The Roots of Modern Anger: Beyond the Smartphone Debate
In the contemporary discourse surrounding societal discontent, a pervasive and convenient narrative has emerged that places the blame squarely on our digital technologies—the internet, smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence. However, this perspective, while easy and lazy, is entirely wrong. This argument underpins Australia’s recent social media ban for young people, a policy driven by the deceptive claims of pop-psychology influencers like Jonathan Haidt and a moral panic manufactured by the Murdoch media. To truly understand the pervasive anxiety and anger in our society, we must look beyond the screens and examine the profound, real-world crises that have shaped the lived experience of an entire generation. These are not abstract digital phenomena but tangible, pressing issues that have created a deep-seated and justified sense of unease.
Consider the average 20-year-old in Australia. Born into the aftermath of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, they have witnessed a stark divergence between corporate profits and the lived reality of ordinary citizens, where the prospect of affordable housing has slipped ever further from their grasp. They have grown up in the shadow of unresolved conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and today are confronted with a daily dose of death and destruction from reporting in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and other conflict hotspots. Their most formative teenage years were spent in COVID lockdowns and Zoom schooling, while conspiracy theorists attempted to convince their parents that the pandemic was a hoax perpetuated by a global cabal. They have experienced more than a decade of the hottest years in human memory, likely living through natural disasters in their own areas, and yet have witnessed utter political inaction on the climate crisis. For older generations, these experiences have simply been endured for longer. The conclusion is inescapable: how could they, and we, not be anxious and angry, regardless of our use of smartphones and social media? As David Weinberger argued in 2004, the problem with an extraterrestrial-conspiracy mailing list isn’t that it’s an echo chamber; the problem is that it thinks there’s a conspiracy by extraterrestrials. Similarly, the problem with climate crisis denialists, anti-vaccination activists, and far-right extremists is their angry, extreme, and exclusionary views, not the technologies they use to express them. If they didn’t have X as a platform, they would find another.
To illustrate this, we can look at the phenomenon of pandemic conspiracy theories. The observation that pandemics like COVID-19 simply happen from time to time and that we can only prepare for the next one is entirely correct but deeply unsatisfying. It is far more convenient to comfort ourselves with fairytales of bioweapon factories, lab leaks, and depopulation agendas, as these provide a concrete target for our anxiety, anger, and action. Where our modern communication technologies do play a role is in making all information—both “real” and “fake”—easier to access and circulate globally and instantly. This contributes substantially to an information overload. We can readily access WHO reports, careful media coverage, and at the same time, the cherry-picked and misrepresented writings of conspiracy theorists. We are overloaded by this “infoglut,” and none of us has the time or subject-matter expertise to reliably distinguish verified facts from made-up stories. Ironically, the problem is the very opposite of the “echo chamber” and “filter bubble” fallacies. Our hyperconnectivity produces an information overload that we are ill-equipped to process, and deep down, we recognize this, which makes us anxious and even angry.
This anxiety drives a coping mechanism of reaching for easy explanations and ready-made scapegoats—elites, migrants, secret societies, or simply “others” who are not like us. This story is as old as humanity itself, though it now plays out across a different media landscape. Uncertainty produces rumors, which generate anxiety, which results in scapegoating and exclusion. The commercial imperatives of both mainstream and social media encourage this further, as they seek sustained audience engagement. Any attempt to deal with these destructive dynamics must focus first and foremost on the underlying causes of our anxiety and anger. As governments are beginning to find out, you cannot make young people less anxious by preventing them from communicating about their anxieties, but by paying serious attention to their actual concerns. At the same time, we must confront the challenges of hyperconnectivity and information overload more directly.
Central to this confrontation is improving literacy in all its forms. This includes news and digital media literacy to enable citizens to distinguish quality information from sources that seek to mislead and enrage them; societal and civic literacy to improve public understanding of government and governance; and scientific literacy to prevent people from falling prey to cherry-picking, whether on climate change or the effects of social media use. Together, these initiatives aim to save Australia from a trajectory of deeply polarized, winner-takes-all politics as seen in the United States. They redirect citizens toward an understanding of political debate oriented toward workable compromise between legitimate diverging opinions, even if consensus remains unattainable. Achieving this will not be a quick fix but a generational project. Australia can learn from Finland’s successful media literacy strategy and Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education, where education at all levels is central to this project.
Ultimately, a substantial boost in investment in education will be required just to avoid a further decline in media literacy levels across the population in the short term. The alternative is to grow only more anxious and ever more angry. The simple narrative that technology is to blame for our societal ills is a dangerous distraction from the complex, systemic issues that are the true cause of our collective distress. We must address the real anxieties of a generation facing economic insecurity, climate crisis, and geopolitical instability, and equip citizens with the critical thinking skills necessary to navigate a complex and hyperconnected world. Only by tackling these root causes, rather than banning the tools through which we communicate, can we hope to foster a more resilient and less angry society. The fix is not to break the mirror but to heal what is reflected in it.
