Ban Social Media, Reopen the Asylums

The kids aren't doing so well these days. Their minds are warped by endless scrolling, their attention spans shattered by dopamine hits from likes and shares. Depression rates soar while test scores plummet. The diagnosis is clear: social media has driven America mad.

You see it in their eyes at restaurants—whole families hunched over phones, parents and children alike lost in their personal feeds. Nobody talks anymore. They just tap and swipe, searching for the next hit of digital validation from mirror-like feeds that reflect the notification-powered self back at them. The conversation died when we handed them those glowing rectangles.

The tech companies got rich off this scheme. Trillion flow to Silicon Valley while our youth sink deeper into the digital asylum. Facebook sells our data while Instagram and OnlyFans sell our kiddos' self-esteem. TikTok ships our attention spans to China, packaged with neat little bows of viral dances and puppy videos.

As my friend David Inman and I wrote last year, the solution is simple, though nobody wants to hear it: shut it all down. Not necessarily forever—just long enough to break the addiction. Lock down the platforms for a few weeks, like we did with businesses during Covid. Stop the spread of posting. Give people a chance to remember what life was like before they lived it through a screen.

Trump won't do it. He's going soft on TikTok now, probably because he’s dreaming of views and followers himself. The politicians are all addicted themselves, endlessly tweeting their performative outrage into the void. They'd rather let the asylum patients run wild than risk losing their audience.

We used to put the mentally ill in institutions, back before we decided that was a cruel way to punish the unusual. Now we give them smartphones and DeviantArt accounts instead. Let them sort themselves out in the digital wilderness. Post their way to wellness. Share and like their demons away.

The numbers tell the story clearly enough. Depression rates triple since social media took over. Anxiety through the roof. Kids who can't read a book but can scroll for hours. Their brains rewired for constant stimulation, unable to focus long enough to form a complete thought.

The tech giants know what they've built. Internal reports spell it out—they're running a massive psychological experiment on society's most vulnerable. Maximizing "engagement" while minimizing human connection. Selling eyeballs to advertisers while minds crumble.

We need a digital detox on a national scale. Shut down the feeds. Close the apps. Let people's minds clear from the endless fog of unread and unreadable content. Maybe then we can have real conversations again, look each other in the eye instead of through filtered selfies. I won’t hold my breath.

The asylums of old had a litany of problems, no doubt. But their bosses and wardens eventually admitted something was wrong. At least while they’re working there, the leaders of our new digital institutions deny the very damage they're causing while offering a perverse kind of freedom. You can log off any time you like, they tell us, but nobody ever does. Nobody ever leaves.

It's the perfect neoliberal asylum—no overhead, no staff, no responsibility. Just algorithms serving up fresh madness to the already unwell, pushing them further into darkness. Nobody has to pay for your care or even pretend to help you get better. They just keep feeding you nutbag and Goon Hand (GH) content until you break under the strain, until you pop off after months of edging. Then they move on to the next patient.

Everything's fine, they say, as long as you keep scrolling, keep sharing, keep feeding the machine your precious attention. The orderlies are gone, replaced by engagement metrics. The doctors replaced by PTSD-afflicted content moderators working for pennies halfway around the world and half-assed AIs doing the work for free.

Some will call this proposal authoritarian, a violation of free speech. But we're not talking about censorship—just a cooling off period. A chance to break the cycle of addiction. To remember what it means to be human without algorithmic assistance.

The kids deserve better than this digital dystopia we've built for them. They deserve a chance at genuine human connection, at developing minds capable of sustained thought and real emotion. They deserve freedom from the asylum of social media. It might not be better—in fact, it probably won’t be—but at least it can’t get much worse.

Lock it down. All of it. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok—shut them off for a month and watch society remember how to function. It would be chaos at first, no doubt. Digital withdrawal on a massive scale. But on the other side might be something better—a world where a few lost souls talk to each other again, where minds can heal from the endless assault of content.

The asylum patients need our help, even if they don't know it yet. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is take away the thing that's hurting them—the car keys from the drunk, the firearms from the guy with the map of the presidential motorcade. Even if they scream and rage against it. Even if they call you cruel.

Because this experiment has failed. The digital asylum has become too dangerous to leave open. Let them call it radical. Let them mock the idea of digital quarantine. But look around at what we've become—a nation of screen-addicted zombies, posting, gooning, and doomscrolling our way to the lunatic fringe.

So there's my two cents, adjusted for inflation (approximately $13.88): Ban social media, reopen the asylums. The cure might hurt, but the disease is already killing us. Time to pull the plug and rip off the bandage.