Technology and madness

I wrote the first draft of this essay in 2018, some years ago. It's from a collection of writing under another title that now seem prescient and worth republishing. Today we are concerned that social media and smartphones are sending generations of our children completely bonkers. That wasn't always the case. Once we talked about giving kids smartphones as being good parents, believing it would give them an "educational advantage".

Things change. Perspectives change. We weren't wrong, in a blameworthy sense. We just didn't know the all of it. But now we know more, and what our hearts and reason told us has been confirmed by science, there's no way back unless we hide in avoidance and denial. That's the stage we're going through now. Some of us want to not talk about it. About how the path of our technology is leading us toward mental and physical unwellness, and perhaps the end of democracy.

We've long known about physical effects on sleep, concentration, eyesight and posture. We've come to understand the huge environmental impact of e-waste and data-centres, the use of slave labour, and how all that makes us feel about our tech.

Recently (2025), disturbing research in psychology of surveillance and in psychology of social media has come to the fore. It details significant negative mental effects, not so much from technological devices themselves as the political and economic structures that surround them. Surveillance capitalism is also rewiring or brains. If we want to stay mentally well, we'll have to fight back and destroy it.

Against this background is the blind commitment of governments to compete in a new arms race. To up the ante rather than heeding caution. It is a course that will ruin all our lives. The new industrial revolution looks set to have more dark satanic mills and Dickensian tragedies than the last one. And our "leaders" will call it "progress" to the last.

The conflict that surrounds digital technology is exhausting. It's particularly exhausting for cybersecurity workers who are the ground-troops in the struggle, but also for regular folks caught up in the fight. If technology is maddening what does that mean for its future and ours?

The biggest problem in the world today is mental health. If everybody had good mental health then all the other problems would be solved. In order to take care of practical problems you have to have good mental health. If people have motives that are not worthwhile those motives are always going to creep into their activities, and you see that every day from the way the political people behave. - Frank Zappa

If insanity is the inability to distinguish fantasy from reality then the present abuse of digital technology for surveillance, tracking, behavioural prediction and influence, is our civilisation's first class ticket to the asylum. Or worse. The insane outcome that many are hoping for is war of some kind.

The Belcerabon people of Kakrafoon Kappa, in Douglas Adams 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe' cite:Adams80 were sentenced to telepathy by a Galactic Tribunal that considered peaceful contemplation contemptuous. Unless they suppressed their brain activity by talking incessantly and loudly about pointless trivia, or distracted themselves with entertainment, their every thought would be broadcast to all.

Adams did not live to see the Twitter generation or western mass surveillance, but despite the humour of his point he clearly considered enforced connection to be a curse. To be unable to maintain boundaries, to filter what enters into or issues from one's mental world is painful, as sufferers of extreme hypersensitivity and disinhibitive disorders like Tourette's Syndrome know. Adams, of course, is just observing the awkwardness of tedious gossip, long before Twitter and Facebook.

Neither reason nor sophisticated systems are possible without boundaries. Boundaries permit structure. Structure is essential to get anything done. However, one can create a Tyranny of Structurelessness by failing to maintain necessary offices, roles, and symbols. These come under attack from hostile inquisitorial agents which constantly try to deconstruct in search of weaknesses.

What Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism" is a soft term for information warfare within the civic space. An over-connected world is a dysfunctional one. Too much connection is antithetical to reason, and stability. As for Kierkegaard's philosophy that "In a world where all things are X, ipso facto nothing is X" cite:Kierkegaard48, an undifferentiated world has no meaningful concepts.

Why are reason and separation so closely linked?

Think of how a scientist works. She tries to reduce the number of influences and variables so that the cause of a phenomenon can be understood. Experimentation, like clear thought, requires controlled isolation.

Organisations require compartmentalisation. In a company, the personnel department should function more or less independently of what customer services are doing. Similarly, in software engineering we design systems with strict modularity, so that unrelated parts of a program cannot accidentally communicate values or state.

In all systems, containment is vital for preventing local errors becoming systemic errors. In psychiatry and psychoanalysis we see that many afflictions are due to a breakdown of boundaries between what Fodor termed the Modularity of Mind cite:Fodor83, and neuroscientists now identify as separate 'circuits'.

Psychologically, beyond the separation of ground and form or defining categories, the ability to 'be reasonable' is not just a matter of accepting tenets of logic and evidence. It requires the lived subjective experience of other people being reasonable, thoughtful and boundaried.

Out of our sameness comes separateness, and thus the possibility of difference, empathy, disputation and agreement. We need to learn from others how to contain ourselves, to manage and put aside destructive thoughts and feelings. We must overcome identification, so that attacks on our beloved objects, ideas, and beliefs do not feel like attacks on ourselves. We stop taking everything so personally.

