BuzzMachine

For 25 years now, the Edelman PR company has issued its Trust Barometer. This year, it’s all about grievances. It’s Festivus every day, the world around.

Six in 10 people in the survey “hold grievances against business, government, and the rich.” Only 36% worldwide — 30% in the US, 14% in Germany, 17% in the UK — believe the next generation will be better off than today. 

A majority of people surveyed are frightened of losing their jobs — which, upon reflection, boggles sense, for that would imply that half the world’s jobs are in imminent jeopardy. Unless you believe the fantastical ravings of the most hubristic AI boys, that’s simply illogical. This leads me to think this pall on the world might be more about perception than reality. 

Where does that perception come from? In this chicken-and-rotten-egg cycle, I wonder whether the complaints came first or whether the political and media exploitation of fear and worry are what fabricated the evident dark vibe. This survey of 33,000 people in 28 countries will not answer that question. But it does paint an enlightening picture of the world’s dark mood. And it almost doesn’t matter whether perception or reality lead, for the survey presents a picture of a world ready to blow — on its own or under the encouragement of both extremist movements and media looking to stir things up for attention. 

So here’s the really chilling bit: A majority — 53% — of young adults aged 18 to 34 “see hostile activism as a viable means to drive change.” The percentages are lessened for older people, averaging 40% overall. This is how many respondents approve of “hostile action” to “engage in online personal attacks against individuals who you see as standing in the way of the change you want to see” (27%), to “create or share exaggerated or even false online content to influence public opinion” (25%), to “threaten or engage in physical violence against the institutions or groups that you see as standing in the way of change you want to see” (23%) [my emphasis], or to “damage or destroy public and/or private property to bring attention to the change you want to see” (23%). This on the day that America’s old and new president pardons and releases 1,500 angry, violent insurgents from prison. Hostile activism is in charge. 

As we know, it’s not just younger people but poorer people who are angry. Edelman’s trust index — an averaging of attitudes toward business, government, NGOs, and media — is 61% for the top quarter of earners but 48% for the bottom quarter, a gap of 13 points. Trust in employers “to do the right thing” fell three points in a year to 75% (surprisingly high). But among those with a high sense of grievance only 30% of people trust CEOs. Overall, two-thirds of people believe the wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes and their “selfishness causes many of our problems.” Yet in America, the oligarchs are now fully in charge — and it’s these voters who put them there. 

At moments such as this, I always feel compelled to point to the lessons Hannah Arendt teaches us. This from The Gutenberg Parenthesis: 

“Arendt found in Nazi and Soviet history “such unexpected and unpredicted phenomena as the radical loss of self-interest, the cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes, the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense.” … Arendt was careful to observe that it wasn’t just the “masses” who followed Hitler and Stalin but also elites — as with present-day senators, judges, and business titans — who “did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.” Both sectors of society did not so much belong to a movement as they had nothing else to belong to, so they could devote all their loyalties to the leader.”

It is disturbing that a worldwide average of 63% of people “worry about experiencing prejudice, discrimination, or racism.” But here’s the revealing piece about America under Trump: 40% of whites say they worry about experiencing racism. 

Illustrative of that widespread mistrust, more than half of people with high grievance also have a zero-sum mindset — i.e., “What helps people who don’t share my politics comes at a cost to me.” This what is instilled in the right wing. And it has taken hold. 

I can hear the journalists puffing up their chests, ready to volunteer that this is why journalism is needed. Not so fast, Clark Kent. Well more than half of people — up to three-quarters of those with high grievance — say that news organizations “would rather attract a big audience than tell people what they need to know.” Thus the attention economy invented by mass media and imported online to corrupt the internet has come home to roost in our distrustful society. 

It gets worse. Seventy percent of people believe that journalists and reporters “purposely mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations’ — that is, lie — just beating out government and business leaders.

This is to say that no one believes anyone. 

And before the tech bros think they have the solution, you can step back from your chatbots. Only a third of people with high grievance trust AI.

