Understanding - and Maybe Escaping - Our Tech Malaise
Next Tech Talk on March 4th: Join us for our monthly tech talk on Tuesday, March 4th from 8:00-9:00 PM EST (GMT-5). Join an informal conversation about events, issues, articles, problems, and whatever else is on your mind. Use this link to register.
Upcoming Book Clubs: You can register for these upcoming book clubs on our events page.
On March 13th, Jacob Pleasants and Dan Krutka will be leading a discussion of Nicholas Carr’s new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.
On April 10th, Dan Krutka will be leading a discussion of Building the Innovation School, written by our very own CoT Board Member Phil Nichols.
Need More Books? Check out our most recent book reviews, including:
The Extinction of Experience (Rosen, September 2024)
AI Snake Oil (Narayanan & Kapoor, September 2024)
The Skill Code (Beane, June 2024)
Learning in a Time of Abundance (Cormier, 2024)
Be sure to join us on Bluesky @civicsoftech.bsky.social and join/follow our Civics of Technology starter pack.
By Jacob Pleasants
About a year ago, Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation to much fanfare and critique. In case you managed to dodge the conversation surrounding this book, Haidt’s central claim is that there is a teen mental health crisis that has unfolded over the past decade(ish), and communication technologies (especially social media) are to blame. More precisely, he places the blame on what he calls a “screen-based childhood.” While many of his claims have received considerable criticism, his book has nevertheless proven quite influential. His proposal to ban cellphones in schools, for instance, is being taken up by a growing number of states; my own state may even join that list sometime soon.
Whether the evidence supports Haidt’s contentions about teen mental health, his overall message has clearly resonated. You might call it a moral panic. But I would contend that he is tapping into a sentiment that is both real and legitimate. Even if they are not the root cause of depression and anxiety among teens, all of those devices, digital platforms, and digital media are almost certainly not good for them. Heck, all of that tech is almost certainly not good for adults, either.
This overall feeling that Haidt tapped into has been growing for some time. The so-called “techlash,” directed primarily at the big tech companies, began as far back as 2013. It’s not that our society has become anti-technology. Phone bannings and dopamine fasts notwithstanding, I don’t see much evidence that we have turned away from digital technology. Instead, what I see is more of a technological malaise, a general sense that even amidst what ought to be technological advancement, everything just kind of, well, sucks. Enshittification could probably have been the 2024 word of the year as well as for 2023. The growing deluge of AI slop, the recent oligarchic moves of the big tech CEOs… yeah, our technological society doesn’t seem to be doing so well at all.
Jonathan Haidt hasn’t been the only one to take notice and publish a book. In fact, the past 12 months has given us several books-about-tech that offer both descriptions and explanations for our technological malaise. I’ve done some individual reviews of a few of those books, and more are forthcoming. But in this post, I’d like to put them into conversation with one another. Where are some points of agreement? Collectively, what insights do they offer? How can they help us explain our predicament? And better yet, what suggestions do they have for us?
Let’s start with what might be the most malaise-y of the group: Nicholas Carr’s (2025) Superbloom (a book club book!). His diagnosis of our predicament is that it is an outgrowth and inevitable consequence of our quest for efficient communication. On a technical level, our communication has never been faster and more frictionless, our access to information less restricted. But contrary to the dreams of many thinkers, including the likes of John Dewey, more powerful communication technologies have failed to yield the kinds of democratic and informed societies we all hoped for. In fact, it has all yielded pretty much the opposite.
For Carr, this isn’t just because our digital media have been designed in problematic ways. They definitely have been, but he argues that this is all but an inevitability. In his medium-centric analysis, it’s the underlying speed of digital communication that has brought us to this point. The development of our digital media has a telos. We can choose to turn away from digital communications, but the internet cannot be reformed.
