I wrote last week that there appear to be two strains of madness in the 21st century.
The first is good old fashioned insanity.
From Biblical demonic possession and howling at the moon to psychopathy and narcissism, some poor folk are born with neurological disorders, or go through trauma or malady that instigates them.
The second is environmentally induced.
Like many diagnoses of type 2 diabetes where excess sugar consumption has overridden the body’s normal metabolic processes, I have watched in real time the descent into madness of individuals who have spent way too long looking at the world through the lens of social media and have clearly lost their marbles.
John Cleese is Mr August in this year’s calendar of Who’s Gone Postal Online.
And there is now a growing body of evidence that proves empircally, by analysing brain chemicals, reflexes, neural pathways and endochrinological responses, that things such as online gambling and porn consumption actually rewire the brain’s software, and even have real world hardware implications (here’s looking at you, early onset erectile dysfunction - mind the pun!)
From ‘Selfie Dysphoria’ where influencers are going mad Pete Burnsing their faces to look more like their filtered avatars, to sick suicide and self harm stunts peddled to kids, it is easy to identify the sharp edges of the crisis.
A recent scientific study has now laid out in neurochemical proofs that indeed, scrolling really does rot the brain.
Cognitive control enables individuals to adapt to the ever-changing environmental demands. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) are key regions of the cognitive control network, activated during cognitively demanding tasks. In contrast, the entertaining and habitual nature of short-video consumption for leisure shifts neural processing toward emotional engagement and immediate gratification, contributing to excessive use and diminished self-control
But what about when these sweeping psychological changes are broadly happening in a synchronised manner and across swathes of society?
You suddenly realise we are all ill.
That society at large is being fundamentally rewritten and reprogrammed by technology, and the last generation not to be brought up dowsed in dodgy dopamine delivery are the ones in power now - and even they have late onset, social media induced psychosis. Nobody is immune.
Because I have come to the conclusion that Silicon Valley’s ‘move fast and break things’ approach to digital revolution has indeed broken humanity writ large, and we are not even seriously talking about that, before ushering in at pace AI systems that, by the sounds of things, could deliver an apocalyptic blow to life as we know it - - and have known it for millennia.
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his most recent book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness argues that the spread of smartphones, social media, and overprotective parenting have led to a "rewiring" of childhood and a rise in mental illness.
There is an entire generation in which young people have essentially been raised with zero social skills, as they have never organically developed. Zero empathy, having been brought up in the artificial incubator of algorithms. Zero emotional intelligence, having had limited human interactions. And with severely limited problem solving capacity, as they were weaned only on synthetic reaction creation, rather than practical output. In brief, zero humanity.
But is it restricted to just young people?
Increasingly Social Media Derangement Syndrome as I will now call it, is observable across the board. It doesn’t matter how wealthy or intelligent someone is (ahem, Elon), their ethnicity or gender (Candace), their prior fame or popularity (Tucker), their age or relative academic standing (AC Grayling during the Brexit years) it would seem wormholing online can fast obliterate even the most robust of psyches.
And that is what is terrifying. And it’s spreading. More and more people live uniquely online. And are being desocialised and dehumanised as a result. The net effect appears to be entire structures of social norms and human interactions collapsing in on itself, along with basic expectations of common morality and decency in decorum. If you were born before 1985, you get this.
I wonder whether those born later do?
Far from bringing us together, social media is siloing society, balkanising communities, creating extreme isolation - indeed induced social solipsism - and erasing time tested fabric that built villages, towns and civilisations. And in doing so, while also being jet propelled by artificial emotion such as synthetic offense, it is rapidly sucking the basic concept of simple shared joy from the world.
Now, this may seem strange - but to me, the Solar Eclipse was a shocking mirror to all of this.
I remember 1999. The build up. The excitement. School projects, special programmes, countdowns, street parties, community gatherings. Solar glasses for free on cereal boxes and with newspapers.
Since humans pointed at the sun and gave it a name, eclipses have been sublime, momentous, transformational and miraculous. Cave drawings, glyphs and generational folklore have underscored their cosmic, civilisational importance. Because true wonderment is one of the most human of instincts.
The Kantian metaphysic concept of the sublime as the frictious interplay between perception and phenomena creating an aesthetic experience is hardly achievable via a phone screen.
Roll forwards to 2026, not only did nobody give a shit that a near total eclipse, for many of us a now last in a lifetime event, was occuring, but almost zero was done to mark it.
On-the-day warnings to not look at it directly, (as we are by now rendered far too infantile and incapacitated to even be able to figure out staring at the sun can hurt your eyes) dominated the narrative, instead of excitement and anticipation of a collective wonder.
Doom-laden instructions for once free moral agents are now standard succour for joyless, hollowed out, unthinking zombies. Even those who did partake in appreciating the celestial phenomenon largely did so to put pictures on their social media.
