Tag Archives: digital harms

Superficially efficient and fundamentally amoral

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Reading The Score by C Thi Nguyen for the Telegraph, 2 January 2026

In the Domesday Book of 1086, C Thi Nguyen tells us, English surveyors measured land by the “hide”: the area an average family needed to sustain themselves. A useful measure, obviously; but you need local knowledge to use it. Some places are more productive than others. So how much land, exactly, would the average English family need? It could be 40 acres, or 60, or 120.

If decisions are taken locally, there’s little issue. But as soon as authority begins to centralise, units such as the “hide” disappear, replaced by standardised measures that are easier to record and act upon. Local knowledge becomes forgotten. The more centralisation advances – and in our modern age, it has only advanced – the greater the problem grows.

The Score is part-polemic and part-philosophical inquiry. Nguyen’s argument, in essence, is that in an effort to be objective and unprejudiced, our governments have turned metrics into targets, and built rules around them. The result: our civic life has become a superficially efficient but fundamentally amoral – not to mention inescapable – game. Nguyen himself is a philosopher, but also a lover of board games, video games, technical climbing and yo-yoing: in other words, he understands the utility of rules. But, he writes, in the desire to make life ever more frictionless and reasonable, we’ve let metrics twist our values.

Skateboarders can spend an afternoon competing to come up with the coolest tricks, and go home satisfied without ever having had to definitively settle on who actually won. In formal skateboarding competitions, though, nature of the activity changes: aesthetic elements are discarded in favour of clearer, more quantifiable goals, such as jump height and number of spins. As with sports, so with the Church: Nguyen mentions a pastor who, instructed to meet a baptism quota, finds himself ignoring the pastoral needs of the rest of his flock. And Academia, to no-one’s ggreat surprise, is far from immune. Nguyen argues that the U.S. News & World Report’s university rankings have suppressed diversity because prospective students now outsource their reasoning to the U.S. News algorithm. Do you want to fight for social justice, or make a killing on Wall Street? Either way, you’ll apply to the same law school — the one at the top of the list.

The dean and the pastor and even the professional skateboarder at least work in settings where these problems can be aired. For the rest of us, fixated on their annual targets at work, the number of likes on their social media, and the number of steps recorded on their fitness doo-dad , the external metrics work beneath their notice to replace their original values. I have a thousand friends and took ten thousand steps today — that makes me healthy and popular!

More ominous examples follow. There is, for example, a US Department of State metric called TIPS, which measures the effectiveness of policies to reduce modern slavery, and sex trafficking in particular. We know that slavery flourishes in areas of extreme poverty. But if a country reduces its ambient poverty and as a result reduces sex trafficking, the TIPS report’s metrics indicate failure – because the conviction numbers drop off. As Nguyen explains, the metric only “incentivises countries to keep sex trafficking around so that there will be plenty of traffickers to convict.”

Nguyen’s most profound insight lies in plain sight: to quote Wordsworth, “our meddling intellect misshapes the beauteous forms of things”. Games do exactly that, and offer a refreshing refuge–for a few minutes or a few hours–from the ambiguities of the real world. The gamification of real life, on the other hand, traps us all, with no prospect of ending.
So how do we escape a gamified world? Read more books! Take up the violin! Stick it to The Man wherever you can! This doesn’t sound like much of a call to revolution to me, and I’m not sure Nguyen’s heart is in the fight. Individuals may recover their individual agency, and this book will help them do so, but it’s hard to see why businesses, governments and bureaucracies of all stripes would ever abandon their self-empowering rhetoric of “objective” metrics.

Early on, Nguyen says: “I had an entire theory about games, in which clear and simple scoring systems were the magic ingredient that opened the door to a whole world of delightful play. And I had an entire theory about metrics, in which clear and simple scoring systems killed what really mattered.” This is well put, but if I had a criticism of this otherwise trenchant and entertaining book, it’s that Nguyen follows the rules of his genre so very closely. Like every “popular thinker” on the shelf, he can’t resist sharing with us his personal journey to enlightenment. If you’ve ever read The Hungry Caterpillar to children, you’ll know how much young readers delight in repetition. Nguyen, to me, is the Eric Carle of philosophy. If you’re even roughly up to speed with his topic, his steady circumspection may prove exasperating.
But don’t discard him. A book, too, is a kind of game, in which “we adopt a goal in order to get the struggle that we really want.” It’s about going the long way, a particular way, using a particular method. If we truly want to understand our civic plight – and not just tick off some talking points – then we should read The Score. We’ll find that Nguyen has planned this particular long way round with skill.

