Why Tech Moral Panic Matters

We should be more suspicious of monocausal theories of tech-driven alienation.

I intend to follow up my last post about the role of “atomization” in theories of fascism with a deeper dive into what I’m calling neo-atomization discourses: the distinct but overlapping public anxieties about loneliness, smartphones, and social media, which share the notion that we are suffering a social crisis of association, belonging and relational fulfillment. That will take some time I don’t have right now, but in the meantime I thought I would lay out some of the reasons this is worth thinking critically about. Yes, it has direct implications for politics, for whether we count contemporary right-wing authoritarianism as an updated form of fascism or whether we see any hopes for a left-wing response to it. But that’s not the only reason I find it interesting.

My working hypothesis is that neo-atomization discourses have formed a knot of moral panic about technology that is being used as a Trojan horse for social conservatism. In some quarters, like the drafters of Project 2025 or Michigan’s outrageous proposed ban on porn and VPNs—that revived social conservatism is simply the usual Christian-right suspects doing their thing. But even among Christian social conservatives, explicit appeals to God and natural order have been replaced by a pseudo-public health language of “epidemics,” “addiction,” and social breakdown. What’s perhaps even worse is the extent to which essentially the same ideas have conquered liberal discourse in places like the New York Times op-ed page; a liminal figure like Christine Emba stands as something of a bridge between the two.

Emba’s book Rethinking Sex is a perfect example of this: you don’t even have to say that porn is immoral and casual sex is damaging (though she does that, too); you can say technology is alienating; apps are disrupting our natural, healthy forms of relation and association, harming women and children; our sex and relationships are dehumanizing and socially corrosive because we basically treat them like ordering DoorDash. You can even throw in some superficial anti-capitalism to give it a progressive spin. I’m not sure people even realize how dominant these views have become among liberals and how, in the absence of true ethnographic curiosity about the forms of life the social web has created, authoritarian policy responses are starting to sound like bipartisan common sense. Uncritical, monocausal discourses about technology-driven alienation are the core of the knot, what makes it all sound reasonable, socially conscious, and even progressive. We poor, helpless automatons need to be saved from what technology is doing to us.

Obviously I’m not automatically endorsing a polar opposite position that everything about contemporary technological mediation is good and healthy, that we’re living in a golden age of sociality, etc. I’m not saying there’s no contemporary alienation or pathological forms of socialization—far from it. But we should at the very least be aware that these are old tropes in American history that have arisen several times in very similar forms, and that those theories had serious political and policy implications. The 1950s, in particular, were host to a very widespread alienation panic that colonized media discourse and liberal social science but was more an index of contemporary political anxieties than a description of social reality. (This was the origin of the theories of atomization that Dylan Riley and John Ganz recently discussed in their conversation about fascism and civil society, which informed “mass society” books like Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and social-science bestsellers like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and C. Wright Mills’ White Collar.) Theories of the masses as alienated, manipulated automatons infused liberalism with a heavy dose of German mandarin pessimism and technophobia, which in some cases blinkered its perception of what American society was actually like.

Here are just a few reasons contemporary tech panic needs to be pressed further than it often is: social scientific research about the “loneliness epidemic” is in fact highly contested, as are linkages of depression and poor mental health to phones and social media. “Porn addiction” is a made-up, faux-medical rebrand of classic right-wing evangelical ideology, and the evidence that porn is all somehow “increasingly” violent and misogynistic is flimsy enough to basically constitute a folk myth, no matter how many times it’s repeated in the New York Times.

Whenever the clouds of consensus gather, it’s worth at least asking: what is this causing us to miss that we should be seeing? Are we stuffing reality into recycled tropes instead of taking a genuine interest in what it’s like? Why—and what is that creating a permission structure for?

What if Americans Are the Opposite of "Atomized"?