On the other hand, at least Google is compartively well-trusted. 

As for the rest of us, I have but one bit of hopeful news to offer: Scientists and teachers are (still) trusted. But the right-wing is working hard to undercut them, too. 

What is to be done? Edelman has various prescriptions. I focus on one. More than two thirds of people across the grievance spectrum say “you will earn legitimate influence with me if you understand what people like me need and want.” Listen.

Two days to go until the fascist oligarchy comes to power in the United States and this is how our once-greatest newspaper, The New York Times, is covering what could end in the fall of American democracy. To The Times, all the world’s Trump’s stage and they’re merely spectators.

On the socials, I started to criticize today’s coverage, with a stack of lead #BrokenTimes slugs to insert with each complaint. But I was overwhelmed by the cascade of disappointments in this urgent moment — and by my exhaustion at the futility of hoping The Times could be better. That is why I criticize it: in that hope.

Start above. Yes, that story about Trump as impresario examines how he turns his crimes and lies to his favor with his gullible public. The Times wonders at his magic:

But the “gray areas between appearance and perception” is precisely where journalism is needed. Can they not understand that his success is their failure? Where is the self-reflection on their own willful credulity as well as their judgment of the public’s epidemic ignorance? The Times already surrenders to the idea that his second term is “his story” to tell when it should be theirs — or actually the country’s and posterity’s.

And how are we, the people, permitted to tell it? Through polls, damned polls.

I constantly criticize the use of opinion polls, always quoting the late James Carey of Columbia, who taught that polling preempts the public discourse it is intended to measure. In my book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I write:

The Times poll provides damnable evidence of the fallibility of the form when set against a Wall Street Journal poll this same day. According to The Times’ rendering of public opinion, America is all in on MAGA fascism, itching for mass deportations to start.

Yet look at The Journal’s poll:

“MAGA Lite,” as in, ‘We voted for Adolf but can we have the Duce now?’ According to The Journal, 70% of Americans “would protect longtime residents from removal if they don’t have criminal records” and thus do not favor mass deportation. Majorities of respondents also oppose pardoning January 6 rioters, oppose taking Greenland or the Panama Canal by force, oppose making Canada the next state, oppose Musk and his “doge,” oppose ending birthright citizenship, oppose cutting education and health care, and recognize that tariffs will raise prices.

So which is it: Mondo MAGA or MAGA Mini? Neither. Each is an impossibly flawed portrait of the nation’s nuanced thinking. Realizing that, The Times resorts to its favorite haunt: the proverbial diner.

What hubris it is for the paper to think it can, with random quotes selected by its editors, portray “the inner thoughts of a nation.” Then again, when the inner thoughts The Times chooses to present on its home page are such as this, it is more likely just another opportunity to dismiss the views of the nation:

Mind-reading the inner thoughts of the populace is not much more hubristic than journalists thinking they write “the first draft of history” while too often dismissing history’s lessons.

I was most appalled to see how The Times presented the right’s threat to birthright citizenship as merely an “idea” that Trump “wants to redefine.” No! To end birthright citizenship is to end Reconstruction and grant victory to the Confederacy. It is a shocking and abhorrent racist and xenophobic plan that should have journalists shouting warning.

The Times responds not with appropriate historical perspective but instead with the anodyne calm of present-tense journalism: “If Trump follows through on this promise, it would represent a triumph for a certain vision of America.” Of course, The Times does acknowledge that this is a question of equity (read: race). But it ends up bothsidesing the Civil War. “The battle over birthright citizenship will be a fight between these two nationalisms.” This from the newspaper — from its magazine — that gave us the 1619 Project. God help us.

I have been trying to write an essay about what I see as a current crisis of judgment. Journalism is afraid of judging our politicians and even their most noxious policies, not daring to condemn a challenge to the most fundamental pillar of Reconstruction. News organizations are afraid of judging the electorate for their ignorant ideas and perilous, self-destructive choices. Meanwhile, technology companies are ever-more refusing to judge extremist, manipulative speech, both because it’s expensive and because that is the speech of the regime now in power.