In The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen shares many of Carr’s concerns with our digital technologies, but offers a distinctly different diagnosis of the underlying issues. Rosen describes the myriad ways that our digital technologies have eroded many of our embodied experiences that are core to the human condition. Communication technologies, for instance, mediate away the need for eye contact. Our devices offer limitless entertainment to stave off the experience of boredom. Yet this is not just an inevitable fact of digital media.On some level, we have demanded these ostensible “liberations” from human experiences. Many of those experiences are often unpleasant or uncomfortable. Boredom is not particularly enjoyable. Human relationships, especially romantic ones, are difficult. Our digital technologies promise an escape from those difficulties, which many of us have gladly accepted.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. There is no reason why digital technologies must cause the extinction of experience. Rosen’s book argues for a need to adopt a new set of guiding values for our technologies rather than a wholesale retreat from them.
The difference between Carr and Rosen echoes much older debates in the philosophy of technology. Carr’s work reminds me of Jacques Ellul in that he identifies technology as inextricably linked to rationality and efficiency - a set of driving forces that inevitably lead to certain types of technological systems and certain societal outcomes (none of which are particularly good). Rosen, on the other hand, advances an argument more in the style of Borgmann or Illich, both of whom argued for ways in which technologies could support human flourishing - while also offering strong critiques of those that did the opposite.
If we can agree that many of our current technologies seem rather anti-human, there is more to the story of how and why we’ve found ourselves in this place. Missing from the account so far is a reckoning with the market logics that have spurred companies to pursue certain types of technological development. In The Sirens’ Call (incidentally published the same day as Superbloom), Chris Hayes focuses on the “attention economy” as a key driver that has shaped the structure of our technologies as well as their pernicious effects. Hayes argues that our technologies are built on the premise that human attention is the most valuable economic resource of our era. Because profitability depends on the ability to capture and hold human attention, we find ourselves in an ever-escalating and extractive arms race for this supposed resource. The perverse outcomes from this arms race are myriad. It is core to the logic of the “surveillance capitalism” discussed by Shoshanna Zuboff. It causes the Stolen Focus described by Johann Hari. It ultimately leads to the “enshittification” described by Cory Doctorow. If we want something different, we need to disconnect our technologies from these market logics. That’s not impossible! But it will take some serious effort.
For one final analysis that is even more focused on the underlying economic drivers of our technological malaise, we have Jathan Sadowski’s (2025) The Mechanic and the Luddite. As its subtitle promises, Sadowski offers a truly ruthless critique of the capitalist underpinnings of our technological systems. Sadowski provides a much broader critique than Hayes in that it is not simply the “attention economy” that is in need of reformation. Instead, we need to see the ways that technological projects have long been intertwined with capitalist logics and bids for power. Our technological malaise is due to the fact that we have allowed the tech industry to sell us on a set of self-serving fantasies. This is not new - capitalists have always tried to impose their own narratives about how they are actually making everyone’s lives better as they enrich themselves (See Winners Take All for an excellent discussion of this) - but the latest iteration seems to have taken a particularly strong hold. Getting out of our malaise will require a whole lot more than regulating the attention economy. It will require all of us to empower ourselves with technical theory and take action as the titular mechanics and Luddites. As long as technology is yoked to capitalism, we won’t make much headway.
Trying to do justice to the complex arguments put forth in all of these books is rather challenging to do in a few short paragraphs. I hope these authors will forgive me for my oversimplifications here. But I think it is worth taking a step back and looking across these texts from a wide-angle point of view. At bottom, all of these books are responding to the same malaise, but they offer quite different ways of thinking about the problem. Is the malaise an inevitable consequence of the technical qualities of our media? Perhaps it is caused instead by orienting our technologies toward a misguided set of values. Or maybe the issues lie with the economic and sociopolitical systems with which our technologies are enmeshed. Maybe it’s even some combination.
As I have tried to make sense of all of these arguments and perspectives in my own mind, one place I keep coming back to is that thinking and talking about technology is, in the end, an act of storytelling. These books-about-tech help us expand our narrative repertoire by giving us new stories to tell, while also helping us set aside those that are problematic.
As an educator, I especially think about which stories about technology we ought to be telling in school. We’re always telling some kind of story, whether we intend to or not. Perhaps we can begin to tell some that can help us navigate out of our collective malaise. At the very least, we’d better tell stories that resist the kinds of narratives that have gotten us into our current predicament. The tech capitalists and boosters certainly won’t be silent.