages to remain the master and not become the slave, remain Pavlov and not become the dog. But confidence that we will always be the master, and hence the too easy assumption that most others probably will be too, is a fool’s wager if ever there was one.
Look around, and keep in mind that addictions permanently change the brain, literally reshaping the dopamine dispersal network. When one reads descriptions of thorough-gone addicts who have plunged into the quasi-metaversal world of unbundled, short-form social media, it is hard to imagine soft landings that could reintroduce such mentality-disabled people to reality as it actually is.
Social media has abetted the sexualization of children and the growth of conspiracy theories and cults, simultaneously pushing kids toward adulthood and adults toward childishness.
More important to society at large, even in the majority, we generously assume, of non-extreme cases, social media immersion and the general lure of being online has shot the attention spans and quality attention capacities of tens of millions of Americans to hell. It has radically reduced the readiness of most students (and not only students) to read books and write their own essays— in other words, to learn how to think, manage time, and constructively plan on their own, without crutching on a ChatGPT bot.4
It has worsened our society’s alienation from nature and made us more, not less, lonely and isolated from each other, thus magnifying already sharply eroded social trust.
It has, thanks partly to its anonymous nature, helped to mainstream regressive zero-sum attitudes and expressions of hatred that have contributed to political polarization and incivility. It has also stimulated extreme and ahistorical debates, deranging our stock of knowledge and experience about scores of vital issues.
It has abetted the sexualization of children and the growth of conspiracy theories and cults, simultaneously pushing kids toward adulthood and adults toward childishness.
It has magnified the cognitive gluttony that is everywhere in the culture, further enshrining entertainment as the ultimate goal of an otherwise aimless civilization.
It has furthered the decay of moral reasoning and self-discipline, and accelerated the nadir of the Abrahamic faith communities that imbued American society with both, for there is little those communities can do to compete successfully with the graphic fantasy spectacle of the attention economy.
Over a mere few years, it laid the foundation for a fantasy-inflected, reality-television presidency, duly and fairly elected now twice. As a result, it has put the future of the United States as a constitutional, classical-liberal democracy at risk and, with it, arguably jeopardized the security of the entire global commons.
And in combination with other factors it has given rise to an immensely powerful digital oligopoly — an oligopoly of a very large scope and largely novel nature that even Robert Michels’ “iron law” never imagined and Theodore Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth” barely touches. This oligarchy has arisen largely by dint of the Net Effect — and so we are brought willy-nilly to the second part of our answer.
The Net Effect, cost disease, and the new corporatism
While the critical attention social media has attracted is certainly justified, it tends to crowd out perception of other harms flowing from the broader technological stream of the digital revolution. Clearly, the ambit of the internet’s uses and hence its cultural influence since the world wide web went live in 1991 is far wider than its social media dimension.
This distinction is important because it turns out that the failure of U.S. politics to land any punches as it is beaten senseless by social media turns on these other, less widely recognized facets of the cybernetic revolution. We now behold a new and insidious form of corporatism in the Trump 2.0 administration, the direct antithesis of the ur-definition of classical liberalism, which separated economic power from political/coercive power. Today, the would-be looters of the domestic (and international) commons are inside government itself, and are largely directing its efforts, as opposed to ostensibly being regulated by it. Just as the Trump administration has switched sides, shockingly to many, in global geopolitics, it has also switched sides in terms of classical political economy definitions and functions. That is, or should be, even more shocking still. Most obviously, Elon Musk and his acolytes were put in charge of the henhouse, and though their initial rampage has ended, their influence lingers throughout a federal government that spends billions on contracts with the mogul; Trump illegally voided the TikTok ban to arrange a marriage that benefited his donor Larry Ellison and other supporters; and an assortment of crypto bros has provided the president with staggering wealth in exchange for his regulatory benedictions. In other cases, tech and tech-adjacent firms appear to be the willing victims of extortion, as in the case of the government’s claims on shares or revenues from Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and a trio of rare-earth miners.
How, in brief, has this happened?
The cyberlution has sired the Net Effect, a structural shift in American economic life that has literally outsized implications for our existing civil society and political institutions.
The Net Effect refers to an inherent characteristic of information technology innovation, especially in digital form: It aggregates a wide range of human transactions that were formerly more dispersed. Technology scales, and cybertech scales better due to its very nature, than any previous information science-cum-communications technology ever has. But human community and empathy do not similarly scale, nor do scientific-rational cognitive templates, at least not in the current American entertainment-centric culture. The result of this core characteristic of the Net Effect has been the relatively rapid transformation of American economic life, reshaping, and fragilizing, a generally affluent political economy in ways few understand.
