About a year ago I had cataract surgery, which these days means replacing the natural lens in the eye with an artificial one. Curious about what happens to the old lens, I looked up the details of the process. It turns out that one of the most common procedures uses an ultrasonic probe to emulsify the old lens, turning a highly structured and durable object that served me well for 70 years into a liquefied mess that was easily removed.
If you're wondering what this has to do with the internet and society, be patient.
A recent report in The Dispatch by Yascha Mounk describes the results of an analysis by Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch of data from a large Understanding America survey of more than 14,000 respondents. Psychologists have standardized certain personality traits as being fairly easy to assess in surveys and also predictive of how well people do in society. Among these traits are conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism. People who are conscientious make good citizens and employees: they are "organized, responsible, and hardworking." Extraversion makes for better social skills and community involvement, while neuroticism indicates a trend toward anxiety and depression.
Burn-Murdoch divided up the results by age categories, with the youngest being 16 to 39, and compared the rates of these traits to what prevailed in the full population in 2014, less than ten years ago. The results are shocking.
Everybody (16-39, 40-59, and 60+) has declined in extraversion from the 50th to the 40th percentile, although by only ten percentile points out of 100. (If a number is unchanged from 2014, the results would be 50th percentile today). But in neuroticism, those under 40, who were already in the 60th percentile in 2014, have now zoomed up to the 70th. Lots of young neurotics out there. And they have distinguished themselves even more in the categories of agreeableness (declining from 45 to 35) and most of all, in conscientiousness. From a relatively good 47th percentile or so in 2014, the younger set have plummeted to an abysmal 28th percentile of conscientiousness in less than a decade.
When the results of conscientiousness are broken down into their constituent parts, it gets even worse. Starting about 2016, the 16-39 group shows jumps in positive responses to "is easily distracted" and "can be careless."
If the survey was restricted to teenagers, you would expect such results, although not necessarily this big. But we're talking about people in their prime earning years too, twenty- to forty-year-olds.
Mounk ascribes most of these disastrous changes to influences traceable to the Internet, and specifically, social media. He contrasts the ballyhoo and wild optimism that greeted various Internet-based developments such as online dating and worldwide free phone and Zoom calls with the reality of cyberbullying, trolling, cancel culture, and the mob psychology on steroids that the Internet provides fertile soil for.
Now for the emulsion part. An emulsion takes something that tends to keep its integrity—such as a blob of oil in water or the natural lens of an eye—and breaks it up into individual pieces that are surrounded by a foreign agent. In the case of mayonnaise, the oil used is separated into tiny drops surrounded by water. Oil doesn't naturally mix with water, but when an emulsifier is used (the lecithin in egg yolk, in this case), it reduces surface tension and breaks up the oil into tiny droplets.
That's fine in the case of mayonnaise. But in the case of a society, surrounding each individual with a foreign film of Internet-mediated software that passes through firms interested not primarily in the good of society, but in making a profit, all kinds of pernicious effects can happen.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with making money, so this is not a diatribe against big tech as such. But in the case of cigarettes, when a popular habit that made the tobacco companies rich was shown to have hidden dangers, it took a lot of political will and persistence to change things so that at least the dangers were known to anyone who picks up a pack of cigarettes.
Mounk thinks it may be too late to do much about the social and psychological harms caused by the Internet, but we are still at the early stage of adoption when it comes to generative artificial intelligence (AI). I tend not to make such a sharp distinction between the way the Internet is currently used and what difference the widespread deployment of free software such as chatGPT will make. For decades, the tech companies have been using what amounts to AI systems to addict people to their social media services and to profit from political polarization. So as AI becomes more commonplace it will be a change only in degree, not necessarily in kind.
AI or no, we have had plenty of time already to see the pernicious results among young people of interacting with other humans mainly through the mediation of mobile phones. It's not good. Just as man does not live by bread alone, people aren't intended to interact by smartphone alone. If they do, they get less conscientious, more neurotic, more isolated and lonely, and more easily distracted and error-prone. They also find it increasingly difficult to follow any line of reasoning of more than one step.
Several states have recently passed laws restricting the use of smartphones in K-12 education. This is a controversial but ultimately beneficial step in the right direction, although it will take a while to see how seriously individual school districts take it and whether it makes much of a difference in how young people think and act. For those of you who believe in the devil, I'm pretty sure he is delighted to see that society is breaking up into isolated individuals who can communicate only through the foreign agent of the Internet, rather than being fully present—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—to the Other.
Perhaps warnings like these will help us realize how bad things have become, and what we need to do to stop them from getting any worse. In the meantime, enjoy your mayonnaise.
Sources: John Burn-Murdoch's article "How We Got the Internet All Wrong" appeared in The Dispatch on Aug. 12, 2025 at https://thedispatch.com/article/social-media-children-dating-neurotic/. I also referred to the survey on which it was based at https://uasdata.usc.edu/index.php.
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