Overcomplicating Digital Skepticism
Where Convoluted Theories Go Wrong
Once again, I find myself forced to defend aspects of modernity that I don’t necessarily wholeheartedly endorse, because critics to whom I am sometimes sympathetic take their case too far.1 I take technology and modernity on a case-by-case basis. There are some wonderful technologies and some pernicious ones. Some of the aspects of modernity that I like are ones other people hate and vice versa.
I’ve written in the past that I’m something of a skeptic of digital technology, insofar as I buy Jonathan Haidt’s thesis about smartphones and teenagers, generally think social media has not been good for society, and believe the internet has had seriously negative consequences for society (although, the cat is out of the bag, and we must do the best we can to live with these consequences).2 But I’ve become convinced that these consequences are outweighed by the positive consequences of digital technology, and I’m generally quite pleased with digital finance, online commerce, and the incredible wealth of books and podcasts and other resources available to us at very low cost. The greatest collection of knowledge and learning in the history of the human race exists at our fingertips. That most people use it to make porn and memes is an indictment of human nature, not technology.
I’m more of a skeptic of AI, and I go out of my way to avoid using or interacting with it. That said, I’d rather have AI develop here in America than in China or Russia. I’m as skeptical about regulating AI as I am about the technology itself, as I’m not sure what the point of writing regulations about an emerging technology even is, other than to give people the illusion of safety in the way that a pacifier does for a baby. By the time any regulations are enacted, they will be obsolete.
I’m not very bullish on television, which I believe has had more negative consequences for society than is generally realized. On the other hand, I think nuclear power has only upsides, and nuclear weapons have been far more beneficial for the human race than most people give them credit for (i.e., by preventing wars that would have dwarfed the First and Second World Wars, and by ending the Second in a way that saved Japanese and American lives).
With that throat-clearing aside, I sometimes feel compelled to defend digital technology companies or other aspects of modern life against some critics with whom I am otherwise in some measure of agreement, because their criticisms veer into the grandiose or unconvincing. For example, the conspiracy theories about Big Tech mind-controlling people (or whatever) make the case for limiting screen time harder, not easer, because they are so ridiculous.3
Recently, I listened to an interview about Byung-Chul Han, a Korean-German philosopher I’d heard of, but about whom I didn’t know much. It was interesting. Some of what Han says sounds very timely for the twenty-first century. But I found other ideas of his so convoluted and complicated they cannot stand on their own feet.
I have this same problem sometimes with Matthew Crawford, who is mentioned in the interview. I’ve never read Shop Class and Soul Craft, but I’ve listened to many interviews with Crawford. He’s very intelligent and he makes a lot of arguments with which I agree (ex. that people need to put down the phone and do physical stuff in the physical world). But other arguments of his I find very unconvincing.
So, I’m not a techno-optimist (although I defended Marc Andreeson’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” from the tendentious claim that it’s fascistic). But too many critics of technology make arguments I find weak or silly.
In the case of Han, I don’t love advertising or stupid screens at the gas pump that blare annoying commercials, but they aren’t “exploiting” us. They aren’t even exploiting our attention. We can look away. You can set the pump to fill automatically and walk away. I agree that corporations are trying to monopolize our attention.4 But it’s pretty easy to ignore these attempts. Maybe people just aren’t trying hard enough.5
At some point in the interview, it’s claimed that most people today don’t realize the extent to which social media and smartphones have captured our attention, or shortened our attention spans. Quite frankly, this is simply false. Almost everybody I meet complains that they use their phone too much, or says something about needing to cut back on screen time, or actively tries to limit their screen time in order to avoid unhealthy consequences, or complains about a shorter attention span. The teenagers I know realize that too much screen time is bad for them. They just ignore that, the same way teenagers have always ignored warnings they know to be true in the case of drugs and alcohol.
Of course, there are communities and demographics that don’t realize (or don’t believe) that there’s anything wrong with ten hours a day of social media. But in 2025, they are the minority. Most people know (correctly) that too much phone time is unhealthy.
From here the interview went into a discussion of burnout, which is partially attributed to screen time, email, social media, etc. What I found frustrating with the interview, and what I find frustrating with so many criticisms of modern life in general, is that both the host (for whom I have a great deal of respect) and guest (who seems very intelligent and quite interesting) failed to follow this line of thinking to what seems to me to be the obvious and logical next step. It seems so obvious to me that I am surprised how little I see from any techno-skeptics on the subject.
The obvious and logical next step is to look at physical behavior, physical environment, and the human body. You might argue that this seems obvious to me because I am an intensely physical person, and because my profession requires me to think about the human body on a daily basis, and you would be right (although this line of thought was obvious to me before I became a personal trainer). Some of the most important sources of burnout are physical. Screen time (including television) is a factor, but so is the lack of what screen time replaces, namely sleep and physical exercise.