Mentally unwell people often see connections where there are none. Psychosis can involve quasi-religious, paranoid ideas that make spurious connections between events and objects.

But our digital world, hyper-connected and operating at the speed of light, breaks down these boundaries. Once, people might have said they thought the TV was listening to them. Or that the TV was speaking specifically to them. At that time it was clear those people needed psychological help.

Today both these 'delusions' are facts of life. We know that 'Smart TV' and 'digital assistants' are always-on listening devices whose primary economic function is to generate advertisements specifically tailored to individuals based on psychometric and behavioural profiles obtained through surveillance and tracking.

In the 1970s if somebody claimed that their car had broken down because they had been reading J. G. Ballard's Crash cite:Ballard73 we would suppose delusional thoughts, or at least think them a witty and creative fantasist.

Today a large percentage of vehicles are connected to remote monitoring systems and include remote control 'kill switches'. They also contain microphones. In most cases microphones are not monitored by humans except when supervising machine training, but they are connected to AI systems that listen for keywords. They also feed into threat assessment and risk management software, with machine learning, and such systems routinely pull in other data sets from phone tracking, online purchases, email content and social media posts.

We could go on, seemingly with dozens of examples of how digital technolgy takes scenarios that were once considered batshit-insane, and makes them real and normal. That would be unfair, because it is not as simple as saying "technology did this". Mostly it is the intentions of people who design and operate the technology. And if those people are not actually malevolent they are so far disconnected from human values as to be criminally negligent.

As the saying goes, "You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you". For citizens and mental health professionals alike, a discussion about what is "reasonable" no longer has solid ground to stand on unless both happen to be experts in computer technology and surveillance. That means, for many afflictions, we can no longer take overt behaviour as a clear indicator of mental health.

Is a CTO/CISO who refuses to allow smartphones in a business meeting a "delusional paranoiac who cannot embrace technological reality", or a "operational cybersecurity visionary who represents the last thin line of courage protecting the organisation from espionage"?

It depends who you ask. It depends on what day.

Tiny Bluetooth devices, including next generation cochlea implants create no visible evidence of communication technology, so people talking to themselves and wildly gesticulating in the street is a common sight. Once it would have signalled schizophrenic intrusion of 'hearing voices'. As early as 2005, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang wrote of his experience of seeing somebody in a telephone argument using a Bluetooth headset cite:Pang05 and crossing the street to avoid the 'madman'. Such a spectacle once made bystanders afraid. Today we walk past people every day engaged in frantic screaming matches with themselves. Indeed, schizophrenics are sometimes encouraged to manage their public episodes by holding a phone or headset. Passers-by then think they are normatively florid (or just anti-social phone users) rather than delusional.

Technology has undergone reversal, from rational instrument to a digital woo-woo world even experts no longer understand. Anti-science and magical thinking are on the rise, because we no longer need cautious, measured, rational analyses to make sense of the world - 'because the system did it'. We hope soon to be able to offload all responsibility for thinking to "algoithms". As if that's going to work.

Consider the simple problem of teaching children maths. For several millennia the motivator has been understanding money. Kids learn to add and subtract so they can pay and get change. But in the last few years some western societies have moved toward a "cashless" goal. This is deleterious to mental wellness for a number of reasons, but an educational side effect is that people no longer count, or care about prices when they have "digital money". At the same time we pretend to have a moral expectation that citizens to manage budgets and debt. We teach children about an imaginary society based on economic principles that, in practice, are entirely absent for them unless money is real.

The result is the re-emergence of a neo-primitive creed, replete with new superstitions, learned helplessness and new forms of sacrifice. It is a magical make-believe world where there are no consequences. In this playground for manchildren and princesses, someone else will always sort things out. We can always wipe and start again. We can "reboot life". As we spiral this drain of unreality, daily we experience: unexplained action at a distance, effects without apparent cause, telepathy, premonition, objects listening to us, apparent persecutions, personally targeted messages, and bizarre connections between events were once the exclusive realm of psychosis and superstition. Technology has taken on a 'crazy-making' or 'gas-lighting' function.

The convergence of technological reality and insanity is not a one way street however. Sedge Armon describes her own experience of recovery from real paranoid delusions in a world of surveillance technology in a 2015 article printed in Model View Culture Magazine cite:Armon15. Curiously, she explains that rather than exacerbating her condition, realising the world really was converging on her nightmares helped her escape mental illness.

As a teenager she had been convinced CCTV cameras (installed by her mother) were watching every moment and been diagnosed as delusional. By the time she was an adult her city really was a dystopian surveillance state. Accepting the overt hostility of her public environment neutralised painful feelings of alienation and difference. In many ways she found herself more robust than those around her who had grown up with the "sane" idea that they were not being watched and stalked around the clock.