But journalists are happy to judge one category of the country and blame them for where we are: the left. The Times invites no one less than “two of the world’s leading thinkers,” Thomas Piketty and Harvard’s Michael Sandel, to examine how “the left went astray.” It is the right that has given us the fascist oligarchy but it’s the left that went astray.

The Times does that one worse: It invites one of the world’s most noxious thinkers, the philosopher-mascot behind the worst of Silicon Valley’s oligarchs — Thiel, Andreessen, Vance — to spew his extreme ideas. It even grants him the prominence of one of its creepy Harry Potter Daily Prophet animated portraits on the home page, Curtis Yarvin drumming his fingers at our doom. Says The Times‘ David Marchese: “Until recently, those ideas felt fringe.” Ideas such as replacing democracy with a dictator-CEO. “But given that they are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can’t be so easily dismissed anymore.” So let’s amplify his ideas further. They’re only ideas, after all.

But fear not, The Times‘ Editorial Board is telling leaders, institutions, and us all to stand up to “Trump’s fear tactics.” I share this without comment.

Elsewhere in The Times‘ opinion section, a member of the Editorial Board asks:

She concludes: “I fear that by the time we get around to talking about oligarchy, it will be too late.” And I want to shout: It has been your job to talk about oligarchy and you’re still wondering when you’ll get around to it?

Meanwhile, pity Nick Kristof, who confesses that he has a hard time writing his annual exercise in Pollyannism.

He proceeds nonetheless to mine glimmers of hope, including this:

Except he does not take the next, basic journalistic step, to then point out the state of literacy in America. According to the National Literacy Institute, 79% of U.S. adults are literate and 21% are illiterate in 2024 and 54% of adults have literacy below the sixth-grade level. The U.S. ranks 36th worldwide in literacy. The lack of education in the United States, the attack by the fascist right on the institutions of education, and the ignorance of too much of the public is what made them vulnerable to the siren call of fascism, Fox, and extremist right propaganda.

How can I complain about The Times without complaining about Ross Douthat? He’s optimistic — about Trump!

But if things go sour, Douthat won’t blame the extremist right. He and his new bestie, Yarvin disciple Andreessen, will blame the left for turning them into extremists, as if oligarchic billionaires have no power, no agency even over their own lives and thoughts:

This from a columnist who blames sexual assault on “social liberalism”:

I’m going to end today’s airing of grievances with an odd, final exhibit: Kevin Roose — alongside the Supreme Court, the Congress, and two presidencies — dismissing the freedom of expression of the 170 million Americans on TikTok.

While confessing that he has spent hours enjoying the creativity of the masses there, he shrugs off the app as “a place to waste time, to numb out, to unplug from reality” and “a kind of cognitive surrender,” accusing it (as he has been known to accuse artificial intelligence) of “starting to rewire my brain — blurring my focus, shortening my attention span, making me less interested in media that isn’t laser-targeted to my precise array of dopamine receptors.” It’s sobering how journalists, like oligarchic billionaires, have so little agency.

What’s worse is that he thinks TikTok’s creators and users are shrugging off TikTok on this apparent evidence….

This is such a key illustration of The Times‘ and its journalists’ inability to empathize with the people they are pledged to serve. So let me tell you about my inner thoughts: I’m exhausted and despair at the triumph of ignorance and hatred, at the apparent futility of protest, and at the failure of the field I have devoted fifty years of my life to — journalism — to defend democracy, enlightenment, education, equity, justice, and free speech for all against the titanic forces of totalitarianism and tyranny.

I criticize The Times more than the rest because it had been our best, and the rest — the #BrokenPost especially now — seem well beyond reform. From The Post:

I am at the point of giving up on the incumbent institutions of mass media, in favor of the tender shoots rising from the ashes to replace them, seeds planted by my students. What you see here today in just one paper’s coverage of this terrifying time is how I have come to this.

