
The digital era’s addictive technologies are undermining the foundations of our self-governing republic
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The warm wave of satisfaction that accompanies helping a friend has much in common with the burst of pleasure delivered each time an Instagram post receives another “like.” Both are genuine human reactions to forms of achievement. Both begin with the release of a hormone produced in the brain—oxytocin in the former case, dopamine in the latter—that not only triggers a range of immediate emotional responses, but also shapes neural pathways that influence future behavior.
The difference is in the influence—in effect, what the brain learns from the experience. Oxytocin, released with real-life interactions, eye-contact, and physical touch, bonds humans together. It bonds husband and wife, mother and child, friend and friend. It establishes mutual love, trust, and responsibility.
Dopamine leaves behind only a craving for more. The brain gets the pleasure, but not any lasting satisfaction or fulfillment. Biologically, dopamine’s role is to reinforce pleasurable behaviors and experiences necessary to human survival, like food and sex, to ensure their constant pursuit. But when dopamine becomes divorced from true biological needs, the dopamine itself becomes the powerful need, turning people into addicts. Substances are more addictive when exposure to them releases more dopamine more quickly into the brain. Indeed, researchers use measurements of dopamine levels to quantify a behavior or drug’s addictive power.
This brief narrative is oversimplified in various ways, but its core truth poses a fascinating theoretical challenge for market fundamentalists whose worldview requires an assumption of individuals capable of rationally maximizing their own utility, and an urgent practical challenge for policymakers and parents who want to protect children online. As former engineers have explained, and current executives implicitly acknowledge when they keep their own kids away from their own wares, Big Tech designs its digital technology to exploit our neurological vulnerabilities.
As former engineers have explained, and current executives implicitly acknowledge when they keep their own kids away from their own wares, Big Tech designs its digital technology to exploit our neurological vulnerabilities.
Most discussion of the digital era’s harms to children focus on the direct problems of exposure: the emotional distortions wrought by social media, the debasement of easy access to pornography, the compulsion to keep on playing the game. But neuroscientists, psychologists, teachers, and parents are all beginning to realize the greatest harms can come away from the screen, in the ways an online childhood derails development and leaves young people ill-prepared to flourish in other facets of their own lives, and in community with each other. Human brains will choose dopamine every time, no matter the personal or social cost. But a civilization cannot survive the choice to let them.
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Tristan Harris, who left Google and later founded the Center for Humane Technology, was one of the first to sound the alarm about online services designed to ensure a user can’t resist coming back for more. Addictive features include constant notifications, daily streaks, immersive environments, and infinite scrolling through sensationalized feeds customized by algorithms to give users more of what they “want” at all times. Each post “liked,” achievement “unlocked,” avatar “leveled up,” and cat video played prompts a release of dopamine and creates a craving to repeat the experience. The end result is that a brain exposed frequently to social media closely resembles a brain hooked on the most highly addictive drugs.
Conversely, the online world is an oxytocin desert. A video call may transmit the same information as a meeting over coffee, DMs and holding hands may both be ways to convey affection, but our brains are unimpressed by the facsimiles. Indeed, the different biochemical reactions to online versus in-person meetings are part of the explanation for so-called “Zoom fatigue.” Friendships built on dopamine instead of oxytocin are shallow. Cruelly, the technologies that were supposed to help us stay more connected instead incubate an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.
The degradation of relationships is perhaps the most obvious and serious consequence of this radical shift in the human environment. But importantly, the harm goes far beyond the low quality of relationships that are formed online to an inability to form higher quality relationships at all. Many in the smartphone generation avoid direct interaction. They feel uncomfortable looking other people in the eyes or holding a conversation. They fear doorbells and unscheduled phone calls. They aren’t spending time with their friends in person. According to a national survey of teens, high school seniors who are hanging out with friends in person “almost every day” dropped from 44% in 2010 to only 32% in 2022.
