America On-the-Line
The digital era’s addictive technologies are undermining the foundations of our self-governing republic
“…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…”
This is an excerpt from my latest piece, a long-form essay, about how dopamine-inducing digital technologies are not only addicting our children and undermining their individual well-being, but also what costs that addiction and the real-life goods it deprives them of has on the free market, our domestic industry and innovation, and our self-governing republic. For these reasons, I explain why “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.” You can read the piece in full on American Compass.
“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.”
Oren Cass and I also discuss this piece on the latest American Compass podcast.