Every current and common explanation for the reelection of Donald Trump — whether inflation or immigration, culture wars or campaign tactics, blaming Harris or Biden or the party — elides its true and root cause: racism. 

The United States is a deeply, fundamentally racist nation and unless and until we in white America admit and address that, our endless Civil War will never find peace. 

It should be the role of institutional journalism to educate us in this most uncomfortable truth, but it will not, because that is too difficult, controversial, risky, and unprofitable. And first, our media would have to recognize their own role in propagating the myth of American innocence. 

But do not listen to me. 

Hear Eddie Glaude Jr., who at every on-air opportunity over years instructs white America to face its soul, to recognize that “this is not simply economic populism. This is the ugly underbelly of the country…. This is us. And if we’re going to get past this, we can’t blame it on him.” On Trump. “He’s a manifestation of the ugliness that’s in us.” 

Listen to Sherrilyn Ifill’s message now for white America and media: 

You are choosing to frame this moment in a way that deflects from the root of the issue. And your role in it…. It is a stunningly reckless & irresponsible step by white voters in this country. THAT’s the story. Not Biden. Not Harris’ campaign (which was excellent). Not Black men. Media, have the guts to follow the story. 

Read Elie Mystal’s indictment of us: 

We had a chance to create a better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not…. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid.

See reporting on the horrid threats targeting Black youth in the hours after Trump’s triumph. And see this welcome moment of blunt analysis of racism by The New York Times: 

It affirmed the worst of what many Black women believed about their country: that it would rather choose a man who was convicted of 34 felonies, has spewed lies and falsehoods, disparaged women and people of color, and pledged to use the powers of the federal government to punish his political opponents than send a woman of color to the White House.

Or read instead the triumphal Wall Street Journal, Murdoch’s party organ, declaring that diversity, equity, and inclusion are not moral aspirations in society’s self-interest but rather “destructive progressive dogma.” And then simply recall all the horrid and hateful bile openly spewed in Trump’s and Vance’s campaign. They do not hide the racism. They preach it. They proselytize it. Media amplify it. 

For Kamala Harris, of course, the sword of equity and justice denied is sharp on two edges: racism and sexism. Misogynoir. She ran a flawless campaign at at impossible moment. The fault is not hers. It is ours: the 10 million who did not show up this time to vote for democracy, the so-called aspirational whites who thought their votes could immunize themselves from MAGA’s bigotry, the white media that failed to raise alarms. 

It’s the racism, stupid.

I am ashamed to say how long it has taken me to begin to recognize the extent of the racism in my land and life. My grandparents were bigots, acknowledged and not addressed. I am proud of my parents for breaking free of that upbringing as best they could. They raised me to believe in what I now understand as the myth of the American melting pot: that all would be harmonious once everyone would seem like us — though, of course, we in the white majority would welcome no one else to share our privilege. My generation of white, liberal America was taught we should be blind to color, rather than appreciative of it. 

Some years ago, I was involved with an organization that had a considerable problem with racism, and so a trainer was hired to try to get the board, of which I was a member, to see the errors of its ways, which had been revealed most starkly when one member employed that most racist of tropes: race v. excellence. 

I remember the trainer instructing us to reflect on our own cultures. I demurred, saying I had none, as my roots were boring and common, raised in a suburban sitcom family minus the punch lines: Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread. Then I heard myself. I had been challenged to recognize the dominance of my culture, how blind I had been to people of every other culture code-switching to make me comfortable, abandoning their identities to seek a place in the echelon of society that still would deny them. That is my whiteness. That is why Professor Glaude urges white Americans to finally “embrace a history that might set them free from being white.”

This is why it is so horribly wrong to hear the likes of Chris Matthews smugly declare on Morning Joe that identity politics is dead because identity politics are to blame for Harris’ loss. Can he not hear himself? The election of Trump is the product of identity politics: white identity politics, dismissing, disdaining, and threatening people of every other identity. 