Many in the smartphone generation avoid direct interaction. They feel uncomfortable looking other people in the eyes or holding a conversation. They fear doorbells and unscheduled phone calls.
Unsurprisingly, then, younger Americans are struggling to trust and rely on other humans and they are less likely to enter the relationships built on mutual love and mutual sacrifice that are necessary for marriages to form and families to flourish. Marriage rates in the U.S. have been declining sharply and, most concerning, the rates for younger adults are near an all-time low. Some projections estimate that one in three young adults today will never marry. The decline in marriage, in turn, reduces fertility and family formation. The family is the first economy, the first school, the first government, and the first church. Without it, none of those institutions can work.
Even for analysts obsessed solely with market efficiency, productivity, and GDP growth, the costs are becoming impossible to ignore. One father I interviewed for my forthcoming book shared that his teenage son, who spends hours online playing video games with friends, had no difficulty emailing with employers about potential job opportunities. But when it came time to walk into a physical establishment to hand in a job application to the manager, he was petrified. He couldn’t handle the face-to-face interaction.
Many companies, meanwhile, report having to fire Gen Z workers just months after hiring them, citing issues like lack of motivation, communication skills, and professionalism.
The second deficit induced by dopamine-hacking technologies is in self-control—a vital prerequisite for rational economic action and virtuous citizenship. Using a mobile device to calm a child is convenient in the moment, but the practice has been shown to “[worsen] their emotional regulation skills over time,” because it deprives children of natural opportunities to learn to handle difficult emotions or build resilience. Beyond just learning to rely on the short-cut of a dopamine hit, digital technology reduces “capacity to delay gratification, solve problems and deal with frustration and pain in its many different forms,” according to Dr. Anna Lembke, professor and medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. This is because screen time primarily engages the brain’s emotional center, also known as the limbic brain, rather than the pre-frontal cortex, which is responsible for not only impulse control and emotional regulation, but also developing personality, planning for the future, and solving problems.
Regulating emotions and planning for the future are important for any individual hoping to function in society, but they are equally important for the functioning of the society itself.
Regulating emotions and planning for the future are important for any individual hoping to function in society, but they are equally important for the functioning of the society itself. Self-control enables long-term planning, necessary for investment in both the economy and in communities. Only when people control their impulses and stop living for the moment do they sacrifice short-term pleasures for long-term goals. Conversely, without self-control in its people, a society can quickly descend into chaos and violence. The endurance of a self-governing republic depends on citizens who are able to first govern themselves.
Finally, chasing dopamine highs in the digital world causes people to lose their appetite for the comparatively mundane experiences of real life. In her book, Dopamine Nation, Dr. Lembke explains that repeated exposure to a dopamine-inducing substance or activity weakens its effect, which means the user needs an ever-increasing level of stimulation to achieve the same dopamine rush. This process also results in a desensitization of the brain to pleasure from other natural rewards. Today’s dopaminergic digital technology renders offline activities unbearably dull by comparison.
The mother who “Paid My Child $100 to Read a Book,” per her essay in the New York Times, illustrated the phenomenon well:
Certainly, my daughter’s having landed a smartphone last year — a secondhand iPhone with a zillion parental controls and time limits baked in — is part of the problem. Before the phone, I had a child who was like a gregarious Tigger, squealing with delight at something as simple as a new dessert cooling in the fridge. Post-phone, I had a monosyllabic blanket slug who wanted only to stay in her room with the blinds down, door closed, under a duvet, palming that little rectangle as if unhanding it would make her social life disappear. If it wasn’t her friends or it wasn’t her phone, it was only one thing: “boring.”
Her incentive worked, and on that basis, she recommends other parents do the same. But the helplessness she felt and the absurdity of the exercise at scale—simply bid up traditional and ennobling activities that cannot otherwise compete with the TikTok feed—underscore the seriousness of the problem.
