After being forced to quit social media, political journalist Rafael Behr was able to see its corrosive influence clearly. How can we repair the damage caused by a system that plays on our worst impulses?
n the first weeks of my convalescence I developed a capacity for time travel. I had to spend a lot of time in bed and, floating on the edge of wakefulness, half-conscious, I discovered I could explore scenes from my past in exquisite detail. I wondered if it was a side effect of my various medications and whether it would be permanent. It was almost hallucinogenic and not unpleasant.
I had taken time away from my phone before, on holidays, and found it difficult in much the same way that I had once found it hard to quit smoking. There is the same restlessness, the same twitchiness in the hands bereft of something to hold, the same feeling of being stalked by an absence. The concept of an “attention economy” was coined before the internet wrote it into the business model of a multi-trillion-dollar industry. It was first theorised in the 1970s by computer scientist and psychologist Herbert A Simon. As he put it:
Some of the most sophisticated technologies developed by our species have been made subordinate to the primitive side of our nature. Then we wired that machinery up to the heart of democracy. Repetitive troglodyte clicking is a feature, not a bug, in the system of politics online.
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