Houston Southard

Jonathan Haidt - The Anxious Generation

Click here for instructions on building a weapon of mass distraction.

1) Distribute smart phones with front facing cameras. 2) Provide internet access (except for the poors. enjoy your network desert, fuckers! sincerely, every dickless ISP). Finally, introduce a platform accessible exclusively mobile.

Presto! Cue hyper masculinity for the boys, hyper influence for the girls. The best part? Your audience now gets to train YOU into more extreme versions of yourselves, all for the low low cost of suicide! 167% up for girls and 91% for boys.

Companies can finally rest easy on their blood money beds knowing they can hijack your attention wherever you’re at. As Sean Parker, founder of napster and facebook’s 1st president, pointed out: social media is the most efficient conformity engine. The social hierarchy of nonhuman primates relies on dominance, but we rank on prestige, willingly conferred to who’s achieved excellence in a valued domain.

Silicon Valley exploited this psychological vulnerability when they quantified every user’s post, engineering both a social-validation feedback loop and humanity’s 1st uncontrolled experiment, GenZ becoming the 1st generation to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets.

Every story is a policy story, and this one plays out a dystopian tune to legislation obsessed on overprotecting children in the real world and underprotecting them online. The phone is ultimately an experience blocker, usurping crucial development needs of active, synchronous free play in place of disembodied asynchronous narcissism that wreaks havoc on the experience-expectant development during puberty.

Social media isn’t a correlate of adolescent mental illness, it’s the causer. Pundits place blame elsewhere, but the world is no worse off than in previous generations. What’s changed is events reach everyone all at once all the time, not as news, but as posts paired with the social contagion of how everyone feels about it.

Conditioning cuts deepest when rewards are on a variable-ratio schedule because you get a 10x dopamine surge in anticipation of the reward. Once feelings are enough to trigger a variably-rewarded behavior, you’re hooked.