But the helplessness she felt and the absurdity of the exercise at scale—simply bid up traditional and ennobling activities that cannot otherwise compete with the TikTok feed—underscore the seriousness of the problem.
“Screen time” limits are not sufficient to counteract social media’s all-consuming effects. Even if a child is only allowed on social media for 30 minutes, that brief exposure can dominate their mental space for the rest of the day. After children log off, they will still be thinking about what “likes” or followers they may have gotten, what friends might be posting, and when they can log in again. They feel a constant urge to check, even if they can’t. Their mind keeps returning to the app. Whether they spend 15 minutes or an hour, kids can carry the virtual world with them long after they “leave” it.
If we stop experiencing pleasure from the real, physical world, eventually the virtual world will become our primary residence. We will neuter our imagination and productivity, our creative abilities will atrophy, we will become wired to consume instead of produce. This is an inherent loss for humanity, and also one with very practical consequences for the vitality of domestic industry and innovation.
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A consumer marketplace overrun by products literally engineered in a lab to satisfy short-term cravings at the expense of long-term well-being poses a novel challenge to the market fundamentalism that has pervaded conservative policymaking in recent decades. In this respect, the emergence of social media on mobile devices resembles the emergence of China as a near-peer economy committed to undermining capitalist economies through its state-owned enterprises. Neither the theory nor rhetoric of “free trade” anticipates such trade. Neither the theory nor rhetoric of “individual responsibility” anticipates the TikTok feed.
For market fundamentalists, the only explanation for what is happening with social media is that people are allocating their time to the platforms because they want to, and doing so maximizes their welfare. The economic models that predict free markets will maximize welfare overall likewise rely on the assumption that people are rational actors. But when it comes to digital technology, desires are being manipulated, and “welfare” as a human brain is capable of understanding it aligns poorly with any external measure.
A consumer marketplace overrun by products literally engineered in a lab to satisfy short-term cravings at the expense of long-term well-being poses a novel challenge to the market fundamentalism that has pervaded conservative policymaking in recent decades.
People aren’t getting what they want from social media, and they know it. One recent, high-quality survey of Gen Z adults (ages 18 to 27) found that most spend more than four hours per day on social media, but roughly half wish products like Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter “had never been invented.” Another study found that three in four Gen Zers blame social media for negatively impacting their mental health.
Users craving dopamine are not “free people” or “rational actors” making uncompelled transactions. And there is no free market without people who are free. Most people understand this when it’s tied to heroin, or alcohol, or even gambling. But digital technology occupies a gray area—the products seem innocent enough, they are analogous to other products and services that raise no such concerns. So what to make of the unemployed 25-year-old young man who lives in his parents’ basement, playing video games all day online with strangers? Is he a free and rational actor? What about the teenager who spends hours a day on platforms she wishes were never invented, while never dating, working, or even learning to drive a car?
Even if some libertarians might be inclined to accept those individual judgments as reflecting the individual’s own preferences, the cost becomes everyone’s problem when it undermines the basic institutions of the community. Conservatives have historically conceived of republican liberty as requiring not just a particular kind of government, but also a particular kind of society and economy. Our ability to freely govern ourselves depends on public virtue and the formation of each generation into citizens capable of fostering the common good.
Humane or not, a society can function in the face of substance abuse and addiction among some small share of its population. It cannot accept choices and behaviors incompatible with human flourishing and the common good becoming the norm. While too many regulations and laws inhibit freedom, the failure to regulate where necessary can be equally damaging. Threats to individual liberty don’t only come from big government; they also come from big business, from powerful corporations proffering developing dangerous products that maximize profit by undermining the human agency and rationality essential for a free market to function.
Conservatives have historically conceived of republican liberty as requiring not just a particular kind of government, but also a particular kind of society and economy.
I wholeheartedly agree with the desire to protect individual freedom and I, too, want a limited government that does not dictate what people can and cannot do or how they should live their lives. But I also believe our government should act to impose age restrictions on social media, regulating it out of childhood.