I have spent my last decade studying the history of mass media and the idea of the mass as a means of depriving the majority of people of their identities. In my research, I have read and learned from scholars including Drs. Glaude; André Brock Jr. from his book, Distributed Blackness; Charlton McIlwain from his, Black Software; and Meredith Clark from her scholarship on Black Twitter. Their work helped me frame my theory about the internet’s role in our current upheaval. 

No, I am not going to blame the internet for an ill-informed public; responsibility for that failing must land first at the door of news media. Instead, I credit the internet with at last providing a place at the table of public discourse for those too long ignored and excluded by so-called “mainstream” (that is to say, white) mass media. Those who controlled discourse in media and politics resent this intrusion on their monopoly of power, privilege, and attention.

Thus, as I’ve theorized here and in my books, what Martin Luther was to the technology of print, #BlackLivesMatter may be to the technology of the internet: a racial Reformation, with the election of Trump as counter Reformation. The question before us is whether we, too, will now enter our Thirty Years’ War — or continue our Civil War — or find some way to end it.

Black America — Black voters — once again did their best to save the nation, but they cannot raise us up when we in white America block the road to the mountaintop. They cannot rescue us from ourselves and cannot be expected to continue trying. 

The only way we will ever escape this cycle of fear, hate, and exploitation is through education. Schools are our salvation; the data make that clear. 

So it is no surprise that American fascism attacks the institution of education to abort the Enlightenment of future generations. One of the most sobering realizations of this election is how we are raising a next generation of isolated, angry, uneducated white boys glibly and offensively branded the “manosphere.”

Failing education, our other recourse with adults should be our media, both entertainment and news. But Hollywood is less a leader and more an exploiter of culture, afraid to be woke, to offend and lose customers as it still chases the dead idea of the mass. 

And journalism? Its mission should be to confront the powerful — by that, I do not mean just politicians and moguls but all of white America — with the most discomfiting of truths about our shared racism. Yet newsrooms still exclude those who could report and edit that story — so much so that the newspaper industry has given up even counting people of color inside. White media cannot get to the starting line of acknowledging how white media are. 

I have no suggestions other than to listen to, learn from, amplify, and respect those who know better because of how they experience our nation.

Do not listen to me. I am merely a student. 

Do not listen to the pundits who resort to their favorite, pat explanations: It’s the economy, stupid. No, stupid, it’s nothing so simple. And by the way, we have not begun to imagine economic anxiety until we see the effects of Trump’s tariffs, mass deportation, destroyed social net, inflation, debt, and mogul welfare to protect those at the top and none below. 

Do not listen, either, to the pollsters who are so chronically wrong, who subvert public discourse and paper over nuance with their own easy answers, prefabricated for the public. When people are asked whether they’re upset over high prices, you know they’re going to say they are. They’re not going to say they are fearful of Black people with accents moving into their towns, for racism is not one of the choices they’re given. Polls do not present the truth of the nation; they attempt to veil it. 

Do not listen to the commentators who want to blame Biden for not leaving sooner or blame Harris for not distancing herself from him or blame them both for not fulfilling the promises Republicans blocked. 

Listen instead to Professor Glaude, who as I wrote this said from his lectern of the air: “It’s not about what Kamala Harris didn’t do. It’s about who we are.”

Then listen once more to Professor Ifill:

The fact that the leading opinion columnists in this country have chosen to frame the question of the moment in terms of a wellness check on “the Democrats” rather than on the country speaks to inadequacy the punditry has demonstrated. This election was a referendum on AMERICA — not on the Democrats. On our national identity and values. On the fitness of this country for global, moral, economic, scientific, and ideological leadership. Where does this leave America? THAT is the question.

Nevermind every other theory or tactical complaint about what happened in this election. Kamala Harris did everything she possibly could to win. The fault is not hers. 

The fault is in our nation. We must come to the realization that America is deeply racist and sexist, incapable of electing a Black, Asian woman to its highest office because of our culture’s innate, widespread, and unreconciled bias and hatred. That is the root of it. That is the weed that will now grow unkempt no matter how much media wish to groom the nation to make us look as if it were not so. Its aims of oppression will grow daily.

