Those who pay attention to our environmental issues and are old enough will probably remember the Love Canal disaster of the 1970s: A Niagara Falls, New York, neighborhood had been built on top of 21,000 tons of toxic industrial waste, and leaking chemicals caused high rates of cancer, miscarriages, and birth defects. It led to forced federal evacuations and prompted the creation of EPA’s Superfund program to remediate toxic wastes.
Sadly, the online environment populated by today’s youth, sometimes as young as grade schoolers, has grown as polluted – by intellectual, not chemical, waste. By allowing this to occur, we are betraying entire generations, failing our duty of care.
Young people come of online age swimming in an endless stream of YouTube and TikTok videos and websites that command their attention and indoctrinate them with ideas that often are not benign. The mass and social media bombard them with the dire predictions of a climate apocalypse. They are offered countless reasons to consider themselves helpless casualties of history. Artificial Intelligence, they are told, will rob them of an economic future by making traditional jobs obsolete. “Influencer” has somehow become a status job despite its utter emptiness. And a socially “just” society demands that young’uns abandon aspirations of achievement or the demonstration of merit, lest they become the oppressors.
Pure and simple, youth are exhorted every day to follow somebody else’s beliefs, standards, and ideologies. Their online diet is not about learning, reasoning, questioning and skepticism, but about conformance and fear. They are being proactively “de-educated” – that is, indoctrinated.
This situation too often breeds anger at the world and their personal plight, which needs some outlet. It may be behavioral acting out, retreating into isolation, online trolling, or something external and performative. This may manifest as protests about the latest cause du jour: resentment toward ICE, billionaires, Israel, executives, judges, etc.
Some of these protesters need more to slake their thirst for catharsis and engage physically by shoving, stoning, looting, or actively obstructing, and are egged on by organizers. Collateral damage to others becomes acceptable. In the extreme, they seek to physically harm their targets. Think the putative presidential assassins or Luigi Mangione, who is charged with the murder of a healthcare insurance executive.
This behavior is then rationalized by asserting contrived ideological positions, without considering soberly what is true, moral, logical, or even legal. These youth become useful idiots for the organizers, willing to be manipulated and grateful just to belong to something, anything.
Canadian political strategist, author, and journalist Warren Kinsella makes a similar point in a recent essay in The Free Press:
In the past, white supremacists and Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis lost more battles than they won. They would run for political office and usually come last, or close to it. They would try to promote hate in a classroom and get fired. They would stand on street corners shouting about conspiracies and get laughed at, ignored, and sometimes arrested. In public opinion surveys, they, and their views, would register in fractions of puny percentage points.
In the mid-1990s, as the internet became available to everyone, everything changed. It’s surprising to many, but it is the truth: The neo-Nazis and al-Qaeda were on the internet long before Twitter or Facebook. They had websites, in the early days, that were more visually appealing than those of national governments. They had a message, a strategy. Notwithstanding their comparatively small ranks, notwithstanding the limits of their bank accounts, notwithstanding the unpopularity of their message, they could — for the first time — be heard and seen by potentially billions of people.
They had finally been handed a formidable weapon with which to attack their shared enemy: the Jew. And in the years since, they’ve continued to use it. Since Oct. 7, 2023, in particular, Hamas and their allies have done so to remarkable effect, capturing the sympathies of millions.
Many universities are no help. Steeped themselves in ideological rigidity, few fully recognize what they are doing, much less take any actions about it.
Failing to adequately police the ubiquitous computers taking over the classroom further exposes the online swamp and may be even more damaging to education than any distraction or social crosstalk on phones. All the while, primary and secondary teachers and their unions prioritize ideological mindsets that suit their personal persuasions rather than what meets the educational needs of students. Their self-interest dominates any educational purpose.
Too many politicians and institutions benefit from exploiting insecurities and psychological problems to their advantage. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a prime current example. He is able to convince young voters that socialism will assuage their anxieties. Never having been taught the unsavory history of socialism and communism and how much misery and death they have created, they find it enticing. Nobody has explained to them, for instance, what has happened to Venezuelan or Cuban society since democracy was eradicated. And these examples are hardly ancient or distant.
A solution must start in our schools but must also encompass the tech giants. There is some hope in the recent successful lawsuits over the social network algorithms that breed addiction for profit. The tech industry could make neutral changes such as limiting the number of sources an individual can follow – forcing users to exercise judgment – or the number of followers a non-public figure can amass. But how do they balance shareholder interests, i.e. profits and stock price, with societal or psychological good and freedom of choice? While these entities are non-governmental and therefore not bound by the First Amendment, they are unable to devise content moderation that is not either manipulative or may expose them to legal or public relations problems. So, they punt.
This is a fundamental new challenge to capitalism that has arisen almost entirely from the ubiquity of digital interconnection. There is no precedent in history. Perhaps we need more well-intentioned lawfare, public shaming and carefully constructed regulation to begin to change the calculus of competing interests. How that is done and how schools are reformed may be two of the most critical questions for America’s next decade.
Andrew I. Fillat spent his career in technology venture capital and information technology companies. He is also the co-inventor of relational databases. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar at the Science Literacy Project. They were undergraduates together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.