The right message, but a decade late

Somewhere in the multiverse, the year is 2012. Barack Obama’s reelection campaign is in full swing, Disney’s Marvel films are just beginning to transform pop culture, and the Together for the Gospel conference is about to pull in record numbers of evangelicals from all walks of life. Remember those days?

Everything looks quite familiar to someone from our own dimension, when suddenly a variation in the timeline emerges. The surgeon general of the United States has just issued a historic statement about the mental health dangers of the most popular emerging technology of the 21st century—social media. Equipped with early but prescient research about the effects of nonstop digital exposure, particularly on plastic adolescent brains, the American government laid out a persuasive and urgent case for why smartphones and apps pose a genuine threat to the well-being of preteens and teens.

Suspicious that their perpetually neck-tilted teens are being shaped in mysterious but real ways by likes, favs, and selfies, millions of American parents respond to this landmark report. Many decide that they will withhold smartphones and tablets until their children are more mature. Some do away with them altogether. Still others decide to take a proactive approach, allowing social media and smartphone participation but setting up strict guidelines—like time limits and no-phones-in-bed rules.

The strategies are diverse, but a groundswell of concern about digital addiction and teen mental health soon dominates cultural conversation, putting pressure on Washington to legislate and keep Silicon Valley accountable. In an often-polarized political landscape, blue and red Americans manage to find common cause on behalf of their and their family’s mental health, and the result is a moment of genuine solidarity that mitigates technopoly and empowers a turnaround for the emotional and mental trajectory of career-embarking millennials and the coming-of-age Gen Z.

Alas, this story is not our story. We are not living in the Obama years. This is 2023.

The surgeon general’s report has instead just arrived, and what’s remarkable about it is just how unremarkable it is. Its observations of correlation between digital addiction and depression come across not as a landmark but as painfully obvious. Its warnings about the pseudo-community of social media come years after the first crop of books and studies strongly suggested that uber-connected youth were dangerously isolated and insecure. In short, there is hardly anything in the report that sheds real light on the adolescent mental health crisis. Like a professional sports league admitting a blown call the day after the big game, the federal government merely acknowledged what just about everyone else seemed to figure out a while ago.

This isn’t to suggest the report is irrelevant. A federal advisory could be significant for many families and schools in thinking through practical measures. It’s also somewhat easier now to imagine a bipartisan policy response, from mandated consumer disclaimers (imagine smartphone boxes tattooed with a black and white Surgeon General’s Warning) to more robust measures, like age verification requirements. The days of parents handing their 12-year-olds the keys to the digital kingdom and then checking out feel numbered.

But is it too little, too late? Perhaps. We are now 15 years removed from the debut of the iPhone and nearly 20 years removed from that fateful day in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm. In that span of time, the emotional health of an entire generation of Americans has bottomed out, misinformation and polarization have routed reasonableness, sexting and revenge porn are now rites of passage, and a gender dysphoria contagion has taken hold of many communities. All of these trends have been featured in major media outlets. All of them are traceable, at least in part, to the technological revolutions of the early and mid-2000s.

What took our political institutions so long to respond? There are many reasons. They were intimidated by Big Tech. Their instincts were jaundiced by a tribalism that interpreted all technology debates through a free speech/media bias grid. But more importantly, many of our institutions, political and otherwise, are deeply committed to the same metanarrative that weaponizes and pornifies our technology: the metanarrative that being human is a problem we must overcome. It’s the same anti-human spirit that shows up in both declining fertility rates and generative AI, in both the transgender revolution and the abuses of factory laborers.

The triumph of the anti-human spirit is why, instead of a decade of bipartisan efforts to rein in the mind-altering drug that is the social internet, a decade of despair, dysphoria, and disinformation has been capped off by a surgeon general’s advisory that is as serious as it is late. Until Christians can rediscover and rearticulate the wisdom that pushes us back toward the world of the physical and embodied, we are likely to watch our leaders try to stitch up what remains of the body politic.