Escaping the Simulation

Social media addiction, algorithms, and how to reclaim our agency.

Perhaps more than anything else, addiction is a defining feature of contemporary American life.

This is the conclusion of a growing chorus of psychiatrists and public intellectuals. Americans are addicted to all kinds of substances and activities, from the minor and seemingly mundane to the vast and life-wrecking. Whether gorging on processed foods, gambling on cryptocurrencies and sporting events, or scrolling through short videos and political screeds, many of us find ourselves fighting—and often losing—a never-ending battle to rein in our compulsions.

Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than on today’s highly addictive social media platforms, where an endless stream of digital dopamine keeps us hooked. Today’s most popular social media platforms offer access to a “free” all-you-can-eat buffet of content that outshines the often-dull reality around us. As a result of mostly ad-based revenue models, social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X, have increasingly pivoted from networks built around real-life connections to a firehose of content from strangers and bots alike meant to capture and sell our attention. To perfect this approach, they now employ highly advanced algorithms to surveil our every tap, click, and swipe, learning exactly what keeps us glued to our screens.

The result is that we have gotten hooked on a “hyperreal” version of the world. One that isn’t real yet is somehow more vivid, colorful, and immediate than reality itself. One in which the loudest and most extreme voices reap the greatest rewards, while obvious virtues like common sense, decency, and empathy struggle to break through. One that leaves us temporarily satiated with entertainment but malnourished of meaning.

Addiction isn’t simply a threat to our physical or mental health; at its core, it is a direct assault on our capacity for agency and self-control. In the mid-twentieth century, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner famously illustrated this dynamic with pigeons. By using addictive stimulus-reward feedback loops, he got them to peck a lever endlessly, demonstrating that instant gratification can override a creature’s natural habits and instincts. The contemporary cultural critic Gurwinder Bhogal argues that Skinner’s key insight—that an animal’s behavior can be controlled by manipulating the incentives of its environment—applies just as much to humans, especially when it comes to modern social media.

Earlier iterations of social media felt more like simple digital mirrors of our everyday lives—clunky at times but endearing, filled with trivial updates from friends and family. But gradually, the platforms have shifted their focus from real-life people we know to larger-than-life influencers we do not. Algorithms now decide what we see and what we don’t, modeling our deepest proclivities to strike at our psychological weak points—our hopes, our fears, and our insecurities. In an echo of Skinner’s experiments, these platforms employ the powerful rewards of entertainment, stimulation, and social validation to “gamify” our very existence with the result of altering our behavior to keep us returning for more.

Pushed to its logical extreme, modern social media has transformed into an all-consuming addiction machine—call it the “Simulation”—that rearranges our experience of reality around whatever drives our engagement and, in turn, generates ad revenue from our attention.

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The Simulation’s erosion of our agency goes beyond the simple trappings of addiction. The algorithms themselves place individuals in unconventional, digitally mediated networks, allowing the companies that operate them to manipulate the public as they see fit. By filtering the flow of information in ways that we typically do not know or understand, a handful of corporations and the people who command them exert unprecedented influence over our perceptions, beliefs, and impressions of each other.

What began as a casual and sometimes charming social experience has morphed into a form of subtle manipulation that steadily chips away at our agency.

Unlike many other forms of addiction, the Simulation touches just about all of us—young and old, rich and poor alike. More than seven in ten Americans use social media; among the youngest Americans (teenagers and 18-29 year-olds), that number climbs to more than nine in ten. The average American checks their phone more than 150 times daily and spends upwards of two hours per day using social media—a figure that balloons to nearly five hours among today’s teens.

As social media platforms have swallowed ever-larger swaths of our individual and collective attention, they have generated billions of dollars in advertising revenue for the massive corporations that created them. But they have increasingly translated this attentional and financial capital into political capital. Observers have highlighted the obvious symbolism of social media executives sitting in front of the incoming president’s own cabinet at his recent inauguration, but nothing showcases the power of the newfound political power of Silicon Valley better than the story of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Last year after the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved a bipartisan measure to protect children from online harm, protect their privacy, and curb social media’s addictive influence on its youngest users in a 91-to-3 vote, social media firms led primarily by Mark Zuckerberg and Meta poured millions into a lobbying effort that killed the bill in the House.