Conservatives should understand that digital technologies, which are designed to be addictive by weaponizing the brain’s reward system, and which are eroding our social fabric and causing serious mental health crises for children and teens, are such products. Treating digital tech products the way we have other controlled substances is not antithetical to conservative values of individual freedom and the free market, but in line with them.
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“Just leave it up to parents.”
That is the most common pushback I hear in my work advocating for public policy solutions to protect children from the harms of digital technology. I hear it not only from Big Tech lobbyists but often from other conservatives and libertarians. My fellow conservatives view regulation of social media platforms as an infringement on the liberties of both adults and children. If there’s a problem, they want to let parents advancing their own interests in the free market work it out.
Generally speaking, I agree that parents should take primary responsibility for forming and protecting their kids. But when it comes to social media, parents cannot do it alone.
First, social media poses a collective action problem. Even if a parent wants to opt out, the use of social media by even a few teens in a school or organization affects everyone’s social environment. Individual parents cannot sufficiently counter these negative network effects. Even when they try, the tools available, like “screen time” limits and parental controls, have proven inadequate because they don’t give parents real control over what their kids are seeing and doing, nor do they do anything to change the underlying addictive design of the technology.
Even if a parent wants to opt out, the use of social media by even a few teens in a school or organization affects everyone’s social environment. Individual parents cannot sufficiently counter these negative network effects.
That addictive design is another reason not to leave it up to parents alone. Brain imaging studies indicate that social media has effects on the brain similar to addictive drugs like cocaine. Parents have recounted to me that the experience of trying to moderate their child’s screen use is like standing between a drug-dispensing machine and an underdeveloped brain. Recognizing that childhood is both a particularly vulnerable time for human development and a significant period for cultivating habits and forming virtues, we restrict addictive substances that threaten this critical stage of human life.
The negative impacts of addictive technology also extend beyond individual well-being and flourishing, and affect the health of our republic. For matters of national concern, we do give government a direct role in shaping or even overriding personal choices, sometimes even when it comes to parenting—from public education to draft registration to prohibiting child labor.
Finally, our society recognizes that some tools and technologies require a certain maturity to operate so that they don’t harm other people, like cars or guns. The government imposes minimum ages for their use and requires licenses, rather than leaving the matter to a parent’s discretion. Even if some parents could teach their own children how to drive safely, if other children were dangerous drivers, the roads would not be safe for anyone. Similarly, the risks of tweens and teens’ social media use are not isolated to the individual users, but can make the environment unsafe for everyone, both from dangerous content shared by one child with another, and through the negative social environment created even for teens not on the apps.
We have public policy tools available to respond. In the same way we have age-restricted other addictive substances like alcohol and tobacco, Congress could likewise restrict social media out of childhood entirely. In the meantime, states could pass parental consent laws for social media, to require age verification and verifiable parental consent before a minor can create a social media account. Nine states have already passed such laws.
We have public policy tools available to respond. In the same way we have age-restricted other addictive substances like alcohol and tobacco, Congress could likewise restrict social media out of childhood entirely.
Congress can also pass laws to compel the tech industry to change its addictive business model. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is one such piece of bipartisan legislation that would place certain regulations on the industry for child safety, and it already passed the Senate with a vote of 91-3 and now awaits a floor vote in the House.
We can draw additional guidance from the ways we have regulated other harmful dopamine-inducing products. These could include mandating health warning labels on tech products about their dangers and risks, and increasing knowledge of their harms through public awareness or education campaigns. Smoking and drunk driving have now become socially stigmatized from such campaigns. It would be good to create similar stigma around children using social media and smartphones.
We don’t leave it to parents alone to keep their kids from smoking or drinking. Social media should be no different. Conservatives have the principles and public policy tools necessary to protect children from the free market’s “efficient” result of digital addiction. We need only to grasp fully the stakes.
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