Women will lose control over their bodies, their health, their lives. 

Black Americans know better than anyone, of course, how racist America is. Now there will be no limits to it; this election gives it permission. 

LGBTQ+ people may be deprived every precious right they fought so bravely to attain as bigots try to force them back into closets.

Some portion of Latino voters may think — like Italians long before them, who once were considered people of color and then were not — that they might buy their way into favor with white America with their votes. But note well that even today, Italian-Americans are a protected class at CUNY; discrimination never ends. No matter their contribution to Trump’s victory, some citizens will again be called garbage by those in power. 

Immigrants, whether documented or not and citizens or not, will find their families and lives torn apart as Trump follows through on his promise of mass deportation, tearing husbands, wives, parents, and children from each other on the suspicion brought by an accent, a name, the color of skin. 

Every consumer will suffer higher prices — no matter what their yard signs promised — as Trump undertakes his deportations and tariffs. They admit the economy will be in shambles.

God save the people of Ukraine, who will face defeat as Trump gives his Putin anything he wants, and the people of Gaza, with Netanyahu completely unconstrained by his friend Trump. NATO, South Korea, Taiwan, and the beneficiaries of American generosity, support, and diplomacy are all at risk. 

Trump’s political opponents and whistleblowers will suffer in ways he is only beginning to imagine. 

Justice will suffer as Trump and his Senate can now stack every federal court with young extremists for generations to come, allowing them to tear down the institution of the Constitution under the guise of interpreting it with convenient pedantry to support their absolute power. The institutions of voting rights, fair elections, and equal rights under the law will diminish further. 

Every institution will be attacked, for that is the goal of this brand of so-called conservatism: not to conserve institutions but to destroy them, rather than share their benefits with those who follow. 

Elon Musk will do Trump’s bidding, outlawing the institution of the civil service, replacing it again with political patronage.

RFK Jr. will drive Trump to outlaw vaccinations, essentially outlawing the institutions of medicine and science.

Education is under constant attack from the right. What DeSantis has done to universities in Florida will no doubt provide a model for the destruction of the university and its institutions: academic freedom, faculty governance, tenure, pure research, the humanities. 

The institution of free speech will be very much at risk, even as Trump, Musk, and their supposedly contrarian lock-step thinkers argue they are its protectors. They will forbid and harass speech of which they do not approve. 

The institution of journalism will suffer, as it is likely that more journalists will be harrassed, even sued or jailed by Trump and his thugs. Mogul publishers will think themselves vindicated for obeying in advance and continue to squash controversy unpopular with power. Journalists — some of them — will let themselves be carried along with the right wing, declaring it the will of the people. Just this morning, I heard one guest commentator on MSNBC say that identity politics is dead and that Democrats will have to abandon progressivism to win — which is like saying that Democrats must commit suicide to live. 

Journalists and media executives refuse to acknowledge their key role in sane-washing dangerous insanity, soft-pedaling fascism, enabling amnesia and historical ignorance in the populous they serve. These journalists will get angry with the liberals who are angry at them. Their incumbent institutions — Trump bump: the sequel or not — will decline and they will have the gall to wonder why.

What is to be done? That is the question I am hearing from friends and family. No one has an answer. 

In my books, I theorize that what the most important thing the internet has done is give people who were not represented, heard, or served in so-called mainstream mass media their stage at long last — and that is what those who controlled the stage resent and resist. Thus I wonder whether the Reformation of this era of technological change will turn out to be the racial Reformation of #BlackLivesMatter, and the January 6 attack on the Capital and Trump’s triumph its counter Reformation. 

Where will this end? Print and Luther’s reformation led to peasants’ wars of exactly five hundred years ago and the Thirty Years’ that followed. Must we find ourselves in such open struggle to reach a conclusion or at least a truce?