Technology scales, and cybertech scales better due to its very nature, than any previous information science-cum-communications technology ever has. But human community and empathy do not similarly scale, nor do scientific-rational cognitive templates.
As general observations go this one is at base not new. The relationship between advancing technology and advantages to scale in most things — manufacturing, banking, trade, investment, and more — is a staple insight into the core dynamic of the industrial revolution. It resounds in David Landes’ 1969 masterpiece The Unbound Prometheus, for example, but perhaps its most insightful succinct description is one from 1955, by John von Neumann:
In all its stages the industrial revolution consisted of making available more and cheaper energy, more and earlier control of human actions and reactions, and more and faster communications. Each development increased the effectiveness of the other two. All three factors increased the speed of performing large-scale operations — industrial, mercantile, political, and migratory. … Since most time scales are fixed by human reaction times, habits, and other physiological factors, the effect of the increased speed of technological processes was to enlarge the size of the units — political, organizational, economic, and cultural — afforded by technological operations. That is, instead of performing the same operations as before in less time, now larger-scale operations were performed in the same time.
Because, as many have noted, the cyberlution substitutes machine power not for human muscle but for selected human brain functions, the result is an exponential elaboration of von Neumann’s insight. If we substantially substitute machine-brain functions for human ones, especially in communications, we lift many of the limitations of “human action times, habits, and other physiological factors” from organizational processes, manufacturing and management processes alike. Indeed, as von Neumann later added, “. . . improvements in control are really improvements in communicating information within an organization or mechanism. The sum total of progress in this sphere is explosive.” Explosive, indeed: von Neumann saw at least dimly in 1955 much of what 2025 would look like.
The explosive progress von Neumann foresaw takes us far beyond descriptions of technology’s relation to scale during and after the industrial revolution. It multiplies advantages to scale dramatically, incentivizing gigantism decisively as an organizational goal. It thus transforms our intellectual inheritance of capitalism, since supply and demand no longer match up invisible-hand-like to produce price-points from massively dispersed economic agents engaged directly, without technological mediation, to create markets. Rather, digital information technology — which, again, is prior to and has little directly to do with social media — inherently conduces to oligopolistic, potentially even monopolistic, conditions.
In fact, the enormous size and swath of the tech companies are functions of the technology itself. Precisely because there is neither a product nor much of a human-devised service, output can increase instantly with the algorithmically-induced demand. Until recently, the capital investment required to provide the underlying computing power was a trivial problem; adding a server is much easier than adding a factory. Only with the extraordinary computing demands of AI has capital investment begun to represent a potential limit.
The Net Effect ramifies across the economy as nondigital businesses take advantage of the new technology to hoover up customer data, find new clients more quickly, and pursue ever-more complex financial wizardry. The resulting efficiencies could in theory be passed on to the consumer, but in key industries that are either oligopolistic, otherwise supply-constrained, or heavily regulated — including healthcare and housing — large providers instead use them to extract more profit. Even major grocery stores in cahoots with Instacart and various data-management firms — all far smaller than the truly major digitech corporations — have been using algorithms to sort buyers into categories that result in different people paying different prices for the same goods at the same time at the same store. This amounts to an ingenious (and not yet illegal) means of effecting wealth transfer from individual consumers to huge corporations’ managers, investors, and shareholders. And rather than just providing a tool for already-big service providers, the ease of monetizing data and the asymmetric advantages of complexity actively incentivize consolidation. The Net Effect thus aggravates what is already a nasty and novel case of cost disease.
The ease of monetizing data and the asymmetric advantages of complexity actively incentivize consolidation. The Net Effect thus aggravates what is already a nasty and novel case of cost disease.
So now finally, why has the U.S. federal government not reacted more assiduously to the harms posed by social media? Quite aside from the absence of pressure to do from below on account of the generally immobilizing nature of cyberaddictions, the fact is that the major digitech corporations, in informal cahoots in this regard despite their competitive relations in other regards, have more influence over the federal government than the federal government has over them. The combined annual revenue of the Big Five alone for 2024 summed to about $1.68 trillion — about double the size of the U.S. defense budget for FY 2024. The Big Five plus a few other huge tech corporations like Oracle account for, at last count, about 34 percent of U.S. stock market capitalization. Even the Treasury Department can’t readily touch that.