The rise of the Simulation is the latest chapter in an ongoing and familiar story of American decline. Over thirty years ago, the cultural critic Christopher Lasch warned that the elite in Western societies had largely “withdrawn from common life,” choosing instead to dwell in enclaves that prize hyper-individualism, ruthless meritocracy, and unfettered commodification. The ensuing shift in values and investment has gutted traditional community-rooted institutions—from religious organizations to civic groups to local businesses—leaving ordinary people socially isolated, economically precarious, and physically and mentally unwell. At a moment where Americans are now choosing to spend less time together than at any other point in recorded history, young Americans are reporting higher levels of anxiety and depression than ever before, with suicide now being the second-leading cause of death among people ages 10-24.

In 1988, the scholars Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman argued that traditional mass media effectively “manufactured consent” by weaving together uniform narratives that served, intentionally or not, to reinforce the status quo. This top-down mode of communication and consensus-building was possible in an era where only a handful of highly-trusted news outlets could disproportionately shape public opinion.

But the internet and social media shattered Chomsky and Herman’s concentrated model of control, ushering in an era of information superabundance that has undermined the prospect of a shared reality. Instead, the Simulation bombards the public with a multitude of conflicting storylines—a process that precludes possibilities for reaching consensus and might be better described as “manufacturing dissent.” What began as a supposedly democratized system for free expression has devolved into a multiverse of competing truth claims, each propagated in its own algorithmic silo. In this information environment, confusion reigns supreme: when no one knows who or what to believe, anyone can be made to believe anything.

The result is an America divided, disoriented, and disempowered. Although the tools have changed throughout the years, the underlying effect remains the same: elites are able to use their monopolies over our attention and control over the flow of information to influence the public.

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The path we’re on now is the path of least resistance: a slow slide into deepening digital dependency, where we continue to cede control of our attention and our autonomy to the Simulation and the mysterious algorithms that power it. Especially for younger Americans raised entirely within this environment, our feeds—and our minds—become flooded with propaganda and AI-generated sludge, crippling our capacity for independent thought, siloing us in isolated and warring tribes, and making it impossible to tell fact from fiction. The phenomenon of “enshittification” (in which online platforms become overrun with sensational junk) metastasizes from the internet to every corner of life—corroding our schools, our workplaces, and even our families at times.

Alternatively, there’s a path where we recognize the Simulation for what it is—a failed social experiment in addictive technology—and wake up to its pervasive influence. In this future, we do not leave the internet, but we do learn to live with it.

Armed with an understanding of how the Simulation hooks and manipulates us, we become capable of recognizing and naming exploitative algorithms, online propaganda, and AI-generated fabrications. We adopt new social norms and set new boundaries that prioritize autonomy and authenticity over digital spectacle, using technology to enrich our lives rather than control us. We learn to treat the Simulation like an addictive substance that we can handle responsibly or even abstain from entirely, perhaps embracing a “Dry January”-style approach to social media. We spend more of our time online in non-addictive spaces (group chats, longform shows and podcasts, newsletters, etc.) and take advantage of new tools that give us more control over our attention.

In short, we put ourselves back in the driver’s seat, reclaiming our individual agency from addictive social media platforms.

The moment is ripe for a new cultural movement to reclaim our humanity from the clutches of the Simulation—one that addresses the individual, societal, and spiritual dimensions of this crisis. Such a movement demands new leadership at every level of society. Cultural figures and influencers must use their platforms to raise awareness of this crisis, exposing the harms of excessive social media use and empowering us with solutions and norms we can adopt in our own lives. Entrepreneurs and community leaders can help build new technologies, business models, and “third places” where we can spend our time free from exploitation and addiction-driven incentive structures. Political leaders should enact regulatory standards that give Americans more control over their data and autonomy while online. Finally, and most importantly, each of us must embrace the personal discipline needed to put ourselves back in control of our lives.

The choice is clear: reclaim our individual agency and dignity from the Simulation or watch society get hollowed out by it.

Hugh Jones and Hannah Koizumi are the co-directors of Civic Attention, an organization fighting against the exploitation of our individual and collective attention in the digital age. Subscribe to Civic Attention here on Substack.