By some metrics, Americans are sleeping twenty-five percent less on average than we were one hundred years ago. If that’s true, it could be the single most important factor in widespread burnout. More important than anything we are doing at the office or on our phones. Sleep is probably the most-neglected area of human health for many people, and near-constant, low-level under-sleeping for any sustained period of time will eventually cause people to feel overwhelmed and mildly depressed.
Physical exercise, poor diet, and lack of time outside are also factors. I don’t believe we need to resort to extreme theories about lack of choice or “self-exploitation” (checking email at midnight) or “positive violence” (subjecting oneself to email or advertising) to reach the obvious conclusion that most Americans would feel better if they spent more time away from screens and digital devices, went outside more, exercised more, ate better, and slept more. In my view, while the digital world poses real dangers to children and adults, one of the most-overlooked dangers is that it pulls us out of our physical bodies and out of the physical world.6
To this we might add in-person socializing. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff noted that the teenager girls most immune to (not perfectly immune, but better able to handle) high doses of screen time were the ones who also spent the most time interacting with peers and friends in the physical world. Human beings are social creatures and social media is a poor substitute to real connection. In other words, the more friends you have in the real world, the less you will find yourself overwhelmed by digital life.
Why The Convoluted Theories?
Why do people underemphasize the physical and overemphasize the ephemeral in discussions about technology? Because intelligent people naturally are drawn to certain sorts of explanations.7 Which is not the same thing as saying that intelligent people are always correct in how they perceive the world. Everyone emphasizes that in which they specialize, or that at which they are good, or that in which they have a particular interest. The strong emphasize the importance of strength. The intelligent the importance of intelligence. Etc.
It is natural for each of us to emphasize our comparative advantage, but it is also worth pointing out that something else is at work. Intelligent people, or people who like to think of themselves as intelligent, will often prefer complicated or convoluted theories, because these theories require more mental effort and are more stimulating than simpler alternatives. They are more engaging. More interesting.
But that doesn’t mean they are correct. Simpler theories often sound less intelligent. Theories which even a child could understand strike us as unappealing, in part because we fear we will be thought of as children if we accept them. But F=ma is both simple and true, whereas 42F+64=8m-13a23 is both complicated and meaningless. Only one of those two equations describes something about the world.
Anyone who has worked in a technical field can tell you that the more elaborate your machine, the more potential for something to go wrong. The most robust and long-lasting inventions are the ones which minimize their potential for failure, primarily by being as simple as possible. Occam’s Razor isn’t a universal natural law. But it does work as a heuristic because it approaches very close to an important probabilistic insight: the more complicated a theory is, the more likely it is to be false in some way, and the less complicated a theory is, the more likely it is to be closer to the truth, because complications are fragile and fragilities tend not to survive over time.
Perhaps this seems like a digression, but it is important to understand. It’s long been understood that intelligent people are naturally drawn to systems of government in which power tends to accrue to those who are intelligent, which isn’t simply self-interest (although self-interest plays a role), but also has to do with the fact that intelligent people often believe they know better than other people and should therefore be running things.8 They genuinely believe the world would be better for everyone if smart people ran it.
A similar thing is true for theories. Intelligent people will often be drawn to almost any explanation that purports to explain the world, no matter how abstruse, except for the obvious and banal. Even if the obvious and banal theory is correct. Especially if the explanation in question allows one to imagine one is superior to the plebeian majority who don’t understand “how things really work” and imagine that nothing is going on beneath the surface.
None of which is to say that there is anything wrong with intelligence. Intelligent people are also capable of being discerning and perceptive. Unintelligent people have their own particular follies to which they are prone.
Reality is usually more mundane than we give it credit for, and so those with excess brain power need to find some outlet – an outlet which often takes the form of generating overcomplicated theories. Which is one reason so many critics of digital technology overcomplicate their criticisms. Instead of saying, “Strong evidence suggests that the dramatic rise in depression for teenager girls correlates exactly with the widespread adoption of smartphones by high schoolers,” they say, “Auto-exploitation and positive violence combine to create a system in which most people don’t even realize how little freedom they have.”
Responsibility:
Finally, the elephant in the room for why overcomplicated theories of digital skepticism take hold is that they absolve us of responsibility for our own behavior. Which is nice, because none of us like to believe that anything is our fault. If the algorithms hacked our attention spans, then maybe we can blame FanDuel for the fact that we lost fifty thousand dollars betting on the Cleveland Browns and maybe if we sue FanDuel we can win damages.9
But honest critics of digital media and modern behavior will admit that “nobody is forcing” us to share everything about our lives on social media. We do that to ourselves. It would be nice to believe that we are being forced into doing it, because “everybody else is,” but that isn’t true. It isn’t true that everybody else is doing it and it isn’t true that we are being forced.
Typically, when people say that something is impossible, they mean that they don’t want to deal with the consequences which come along with doing it.10 When they say that they have no choice but to do it, they mean that they don’t want to deal with the consequences of not doing it. When they say that something is too hard, they mean that they don’t want to accept the tradeoffs which come with it.
