My 2024 Pop Psych Hateread

I'm on Youtube now!

Long-time readers know I like to pick at least one pop psychology book per year to critically think way too hard about. I love analyzing popular titles because I think they tell us so much more about the zeitgeist — what people are actually thinking/feeling/doing — than a niche academic text ever could.

Last year it was Dopamine Nation, and the year before that was ADHD 2.0. This year (as mentioned in dopamine dispatch #5), it’s Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis, and How to Restore Our Sanity, and it is coming to you in the form of a video essay on youtube dot com.

If we were to think about tech anxiety as a subgenre of pop psychology nonfiction (which I do), I would argue that Nicholas Kardaras’ Digital Madness ran shrieking through the conservative podcast circuit in 2022 so Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation could walk calmly into the mainstream in 2024. Kardaras has a very similar thesis to Haidt — the internet is making young people mentally ill (and possibly trans) — but he takes it way, way far out into conspiracy land, where Haidt scaled it back and made it respectable for the centrists.

Digital Madness makes some ridiculous claims: mental illness is on the rise in the 21st century because we’re ‘still genetically paleo’, social media gave our entire society borderline personality disorder, and the transhumanist billionaires want to addict us all to the internet so they can trap us in the metaverse, invent the singularity, and live forever.

Rhetorically, Kardaras has one trick: claiming to be one of the ‘rational, reasonable people,’ and trying to make his opponents look crazy. I started out thinking I was going to rationally debunk all his claims, but then I realized that none of this is really about rationality at all.

As I say in the video, reason bros who rely on the fear of madness to make their arguments aren’t actually interested in reason — they’re just trying to convince people with rational vibes. I’ve found myself growing weary of debunking, to be honest — it’s tedious, and I think it rarely changes anyone’s mind in a ‘vibeocracy’ anyway. So instead I focused on what we could learn from the book’s political feelings: nostalgia, disgust, and dislocation. 

Anyway, I am starting from scratch on Youtube (1 subscriber so far!), so I would love if like 20% of the 11,000 of you who get my emails would christen the channel with your hallowed attention. There’s a bunch of stuff in there that should probably be another video entirely, but I was trying to keep it succinct, so let me know what possible threads you’d be interested in following with me, maybe I will work it into the editorial plan! The next one is gonna be about all those weird AI-generated ads for ADHD types that I see everywhere I go online…