“The most efficient conformity engines ever invented”

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Reading The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt for The Spectator, 30 March 2024

What’s not to like about a world in which youths are involved in fewer car accidents, drink less, and wrestle with fewer unplanned pregnancies?

Well, think about it: those kids might not be wiser; they might simply be afraid of everything. And what has got them so afraid? A little glass rectangle, “a portal in their pockets” that entices them into a world that’s “exciting, addictive, unstable and… unsuitable for children”.

So far, so paranoid — and there’s a delicious tang of the documentary-maker Adam Curtis about social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s extraordinarily outspoken, extraordinarily well-evidenced diatribe against the creators of smartphone culture, men once hailed, “as heroes, geniuses, and global benefactors who,” Haidt says, “like Prometheus, brought gifts from the gods to humanity.”

The technological geegaw Haidt holds responsible for the “great rewiring” of brains of people born after 1995 is not, interestingly enough, the iPhone itself (first released in 2007) but its front-facing camera, released with the iPhone 4 in June 2010. Samsung added one to its Galaxy the same month. Instagram launched in the same year. Now users could curate on-line versions of themselves on the fly — and they do, incessantly. Maintaining an on-line self is a 24/7 job. The other day on Crystal Palace Parade I had to catch a pram from rolling into the street while the young mother vogued and pouted into her smartphone.

Anecdotes are one thing; evidence is another. The point of The Anxious Generation is not to present phone-related pathology as though it were a new idea, but rather to provide robust scientific evidence for what we’ve all come to assume is true: that there is causal link (not just some modish dinner-party correlation) between phone culture and the ever more fragile mental state of our youth. “These companies,” Haidt says, “have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.”

Haidt’s data are startling. Between 2010 and 2015, depression in teenage girls and boys became two and a half times more prevalent. From 2010 to 2020, the rate of self-harm among young adolescent girls nearly tripled. The book contains a great many bowel-loosening graphs, with titles like “High Psychological Distress, Nordic Nations” and “Alienation in School, Worldwide”. There’s one in particular I can’t get out of my head, showing the percentage of US students in 8th 10th and 12th grade who said they were happy in themselves. Between 2010 and 2015 this “self-satisfaction score” falls off a cliff.

The Anxious Generation revises conclusions Haidt drew in 2018, while collaborating with the lawyer Greg Lukianoff on The Coddling of the American Mind. Subtitled “How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure”, that book argued that universities and other institutes of higher education (particularly in the US) were teaching habits of thinking so distorted, they were triggering depression and anxiety among their students. Why else would students themselves be demanding that colleges protect them from books and speakers that made them feel “unsafe”? Ideas that had caused little or no controversy in 2010 “were, by 2015, said to be harmful, dangerous, or traumatising,” Haidt remembers.

Coddling’s anti-safe-space, “spare the rod and spoil the child” argument had merit, but Haidt soon came to realise it didn’t begin to address the scale of the problem: “by 2017 it had become clear that the rise of depression and anxiety was happening in many countries, to adolescents of all educational levels, social classes and races.”

Why are people born after 1996 so — well — different? So much more anxious, so much more judgemental, so much more miserable? Phone culture is half of Haidt’s answer; the other is a broader argument about “safetyism”, which Haidt defines as “the well-intentioned and disastrous shift toward overprotecting children and restricting their autonomy in the ‘real world’.”

Boys suffer more from being shut in and overprotected. Girls suffer more from the way digital technologies monetize and weaponise peer hierarchies. Although the gender differences are interesting, it’s the sheer scale of harms depicted here that should galvanise us. Haidt’s suggested solutions are common sense and commonplace: stop punishing parents for letting their children have some autonomy. Allow children plenty of unstructured free play. Ban phones in school.

For Gen-Z, this all comes too late. Over-protection in the real world, coupled with an almost complete lack of protections in the virtual world, has consigned a generation of young minds to what is in essence a play-free environment. In the distributed, unspontaneous non-space of the digital device, every action is performed in order to achieve a prescribed goal. Every move is strategic. “Likes” and “comments”, “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” provide immediate real time metrics on the efficacy or otherwise of thousands of micro-decisions an hour, and even trivial mistakes bring heavy costs.

In a book of devastating observations, this one hit home very hard: that these black mirrors of ours are “the most efficient conformity engines ever invented”.