This situation puts the government on the losing end of a somewhat unusual, and hence opaque to many, collective action problem. All the Big Five, plus Oracle and Palantir and so on down the scale line, oppose regulation of their industry, all strenuously oppose any antitrust actions aimed their way, and they all share the same reasons for both. They are all also massively deep into government contracts and congressional campaign contributions. Compared to the federal government as a whole, they know what they want on what matters most to them, but the government—which we imagine as unitary but which in fact is a highly fragmented collection of public organizations—is all over the place, unable to concert any kind of coherent policy toward Big Tech.
This asymmetrical arrangement biasing policy in a generally passive direction held for years before January 20, 2025. Now, as noted, the MAGA Republican administration is actively abetting what amounts to a new corporatism in which digital mega-corporations are first-tier players. This accounts for why new techno-anarchist corporatists in the MAGA camp have in some cases mounted and in others supported efforts to intimidate those monitoring the internet for misinformation.5 Meanwhile, MAGA spinmeisters try to persuade their largely populist, post-literate constituency that the accursed monstrous bureaucratic/administrative state run by Marxist/Communist/Socialist/antifa elites is their enemy, deflecting attention from the major tech corporations and others algorithmically targeting their brainstems and manipulating their novelty bias in order to strip-mine their sanity and turn them into Eloi with debit cards.
And what of the opposition in what remains of America’s liberal democracy? The Democratic Party is ideally positioned to foster a major social reform movement against digital oligarchy in league with new corporatists, and the harm they do to the commons: It is national in scale, and has an organized presence downward in each and every state, town, and county. And yet in that regard it has done about as little as can be imagined under the circumstances. Why?
To be fair, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has called repeatedly for the regulation and breakup of the major digitech corporations, and she and several others in the party, notably Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, are volubly aghast at the politicized media consolidation antics we have been recently witnessing. Not very much active company have she and Senator Murphy attracted, however, from among their peers.6 They all know what’s happening, many of them, to one degree or another, but they say and do very little about it even amid their own state and local constituencies.
The Biden administration did throw the spear of antitrust litigation at the tech giants and other industries it viewed as overly consolidated, marking a break with the party’s friendly posture toward an industry long viewed as an ally. But Democrats are too feckless, divided, and unpopular to win the kind of mandate that might allow them to think bigger—only a 27 percent national approval rating at last measure, so in single digits in many if not most beyond-xburbs parts of the country. This is true not least because the social media snare has also trapped left-wing politics, fueling the woke ideologies and purity tests that have turned off so many Americans.
Will this change? Growing signs of discomfort and tumult over social media harms, and some glimmers of action in the culture and even in the courts, suggest it might. We may hope so, but as has been often been recited, hope is not a policy. In any event, we are bound to find out.
Adam Garfinkle is founding editor of The American Interest and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. Before founding the magazine in 2005, he served in 2003-05 as speechwriter to the Secretary of State.
Photography may seem an odd inclusion here, but it is not. Photographs communicate images instead of words, but images can also have lexical qualities, albeit differently from words. The reference in the text refers particularly to what happened in the 1920s when relatively inexpensive cameras became available commercially. Legal issues arose with respect to privacy on account of cameras, and Justice Louis Brandeis famously — to legal scholars — argued in his dissent to Olmstead v. United States (1928) that the Constitution contains an implicit right to privacy. It is from that jurisprudential principle that many years later the Warren Court stretched itself far enough to find a woman’s right to an abortion.
Innis, The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 1951), p. 13.
Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now (Henry Holt & Company, 2018). For other non-technical explications see Catherine Price, How to Break Up With Your Phone (Ten Speed Press, 2018); and Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (Crown, 2022).
This is no joke: See Nataliya Kosmyna, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” MIT Media Lab, June 10, 2025. For summaries see Daniel Sims, “MIT brain scans suggest the using GenAI tools reduces cognitive activity,” Techspot, June 20, 2025, and “Does AI Make You Stupid?” The Economist, July 16, 2025, and I could go on, and on…..
The best, actually the worst, example is Stanford University’s capitulation to pressure against its own Internet Observatory brought by congressional Republicans. See Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer, “The Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled,” The Platformer, June 13, 2024. Related in at least an orthogonal way is the early decision of the second Trump administration to stop various streams of work monitoring Russian government efforts to plant misinformation on the internet. Taken together these decisions amount to a demonic declaration of huge corporations and government agencies that they will take “free speech” as license to lie and manipulate tens of millions of others situated at a profound Net Effect disadvantage relative to them. It is an integral and revealing part of the extractive, predatory “reverse Robin Hood” dynamic of the digital age.
A few Republicans whose populism and common sense have not entirely abandoned them are in harmony—among them Josh Hawley and, more recently, Governor Spencer Cox of Utah.
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