As I stood in the fields across from my house, marvelling with outstretched arms at the sheer magic of the moment, I felt incredibly conspicuous. There was I looking like a Pagan Priestess while everyone else was sat on the floor taking selfies with collanders, largely oblivious to the euphoria of the actual moment.
It made me realise, poignantly, that the last of true humanity now has a shelf life. Those of us who still spend the majority of our time off social media and belly laughing down the local pub are becoming a dying breed. Even down the boozer, once fluid conversations are now punctuated by scrolling.
It was a few days later that Jason Arday commit suicide, a paradigm product of the same psychopathic lurch to sensibility erasure.
Here was a chimera of identity politics, lanyardism, performative virtue and truth inversion, put on steroids. The archetype of what the ghoulish cocktail of radical leftism and the artificial universe of ‘virtual reality’ can create. Neo-religious, unthinking, untethered zealotry steeped in performative hyperbole and hysterical emotion, yet without any connection to reality. Arday became a mere mascot to each political tribe, either beattified or belittled depending upon your view of the world. He makes Eva Smith in An Inspector Calls look rather pedestrian as a tragic character.
When we wonder why autism has become a societal pandemic, why birthrates in the West have collapsed, why out of work sickness is highest among the 18-25 cohort due to a litany of mental health acronyms, why government policy has become so detached from teleology and society and tethered to trends and terminology, to me it is clear the common denominator is life lived online. How else was political debate a couple of years ago dominated by whether a woman can have a penis?
Rome is burning but the insatiable and interminable draw of absurd and abstract semantic battles are the only thing that now matters as we are all made to suck at the teat of a 24 hour consumer “news” cycle.
It has become clear to me that anyone can be radicalised.
The desocialising and dehumanising effect of life online can render anyone an empty vessel ready to be refilled with potent ideology and prodded into an immediate, impassioned defense of it.
Whether Pro-Palestine, Terf or Trans, TradWife, polyamorous, Islamist, Wiccan, Neo-Nazi, Antifa or BLM, it has become scarily simple to turn a once nuanced, reasoning, rational being into a radical, and in a shockingly short period of time.
Marionette Mankind in a dystopian Punch and Judy show
The sordid process was grimly expedited during Covid, locked in our homes and to our screens, the New Normal was like lighting an oily rag next to a fireworks factory.
Now working from home is standard, with the idea of real human interaction seen by many as, at the very least, an inconvenience, but to far too many, some sort of horror. What was once the most fundamental discipline of a deeply social species is being recklessly rewritten as computer code.
Early humans needed groups to find food, hunt large animals, and stay safe from danger. Our large brains evolved to help us understand complex social rules and group ranks. We have biologically evolved to experience positive bonds as psychologically and physically vital, helping to lower stress and make us feel safe, while isolation harms our well-being. What was once conducted in reality has now been dismantled and psychotically rebuilt as colliding new tectonics of mass hysteria.
Having experienced being at the eye of a social media storm in recent weeks, what amazed me was the proclivity of people I thought of as individuals I got along with joining a cast of characters who don’t even know me taking delight in throwing their own rotting verbal vegetables while I was in the online stocks. Someone had set a swarm of bots to target me for political reasons, but what then transpired was the mass propensity of so many to join in the pile on like lemmings: Team Restore Britain or Team Alex Phillips. Watching it from the outside was sociologically disturbing.
The psycholigical trait of joining in is of course a fundamental element of being a deeply social species - and the madness of crowds is nothing new. One just has to look at the greatest warning ever given to realise that, as the gathered masses demanded the crucifixion of Christ. The Greatest Story Ever Told has echoed throughout modernity, and should be heeded as the gravest warning to mankind. It did not stop Nazism a hundred years ago, and is not being minded today, even as social media turbo charges the worst of it.
I came off social media for Lent this year. The 40 days free felt like a total reset. Parts of me that had become overstimulated and inflamed shrank back into obscurity while other deadened and numb sensations began to gloriously revive. Nature healing itself. I would highly recommend an individual fast or a purge.
But what I fear is this process has to be done en masse and truly together if we are to steer society back to high birth rates, good collective mental health and a sense of cohesion vital for a thriving, or even just surviving, society.
However far too many now are too addicted, or too dependent. Entire livelihoods and processes exist solely online, while entire generations now have never experienced life off it.
And I am deeply concerned that into this maelström of dehumanisation comes an omnipotent, suprahuman overlord in the form of AI. There is absolutely no way to stop or reverse what lies ahead, it seems.
So if I were you, I’d opt out. At least now and then. Chuck the phone in a Faraday Cage, delete the apps, go and look at the sun, the stars, the moon and the whites of one another’s eyes.
Time is running out to enjoy the real world as a callous contagion sweeps across our collective conscience.
I am prepping to stay in The Real World. I suggest you do, too.
Another brilliantly thoughtful essay again Alex. Thank you for your words of sanity.
Alex, we are in a spiritual war. Keep strong and know you are loved.