A Culture of Digital Junkies

We're all addicted to systems destroying us.

Leaders should be role models. You should conduct yourself with the utmost professionalism when holding an office of public trust. This was once our political culture—an expectation that public figures would demonstrate integrity, kindness, and grace not as performance but as recognition that leadership shapes the moral atmosphere within which citizens learn to relate to each other and to shared challenges.

Our political culture has become a sewer. And it’s not accidental—it’s the inevitable result of conducting democratic discourse through technological infrastructure designed to reward the worst human impulses while punishing democratic virtues.

Donald Trump’s political rise is often tied to his use of Twitter. Well, as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. Message received. A platform that rewards immediate emotional reactions, tribal signaling, and attention-grabbing provocations produced a political culture organized around immediate emotional reactions, tribal signaling, and attention-grabbing provocations. Trump didn’t corrupt Twitter—Twitter’s design characteristics made Trump-style politics inevitable. The medium shaped the message, and the message shaped our politics.

Sam Harris, reflecting on the response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, recently wrote a powerful piece diagnosing how social media platforms are “destroying our culture.” His conclusion—“Get off social media. Read good books and real journalism. Find your friends. And enjoy your life”—represents exactly the kind of individual cognitive sovereignty that democratic culture requires. Harris is absolutely right that these platforms amplify extreme views as representative, that we’re “losing our sense of what other people are really like,” and that platform business models depend on our continuing to “gaze, and howl, into the digital abyss.”

But individual withdrawal, while necessary, isn’t sufficient when we’re facing civilizational addiction—a self-reinforcing loop where design choices optimized for engagement create negative social externalities that become profitable to amplify, making collective resistance increasingly difficult as the cognitive infrastructure for resistance gets systematically eroded.

Social media platforms are increasingly the main way Americans get their news, and the algorithms that decide what they see are engineered to keep eyeballs planted and thumbs scrolling. They accomplish this by making us anxious to know what happens next—chasing the infinite scroll—or by keeping us mad at preferred scapegoats. Every notification is calculated to trigger psychological responses that maximize engagement regardless of whether that engagement serves human flourishing or democratic reasoning.

We have expended massive amounts of blood and treasure fighting illegal narcotics and the addiction to them. But I would argue that social media has done more harm to the world than heroin, cocaine, or even fentanyl ever did. Unlike drug addiction, which destroys individual lives while leaving social structures intact, algorithmic addiction fragments the cognitive infrastructure that makes collective reasoning possible.

This isn’t hyperbolic. Social media algorithms use the same psychological mechanisms as addictive substances: intermittent variable reinforcement, tolerance requiring ever-greater stimulation, withdrawal anxiety when access is restricted, and systematic replacement of authentic satisfaction with artificial substitutes. But where drugs affect individuals, algorithmic addiction affects the shared capacity for sustained attention, complex reasoning, and authentic relationship that democracy requires to function.

The people who built these systems didn’t start as oligarchs plotting civilizational destruction. Many began as entrepreneurs and innovators who achieved success within systems that rewarded specific behaviors. But they became addicted to the money, status, and power that success provided. The same technological systems they created to capture others’ attention eventually captured their own psychology, creating self-reinforcing cycles where optimization for narrow metrics corrupts broader human values.

We’re all junkies now. The influencer economy built around algorithmic manipulation, the bullshit memecoins and memestocks that financialize human psychology, the entire attention extraction apparatus—it represents systematic addiction that turns human consciousness into commodity while destroying the cognitive capacity that makes meaningful choice possible.

The problem is we’re in an impossible bind that individual solutions alone can’t address. This toxic substrate has become the medium through which most people understand the world around them. Political conversations must happen here because this is where people are, but conducting democracy through systems optimized for engagement over understanding is like trying to have rational discussion while participants are systematically triggered into emotional reactivity.

We were promised more connection, but we are lonelier than we’ve ever been. We were promised more information, but we’re more confused and manipulated than previous generations who had access to far less data but far more cognitive capacity to process it meaningfully. We were promised democratization of knowledge, but we got systematic destruction of the attention spans required to engage with complex knowledge.

This isn’t sustainable. Democracy will not survive unless we change the incentive structures that profit from fragmenting human consciousness. These social media algorithms have corrupted our collective sense of morality, our capacity for sustained reasoning, our ability to form authentic relationships that could serve as foundation for collective action.

We’re junkies and we need to quit. Or we’re going to die—not as individuals but as a civilization capable of conscious self-governance. Harris is right that we should get off social media, read good books, and find our friends. But individual withdrawal isn’t sufficient when the addiction has become the substrate of political culture itself, when the systems profit from our inability to think clearly about their control.

The extraction economy treats human attention as resource to be mined, human emotion as trigger to be pulled, human community as market to be captured. Every moment spent in these environments makes us less capable of the cognitive and social capacities that meaningful choice requires.

Many who built these systems didn’t start as villains, but they’ve become functionally villainous through addiction to power and money that makes them incapable of caring about consequences for others. Their personal addiction has become civilization’s addiction, and our collective healing depends on recognizing that individual solutions, while necessary, aren’t sufficient for addressing systematic problems that require systematic responses.

The only cure is building collective resistance to systems that have made resistance psychologically difficult but not impossible. We can still choose consciousness over commodity, attention over distraction, authentic relationship over algorithmic manipulation.

But the window for that choice narrows every day we remain addicted to systems designed to fragment the very cognitive capacity required to recognize our addiction and choose differently.