A powerful lesson she notes from this is that we each personalise our discomfort with surveillance and remain silent about it. But in a community, sharing that sense of violation seeds resistance. It is good therapy. It dispels the pervading sense of persecution by shining light on it, acknowledging and naming it, and turning it in our favour. When the going gets weird, the weird go pro.

If we talk to other people we find that, aside from a few insecure souls, almost everyone is extremely uncomfortable with public surveillance cameras, but for years we have pretended "It's okay. They prevent crime", in order to go along and reduce social cognitive dissonance. Events like the Sarah Everard murder by police officer Wayne Couzens who almost certainly had technical priviledge to select and track his victim, have changed our minds.

The authoritarian clings tooth and nail to sanity and order. A callous technophile or 'Silicon Valley Visionary' will argue that this is the fault of people not adapting quickly enough to "progress" or "the new reality", or whatever their euphemism of the week is for their bewildered fear.

For the easily bamboozled that has a veneer of reasonable sounding logic, because of historic precedence. Only 200 years ago it would have sounded like fantasy to think of people flying, or talking to others not present in the room. We've accepted aeroplanes and telephones, not because aerodynamics and electrodynamics are understandable, but because they served us with fabulous utility. Many new technologies do not serve people. Whatever stories are told about them, they are a disservice and empower private, often malevolent minority interests.

Technology should serve people. I find the dismissive tone of "adapt or die" to be itself rooted in deep fear and ignorance. One cannot simply assert that a peoples' failure to adapt is a weakness or fault. Nobody is obliged to 'adapt' to systems that persecute them, indeed they are compelled to resist and overcome. This is world we had between 1938 and 1946, and the "broligarchs" are no less a threat.

New forms of digital resistance have formed around protecting our minds from the "attention economy", see, for example Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing cite:Odell20.

Much of human cognition is filtering. If our conscious mind had to process everything it would be overwhelmed. Our mental apparatus is extremely selective. Seeing is about what we do not see. Hearing is about what we do not hear. Proprioception, the simple management of bodily balance, sensation and background pain is about what we do not need to constantly pay attention to.

Likewise we have output filters, variously called inhibitions, super-ego governance, and willpower. We do not immediately register disgust or sexual attraction on our faces. We do not say every thought that comes to mind, or salivate like a dog at the sight of food. Affect regulation is part of social integration. One could say that we have an elaborate mental 'firewall', an "intellectual self defence" capacity.

What we have not learned is how to extend this defence into our digital worlds, which in many ways are simply extensions of our sensory and affect networks cite:McLuhan64. Abusive digital technology attempts to circumvent our psychological firewall. Hence we are learning that cybersecurity (the defence of digital systems) is very closely linked to personal, intellectual self defence.

Even with relatively primitive technology, once digitally connected, we give away too much. We respond to inappropriate cues. We pay attention to the wrong things. We are easily overwhelmed. We are readily tricked by ambiguous signals, disorientated by digital illusions. Also we are unaware of what we give away. Our breathing, facial blood-flow, handwriting, eye movement, posture, gait, fidgeting and speech emit vast amounts of data that the techno-dystopians are keen to extract, feed to their AI accomplices, and use to manipulate us.

Digital Self Defence involves building up the digital equivalent of resilient mental filtering, self-control and situational awareness that is needed in a hostile environment like our modern digital world.

New forms of filtering require us to decide what technologies not to use. How do you spot a poisonous snake in 2025? The societal rejection of Google Glass was an example of this process working (although other Big Tech companies will surely attempt to relentlessly foist wearable surveillance products on society, further eroding interpersonal trust).

It is also taking control of technologies that are extensions of our lives in the same way a healthy person takes control of their own body, diet and movement. Technology does not belong to either state or corporations, it belongs to the people who use it.

As a society, to avoid going insane we really have no other choices than to either turn-off technology, fight it, or retake civic control of it. I think we will do all in some measure and that things will proceed in that order. We have entered the "turn it off" phase, with a brewing technological backlash. But turning our backs on technology is not an option, so we will naturally progress to retaking control of it.

Tijmen Schepm, in his observation of Social Cooling, argues that widespread withdrawal and cynicism in the abusive technological milieu, where gadgets are our new Gods, is inevitable. Disengagement with technology accords with a modern form of atheism. Today "atheism" is not necessarily a rejection of religious ideas, so much as a sceptical rejection of all cults, dogma, and other kinds of mindless consensus - particularly technological woo-woo. For the techno-sceptical hipster "Turn-on, Sign-out" is the new resistance. as centralised platforms are abandoned for federated and small-network alternatives.

Things will get more interesting is in the fighting and re-taking stages, which I believe are inevitable, if only because humans dislike insanity only a little more than we love and need technology.