I write this while on an ill-timed trip to Germany to give a talk, wishing I were not away from home right now as everyone I know and love is in pain. But being here, I wonder whether American fascism will have to find its denouement as it did here in Europe, in vast tragedy and destruction, before sanity might return. 

This election was my hope that we could find a different way, to rebuild not from the ashes but from where we stood. Now I am not sure. What is ultimately broken is not the set of institutions the extremists are trying to destroy but instead our nation itself. Until we face its faults of racism, sexism, and inequity we will never be finished fighting our war, our endless Civil War. 

Rupert Murdoch’s media have been a key source of moral panic about the internet and technology — see, for example, this from his Times declaring that phones are “dope” that imprison us all in an epidemic of addiction causing cognitive decline: 

On the latest episode of This Week in Google, we discussed parents’ legitimate concerns about their children’s technology use as they seek help in monitoring and managing it, as cohost Paris Martineau explores in her excellent reporting. I challenge the assumption of addiction in framing the discussion and read bit from my new book, The Web We Weave, so I thought I’d share the rest, in which I look at the source of the addiction argument regarding the internet and now phones:

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In July 1996 — only two years after the introduction of the Netscape web browser — Columbia University psychiatry professor Ivan Goldberg posted a notice to an online bulletin board he founded, intending to parody the language of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the profession’s encyclopedia of mental disorders. Goldberg announced criteria for a new diagnosis: internet addiction. The astute might have noticed the word “humor” in the announcement’s URL or the odd symptoms listed: “voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers.” Even so, folks appeared on the bulletin board, claiming they suffered the ailment he had just concocted, so he kept the joke going by creating the Internet Addiction Support Group, even though he believed that “support groups for internet addiction made about as much sense as support groups for coughing.”

Goldberg regretted the coinage of internet addiction disorder. “I.A.D. is a very unfortunate term,” he told The New Yorker. “It makes it sound as if one were dealing with heroin, a truly addicting substance that can alter almost every cell in the body. To medicalize every behavior by putting it into psychiatric nomenclature is ridiculous. If you expand the concept of addiction to include everything people can overdo, then you must talk about people being addicted to books, addicted to jogging, addicted to other people.”

Kimberly Young founded the Center for Internet Addiction and in 1996 presented a paper to the American Psychological Association declaring “the emergence of a new clinical disorder: internet addiction.” Mind you, = Google didn’t come along until two years later in 1998, Facebook until 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. She declared that folks had become addicted to the crude, slow, ugly — and expensive — early web. Young modeled her definition of internet addiction on pathological gambling and created questionnaires to measure the affliction’s severity: “How often do you find you stay online longer than you intended? . . . How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time online? . . . How often do you form new relationships with fellow online users? . . . How often do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are online? . . . How often do you fear that life without the internet would be boring, empty, and joyless?” How would any of us answer those questions — about the internet or a binge-worthy TV show or good book?

Young advertised for volunteers for her first study from Goldberg’s parody Internet Addiction Support Group as well as a Webaholics Support Group — hardly representative populations. On that basis she
declared the condition serious, with 98 percent of people reporting moderate or severe impairment in work and relationships. She layered the report with anecdata: “Dependents gradually spent less time with real people in their lives in exchange for solitary time in front of a computer.” Thirty-five percent of her dependent subjects said they spent time in chat rooms, 28 percent in multiuser games, 15 percent in news discussion groups, and 13 percent in email — all of which entails interacting with people I would classify as real. “Initially,” Young continued, “Dependents [her capitalization] tended to use the Internet as an excuse to avoid needed but reluctantly performed daily chores. . . . For example, one mother forgot such things as to pick up her children from school, to make them dinner, and to put them to bed because she became so absorbed in her Internet use.” I cannot help but be reminded of a critic writing of novels in 1795: “My sight is every-where offended by these foolish, yet dangerous, books. I have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread.”

