Is Social Media This Generation's Heroin?

How algorithms distill fear and rage into society's deadliest addiction, destroying society and political systems in the process…

A fascinating article in The New York Times this week by Kurt Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gives us the beginnings of an understanding of how and why social media is so destructive to society.

Gray points out that most people assume humans have historically been predators, the metaphorical big cats of the jungle. In fact, Gray says, we’ve historically been prey, the victims of predators:

“This picture of fearfulness is consistent with our understanding of human psychology. We’re hard-wired to detect threats quickly and to stay fixated on places where threats once appeared, even after they have vanished. We fear that ‘child predators’ will abduct our kids even when they are safer than ever.

“Modern humans, ensconced in towns and cities, are now mostly safe from animal predators, but we are still easily frightened. Whether we’re scrolling social media or voting for a presidential candidate, we all still carry the legacy of our ancestors, who worried about big cats lurking in the darkness.”

Thus, if you could invent a drug that would cause people to be fearful — and thus stimulate the rage that comes from fear — you could have incredible control over a population if you could simply tell them where and against whom to direct that fear-induced rage.

We all have opiate receptors in our brains that modulate our response to pain. Compounds that bind to these receptors are produced naturally by our body in response to extreme pain and shock, and numerous plants—most famously, opium poppies—naturally produce chemicals that bind to and activate our opiate receptors.

When we lived in Germany back in the late 1980s, I loved to visit a nearby castle in Kulmbach and order mohnkuchen, a piecrust filled with poppy seeds ground into a paste with sugar and a few spices. I always felt so good after eating a slice or two of the pie; when we had a glass of a fresh German Riesling with it, my smile went from ear to ear for hours.

The mohnkuchen seemed to constipate me a bit, and when I noticed one afternoon that my pupils were pinned so small as to nearly vanish, the same as I’d noticed whenever I’d taken narcotic painkillers after injuries and surgery, the penny dropped. Turns out I was enjoying opium in that little German café in a way that people around the world have for millennia.

Similarly, I once shared a few days with a shaman from Peru; he had a bag of coca leaves, and we each chewed a few along with a tiny piece of alkalized ash to release its active ingredient as an afternoon pick-me-up. The buzz I experienced was considerably less strong than what a two or three cups of coffee provide.

Mountain-dwelling Andean tribes have been doing this for as long as there have been people in the region; they consume coca the way people in India and parts of China consume local tea leaves. We consumed coca leaf extract here in the US, too, from 1886 to 1929, in a drink called Coca Cola.

Somewhere on the spectrum from these drugs’ original state to their becoming increasingly concentrated and purified, a toxic/addictive threshold or tipping point is reached. I never experienced withdrawal symptoms from mohnkucken, but I did from the highly concentrated opiate painkiller (Oxycontin) I took for a few weeks for severe sciatica prior to spinal surgery and for a week after. It wasn’t terrible; a few nights of trouble sleeping and sensitivity to pain and touch, but there it was.

Heroin is concentrated opium poppy. Cocaine is concentrated coca leaf. Substances that are otherwise benign become both potent and deadly when they’re super-concentrated.

Which is exactly what the algorithms deployed in secret by social media do: they purify and concentrate hate and fear spread across the broader social media site, distilling the most potent memes and messages to the top and shoving them into people’s brains.

But that’s just the beginning of the damage these top-secret algorithms are doing to our societies and politics. By increasing our individual levels of fear and rage, they create a broader social sense of fear and rage, making these emotions far more easy to exploit.

Enter stage right “populist” politicians and media sites who push people’s now-sensitized fear and rage buttons for political gain. (Not to mention the billions earned by social media billionaires pushing this psychological heroin while absolutely refusing to publish their algorithms.)

Numerous studies show that when people believe crime is a serious problem in their own communities and lives, they measurably shift toward the political right of the spectrum. Law-and-order campaigns and promises of severe punishment acquire a sudden appeal, as Joe Biden and Bill Clinton discovered in the early 1990s and politicians everywhere since the pandemic have seen.

Fear of crime — and fear more generally (of your kids being victims of trans people or renegade surgeons in public schools, for example, or of immigrants raping your wife or taking your job) — push people toward an embrace of conservative and then authoritarian politics and governance.

When media promote narratives about crime being out of control — whether true or not — they measurably drive acceptance of more reactionary crime control legislation along with rejection of efforts at rehabilitation and reform.

There may be an even wider impact of social media’s promotion of fear and rage.

The Transcendental Meditation group reported in the Journal of Mind and Behavior on several 1970s and 1980s studies showing that when a certain relatively small threshold number of people in a particular community meditated daily, crime and violence went down.

Another report in Social Indicators Research found that when a group of meditators moved to Washington, DC between 1988 and 1993 that over those following years crime went down by an impressive 23.3%.

A comprehensive study was run during the 1883 Lebanon war, when a group of meditators took up residence in Jerusalem and meditated daily for two years. The result, almost certainly exceeding any possibility of coincidence, was:

— A 76% reduction in war deaths in Lebanon on days when there was high participation in the meditating group,
— A 71% decrease in war-related fatalities,
— A 68% reduction in war-related injuries,
— A 48% drop in the level of conflict, and
— A 66% increase in cooperation among antagonists.

If a certain threshold of people being intentionally peaceful for a year or two can lower crime rates, what happens when a certain threshold of people are daily enraged by the injection of fear and hate into their psychological bloodstreams?

Could it be that social media is directly (or indirectly) responsible for much of the swing we’re seeing around the world toward bigotry, hate, and violence? That rightwing movements are emerging as a result of the impact of social media, rather than social media merely and passively reflecting the trend as the social media companies argue?

The meditation studies are controversial, but it’s hard to dispute the assertion that as more and more individuals in a given society are racked with fear and rage, the result, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Big Brother, will be more hate and violence.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley has been thinking along the same lines. In his book The Tyranny of Big Tech, he wrote:

“Big tech has embraced a business model of addiction. Too much of the ‘innovation’ in this space is designed not to create better products, but to capture more attention by using psychological tricks that make it difficult to look away.”

The past two years have shown America and the world what happens when a social media company is captured by an unaccountable billionaire with a specific political goal. The site that was once Twitter is now a veritable sewer, filled with hate and Nazi-level extremists.

Is it possible this is making the world less stable, less peaceful, and more violent through a reverse “Maharishi Effect”? Are wars around the world and the recent assassination of a healthcare CEO demonstrations of the power social media has over society? School shootings? The rise of Nazi-adjacent militia groups here and in Europe?

The simple reality is that we won’t know until government steps in and requires these companies to both publish and moderate their algorithms and monitor/control the naked hate on their platforms. And that day can’t come too soon.

My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.
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