The Decade of Technology-Driven Anxiety

It is hard to believe and yet all too believable that another decade is already wrapping up. It has been a strange one. While it lacked the overt chaos of 9/11 and the onset of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and acute fears of terrorism, it brought its own unsettling dynamics and sense of dread.

The rise of social media via the internet was perhaps the most dramatic phenomenon that affected society, with spidery tendrils of downstream effects, most dramatically including contributing to our presidential election winners: the initial audacity of hope and embrace of multiculturalism and globalism provided by President Obama, and the comparative isolationism of President Trump. The galloping continuous rise of the stock market after the 2008 recession, with internet moguls like Amazon and Facebook and Google leading to an unprecedented hoarding of wealth in a handful of people combined with the economic rise of China and India and other countries; this has led a corporate-driven trend towards dangerous deregulation and ethical indifference as fake news goes viral and climate change worsens.

The honing of internet-based social manipulation as a weapon for various power-hungry entities, political, corporate, racial, and more, as seen in the documentary The Great Hack about services like Cambridge Analytica and malignant campaigns, like the ones distributing fake news about Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. The sense of simultaneous in vivo social breakdown and in vitro social dynamism contributing to a disjointed brave new world, where Instagram influencers live off their YouTube videos, and people at work in neighboring office cubicles barely speak to one another. Where youth become instant stars overnight, but crash just as quickly from onslaughts of internet trolls and bullies, and mass shootings and suicides and opiate deaths continue to climb each year. Where polarization and clickbait-friendly extremes disseminate controversy and sow discord and bad blood amongst online citizens whose vitriol sometimes spills over into real-life violence.

All these new pressures have led to an unprecedented need for mental health, and yet access to quality care if anything is worse than ever. Insurance coverage has deteriorated again after the initial hopefulness of Obamacare, and loopholes in mental health parity laws have been exploited. Managed care and hospital corporations have prioritized billing-driven quick visits and clunky, time-consuming electronic medical records over actual clinical contact and expert-driven decisions and autonomy, leading to mediocre interactions, an overreliance on quick fixes, or no access at all. The emergent distrust has understandably driven many to seek alternatives, some of which are reasonably holistic, like yoga or nutrition, but some of which are dangerously fraudulent, such as the anti-vaxxer movement.

Jean Twenge’s well-publicized September 2017 article in the Atlantic on alarming trends in the mental health of American youth highlights the fear that our overreliance on technology and dopamine-heavy thrills at the expense of real-life social interaction is a potential breeding ground for anxiety and depressive disorders, and at worst, contributing to escalating suicide rates, according to CDC statistics. Our brains are becoming defragged like disk drives by smartphones and social media into instant gratification machines that crave the next quick buzz, masking an underlying and growing sense of emptiness.

The new, technology-driven society of this decade hasn’t all been negative. Streaming services arguably helped drive the creation of the highest-quality television ever, as the novelty of the medium and growing competition drove innovation and an appetite for risk in art (although, sadly, shifts in how entertainment can profit in this new environment also, in turn, stifled innovation in popular music and movies, which had to rely on commercialized slam-dunks to survive). The democratization of information can certainly be positive, as well, and may have contributed to movements like #MeToo that were able to overturn cabals of silence that protected criminals in power.

Once-marginalized voices have achieved more prominence and connection through the new media environment, and crowdsourcing has helped everything from diagnosing rare diseases to offering useful cooking tips. Mental health stigma has overall been aided, with greater openness and awareness of personal stories and the realities of living with these conditions, although debate and misperceptions sometimes take a life of their own for better or worse online. Using the force of such massive waves of information for good requires some steady moral compasses in the background, which are sometimes absent or threatened by ulterior motives.

Ultimately, this is the fear behind the power unleashed by technology to date; it magnifies what our existing human thirsts and impulses are. If we cannot measure or regulate this magnification with those crucial moral compasses … we may be hastening our societal destruction.

And unlike the deaths of past empires, we are now playing these games out with larger, nuclear-level, planetary forces from which there is no return, and no option for additional video game lives. The Earth is all we have, and the balance of our evolutionary existence here is in danger of tilting towards doom. Will we have the foresight to curb our instincts this time, when it matters most?