Young was not alone in sounding the alarm. Psychology Today declared in 1998, “Internet users who become addicted to online activity usually face divorce, unemployment, financial and legal difficulties and child neglect.” Usually? The magazine said unnamed experts estimated that for as many as five million Americans, “the Internet has become a destructive force.” Only two years later, in 2000, Psychology Today upped the ante to estimate that 25 million Americans “qualify as compulsive surfers.” At least the magazine exercised sufficient self-awareness to note, “Today, so-called addictions are everywhere: sex, exercise, work, chocolate, TV, shopping, and now the Internet. Have we been, well, abusing the word?”

Young founded the first inpatient hospital clinic for internet addiction in Pittsburgh. Others followed. In 2009, two therapists founded reSTART atop “Serenity Mountain,” twenty-five miles from Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington, to treat teens and young adults for a long list of alleged ailments associated with the net: screen dependence (now including virtual reality), internet gaming disorder, gambling, compulsive shopping, social-media use, and intimacy disorder. The program costs a reported $18,000 to $20,000 per month. Inpatient programs run two to twelve months, then reSTART offers off-campus living in “tech-limited” apartments, for six to twenty-four months, followed by ongoing coaching. I do not diminish the painful reality of compulsive behavior around any activity and its connection to co-occurring conditions, including depression, anxiety, ADD/ADHD, and personality disorders. Often internet use is a symptom of other issues — and sometimes a salve for them, a way to grapple with concerns we all can share, like loneliness. If there is an internet pathology, how prevalent might it be? We do not know, for there is as yet no agreement even on definitions, in spite of almost five thousand papers on “internet addiction” appearing on the National Institute of Health’s database.

Mark Griffiths wrote the first academic paper examining the idea of internet addiction, in 1996. He questioned Young’s research: “It is unlikely that very many of her dependent Internet users was a bona fide Internet addict.” Writing in 2003, he noted that “the Internet can be used to counteract other deficiencies in the person’s life (e.g. relationships, lack of friends, physical appearance, disability, coping, etc.)” and that “text-based relationship can obviously be rewarding for some people.” In another paper, he proposed that “many of these excessive users are not ‘Internet addicts’ but just use the Internet excessively as a medium to fuel other addictions.”

Griffiths’ observation speaks to much controversy about the net: it is blamed as the cause of many ills when often it is merely a conduit for them. I emailed Griffiths and asked whether his opinion had changed in the intervening decades of research. He replied with a paper that expressed his current view: “There are also much wider problems with the use of the term ‘internet addiction’: though the number of studies in the field of internet addiction has certainly grown, most have really investigated addictions on the internet rather than to the internet. . . . In short, the overwhelming majority of so-called internet addicts are no more addicted to the internet than alcoholics are addicted to the actual bottle.”

Not infrequently, writers call on biology to back up their claims of addiction, reporting that smartphones and their apps induce the production of dopamine, as drugs do. “Digital addictions are drowning us in dopamine,” claims a headline in The Wall Street Journal over a Stanford psychiatrist’s contention that the smartphone is “the equivalent of the hypodermic needle for a wired generation.” In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria decides that TikTok is “dangerously addictive” and must be regulated because it delivers dopamine. Except as Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson points out, “Anything fun results in an increased dopamine release in the ‘pleasure circuits’ of the brain — whether it’s going for a swim, reading a good book, having a good conversation, eating or having sex. Technology use causes dopamine release similar to other normal, fun activities: about 50 to 100 percent above normal levels.” That is versus cocaine, which increases it 350 percent, and methamphetamine, 1,200 percent. Says Ferguson, “Technology is not a drug.”

Nevertheless, journalists continue to insinuate that we are wired addicts. Forbes: “Digital Addiction: Should You Be Worried?” The BBC: “Is Internet Addiction a Growing Problem?” CNN: “How Much Screen Time Is Too Much?” They pose these headlines as questions because they don’t have the facts to back up their allegations. Let us note the irony of journalists crying addiction: news organizations themselves are dying to addict us. As with so many of the press’ charges against the net, it is that press that invented and perfected the crime.