The Backlash Against the Screen

Commentary

Anyone who has lived through the last several decades of technological revolution has been witness to a remarkable shift in public opinion. The backlash against the screen is hitting new heights as schools ban smartphones and unplug the expensive laptops that were supposed to save the world. It is pretty obvious at this point that this entire digital apparatus had the reverse effect, downgrading scores, reducing attention span, and spreading social alienation without precedent.

We all know this now. Too many times I’ve encountered a twenty-something who was in school during the lockdown years, and otherwise was educated in the new age of digital everything, who can barely look you in the eyes, barely form coherent sentences, has almost no curiosity about anything, and cannot think their way through basic issues of history, science, language, or much of anything beyond viral videos on TikTok.

Is this the least educated and least well-formed generation in all modern history? One could make that argument without much fear of contradiction with available evidence. Digital media is the scapegoat and probably correctly so. Parents trusted too much. Schools and teachers outsourced too much. The adults surrendered their jobs to tech titans who betrayed them.

There is this funny movie from 1979 starring Steve Martin. It’s called “The Jerk.” He is raised in a poor rural area, gets sent to the city, and accidentally stumbles on a new innovation that allows people to take their glasses off with a little handle on the nose bridge. An entrepreneur finds the invention intriguing and invests. He gives Martin/Jerk royalties from sales.

The Jerk, who becomes mega-rich, immediately starts living the high life with fancy restaurants, high-end clothing, a new mansion, and insufferable manners to back it up.

Then fortunes change when, as it turns out, the new glasses cause people to go cross-eyed. The victims litigate and the entire enterprise goes belly up, leaving The Jerk destitute once again.

It’s an allegory drawn from the classic stories of the rags-to-riches-back-again genre. It’s “Wolf of Wall Street” and “Scarface.” It might offer lessons in the strange way we are drawn to new and untested innovations and gizmos that turn out later to have unanticipated side effects.

This seems to be the story of universal digital media. I cannot say that I was among the wise who saw the dangers. On the contrary. I was thrilled with every new tool. My first look at iPhone 1.0 nearly changed my life. I wrote entire books celebrating the migration to the cloud. To be sure, I was not entirely wrong but I was also blind to the downside.

AI represents a dramatic new turn, mostly toward the dark side. A tool that replaces thinking itself is bound to be a danger at some level to human society. That which machines do invariably causes skills to atrophy in every area. This is not entirely regrettable when it comes to busting rocks, plowing land, or sewing clothes. But you can take that idea too far. Replacing intelligence with machines takes us to a new realm.

Looking back, it’s not entirely clear why anyone thought that sticking a Chromebook in a kid’s hands would cause him to be smarter. Sure, it provides more access to information streams. We should have known from the pathetic history of television that the medium itself would be subject to an inexorable decline in quality. This is exactly what happened.

The impact on thinking is more dramatic. There is no real shortcut to training the human mind. It requires time, work, memorization, logical puzzles, the formation of a clarity of mind, a narrative of history, deep reading of the Classics, mastery over tools like language, math, and science, plus the development of technical facility in reading and otherwise.

The trouble with digital media is that it tempts one to believe that the human person can bypass all that, just get the visual summary, develop the right poses and credentials, and you are good to go. I began to notice this happening in 2005 as meme culture took hold. People were rallying around thinkers and ideas with no evidence that they had ever actually read them.

Today, matters are wholly worse. The technologies are tempting an entire generation to believe that they can do without hard intellectual work at all, and the systems of education and credentialing are allowing them to get away with it.

The moment of truth comes in the professional workforce when core thinking skills that have long been taken for granted seem strangely missing. We end up depending entirely on unusual savants or people over the age of 50 who still seem to have a head on their shoulders.

We are all scrambling these days to find a way to detoxify our minds from dependence on digital summaries and AI methods, even as the companies behind these tools are insisting on building larger and more invasive data centers and deploying eminent domain to get the resources they need.

Meanwhile, AI has been met with enormous public opposition. At graduation ceremonies this year, the new protocol among students was to boo and jeer speakers who celebrate the AI revolution. These are kids who were locked in their homes for disease control, forced onto Zoom calls, and told that machines would solve all their problems. Now they face a job marketplace that is freezing them out and replacing them with gizmos hardly anyone understands.

It seems highly dangerous to the human project itself.

We are relearning an ancient truth: the human mind is not a hard drive to be filled with data dumps. It is a muscle that grows through resistance. Real education demands friction. Screens offer the illusion of mastery while delivering passivity. You scroll, you watch, you “like.” You rarely wrestle, retain, or create.

This revolt is visceral. Parents pulling kids from screens, schools installing phone lockers, universities rediscovering the value of handwritten exams are survival instincts kicking in. The pandemic response accelerated the folly.

The result has been called intellectual obesity: vast access and zero digestion. Students submit AI-crafted essays they barely understand. Coders lean on autocomplete until they can’t debug simple logic. Creativity atrophies into prompt engineering. We risk producing a society of elegant parrots, fluent in borrowed syntax but empty of original thought.

The path forward requires deliberate refusal. Parents must reclaim authority over devices. Educators must prioritize the physical book, the Socratic dialogue, and the quiet library hour.

Companies should face market accountability for addictive design. And individuals—especially those of us who once cheered every upgrade—must practice digital minimalism. Leave the phone in another room. Turn off your haptics. Try what I’m trying: move the phone to black and white to make it as boring as possible while turning off all notifications.

Read deeply. Write by hand. Talk to strangers. Host dinner parties for extended conversation. Train for socialization skills. Rebuild the neural pathways that screens have worn smooth.

The human project has always depended on cultivated minds. We surrendered too much to the glow. The machines will keep advancing, but humanity’s edge lies in what they cannot replicate: the spark of struggle, the depth of presence, the stubborn refusal to outsource our souls.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.