Which is totally fine, as long as we’re honest. I find that quite a lot of people are perfectly honest with me about how they’d love to be in shape, but they like drinking too much and they aren’t going to give it up, or how they’d love to be better at some hobby, but they aren’t willing to devote the time it takes to improving. Most people are perfectly capable of being rational and making unemotional decisions like this. They’d like to be in good shape. But they don’t want to run sixty miles a week and they don’t want to give up French fries. And this is perfectly fine.
It’s only when we are presented with convoluted theories about technology stealing our agency that we stop talking about tradeoffs and start talking about exploitation.
My critics contend that when I talk about responsibility, I am telling people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps (or that what is easy for me is more difficult for other people). But in many cases, we are talking about taking actions which are “so easy a caveman could do it,” as the saying goes. I have a great deal of respect for people who struggle at something but put in good faith effort, and I think anyone who knows me in my daily profession will corroborate that statement. But quite frankly, I am not going to be sympathetic to people who complain about something, but will not lift a finger to even try doing anything about it.11 And I’m not alone.
And that is where I see a lot of techno-skepticism going. It gives us excuses. It’s easier to claim we’re subconsciously self-exploiting than it is to take the simple actions of turning off our phones before going to bed (because, you know, then you’d have to go to the trouble of turning it on again when you wake up in the morning). Overcomplicated theories flatter our intellectual egos and give us excuses for failing to admit that we don’t want to accept tradeoffs. But they fail to explain the world and they fail to provide us with solutions to the problems which face us.
While drafting this, I read After Virtue. I enjoyed it, and Alasdair MacIntyre was a deep thinker whose work I find compelling. But there are large portions that I just didn’t find convincing, and I think MacIntyre was entirely wrong in his economics. Similarly, my sharpest departure from many technology critics occurs on economic issues.
Which is all we can ever do. There will always be problems in the world and all we can do is try our best to make them a little better and learn to live with anything we can’t change.
In general, I am always going to be unsympathetic to any theory which establishes grand and convoluted narratives (which often sound quite intelligent) to explain that human beings are being manipulated by powerful forces beyond our control. We aren’t, even if it sounds smart to say that we are.
But if you don’t pay to use something, I don’t see the point in complaining about platforms relying on advertising to pay the bills. Companies aren’t just supposed to give us stuff for free out of the goodness of their hearts (although some people seem to think they should). I’ve been a harsh critic of the advertising model as compared with the subscription model (which is why I’m on Substack), but the problem isn’t corporations. The problem is consumers expecting to receive content or internet services without having to pay a dime.
This is very often my complaint. The idea that by making it easy for us to do something, companies are forcing us to do that thing, is so tremendously foolish I can’t take it seriously. Some critics contend that I’m telling people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but if we are talking about something as simple as looking away from the screen at the gas station, almost every adult is perfectly capable of doing this without any trouble. Or, to take another popular claim, it isn’t “impossible” to visit a restaurant without any preset expectations created by the Yelp reviews you read. Just don’t read the Yelp reviews.
Which leads to an interesting phenomenon: the “very-online” techno-skeptic. This is the person who has overdosed on Reddit and group-chats and forums for so long they become more and more hyperbolic in their grand theories about the evils of technology, to the point where they begin to demonstrate obvious symptoms of a need to “touch grass.”
Sometimes because the athletes made fun of them in high school, and therefore they will naturally be biased against anything that is overly physical. If F-students could be good football players, there can’t have been anything all that important or special about physicality, you know.
Intelligent people also sometimes worship power, as George Orwell and Lord Acton knew.
Is gambling an addiction? Yes, for some people. So is smoking, and some people quit smoking cold turkey. Is social media an addiction? Are some people addicted to their phones? Depends on how we define addiction, but if a psychological dependency counts as an addiction, then it is possible to be addicted to smartphones and social media. But are either of those more addictive than alcohol or cigarettes? Of course not.
If you will allow me to indulge a quick example close to my heart, the vast majority of people who say they couldn’t run another step, or who say that they ran until they couldn’t stand up, mean that they didn’t want to run another step, because it hurt “too much.” But the brain throws up extreme fatigue and pain so far in advance of actual physical collapse that most people will be unable to come anywhere close to physical collapse (and if they do, they will suffer the consequences long after they have stopped running). To actually run to the point of physical collapse, you have to have passed through so many stages of pain and suffering that most people will throw in the towel long before they ever arrive at that point.
I criticize AI. So I don’t use AI. For this article, I actually went to Google’s AI tab and typed in a search. The result was terrible and I’m resolved to not try that again. I criticize television. So I don’t watch television unless I am visiting someone who is watching television. I criticize social media. So I spend less than one hour a week on social media (and wouldn’t spend any if having a writing career didn’t require using social media).