Is screen use really sapping our ability to focus and lowering our IQs? The scientists who have actually analysed the data give their verdict

Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behaviour and technology at Oxford University, is a busy man. It’s only midday and already he has attended meetings on “Skype, Teams, in person and now FaceTime audio”. He appears to be switching seamlessly between these platforms, showing no signs of mental impairment. “The erosion of my brain is a function of time and small children,” he says. “I do not believe there’s a force in technology that is more deleterious than the beauty of life.”

Przybylski should know: he studies technology’s effects on cognition and wellbeing. And yet a steady stream of books, podcasts, articles and studies would have you think that digital life is lobotomising us all to the extent that, in December, Oxford University Press announced that its word of the year was “brain rot” (technically two words, but we won’t quibble) – a metaphor for trivial or unchallenging online material and the effect of scrolling through it. All this has sown widespread fears that the online world that we – and our children – have little choice but to inhabit is altering the structures of our brains, sapping our ability to focus or remember things, and lowering our IQs. Which is a disaster because another thing that can significantly impair cognitive function is worry.

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People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

—Aldous Huxley

Let’s put the cards on the table…

On the left, we have Joseph Keppler’s oft-used cartoon, “The Bosses of the Senate.” On the right, we see some presidential inauguration guests, including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk, on 20 January 2025 (photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP).

I’ve been in the United States for the immediate time after Trump’s two inaugurations. I cannot adequately describe the difference in tone, pitch and feeling between the two periods. I remember being at a Women’s rally in Philadelphia just as the “Muslim ban” was introduced, then delayed up by a judge, then introduced again. The charge and fizzle of sheer political indignation was heady, in its way. Despite the Dems’ defeat, I think they were excited, animated certainly. The contingency of the first Trump presidency was enabling- the lines between what was and what so nearly could have been, barely askew. It was Trump’s opponents, “the resistance” who felt like they had all the energy, despite having won, Trump’s early administration, by contrast, felt rudderless, illegitimate, alone.

Today, it is the opposite. Trump has turned a narrow but decisive win into a dominance not only of government, but for now, of all politics. As I wrote earlier in the week, part of this is what feels like a decisive cultural turn in conservatism’s direction. But there’s something else going on too. Trump understands one of the most important commodities in modern politics: the ability to exhaust.

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Trump has now been at the top of American politics for over a decade. I always have to suppress a smile whenever I interview a member of the MAGA faithful and they repeat the old truism: “He’s not a politician, he’s a businessman.” The truth is his business has been politics for a long time now, and the most profitable bits of his business are now intimately linked to his politics and political profile (see this last week’s grotesque graft with the launch of the Trump digital coins). He is perhaps the most consistently commanding American politician since FDR, having dominated three elections and three presidencies, including the Biden interregnum. He has achieved this through remarkable force of personality and will to power. He has also done it through the possession of the energy required to dominate all forms of media, to be ubiquitous, omnipresent, everywhere, anywhere all at once. And that ubiquity predates his politics- his presence in the culture and zeitgeist stretches nearly half a century. In Chicago, for the DNC this summer, I reflected how deeply weird it is, that you can walk along the city’s main thoroughfare in one direction and simply not be able to escape the titanic lettering of ‘TRUMP’, whichever way you look, emblazoned across one of his flagship hotels. In America, for so long now, it’s been harder and harder to walk down the street, turn on the TV, look at your phone and now open an app without Trump, in some way, being projected on to your brain.

In other words, Trump has simply worn everybody down. He has vanquished his opponents, but even more importantly sapped their will. He did this first with the city authorities of New York, then he did it to the Republican Party, now the Democratic Party, and it feels almost as if from America itself. He just does not stop. He is a battering ram- never yielding, never ceasing, never accepting that he is wrong. His warped narratives pollute everything, but they become the political air we breathe. It becomes difficult to remember there’s an alternative read. In the end, it’s just easier to submit.

That is how Trumpism is best understood. It is about the free expression of power, without hindrance, even over our collective understanding. And this week, it reached a new apex: Trump wants the power to shape not only the present, but the past, history itself. That is how the pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists should be seen. There was much speculation that Trump might only pardon some, not all of those impriosned, to leave some of the most egregious offenders, including those literally caught on film violently assaulting police officers. But he is said to have told his team to “fuck it. Release them all.” This wasn’t just about rewarding his people, though it is truly chilling to consider that he has released his own de facto paramilitary force, loyal entirely to himself, highly armed, precisely at the moment he takes away the state security provided to a whole host of his enemies. It’s about something deeper: about history and how we understand it.

In releasing everyone, the message he sends is that his narrative of January 6th is the correct one- that these were minor incidents. That we did not see what we saw, that we cannot believe our own eyes. This coincides with the new Congress, at Trump’s behest, investigating not the Jan6th insurrectionists, but the Congressional committee which investigated them. He and his allies have been spreading conspiracies about what happened at the Capitol for years. The pardons are the final coup de grace: Nothing could have happened because no crimes occurred. It was all just a liberal, Democratic confection, like everything else. As Orwell said, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." In effect, Trump pardoned himself.

This marks the start of a new age not of resistance, but acquiescence. Because it’s been marked with barely a whimper, barely a murmur, certainly from the Republican Party- some of whom were in the Capitol and targeted that day. But even the Democrats, in a daze, seem unable to articulate their opposition. The result is an act of collective gaslighting, of Trump’s distorted narrative settling, which is quite unlike anything I can remember. It is part of the many ways Trump is rewiring the American state around his own distorted truths: there are reports of officials being asked loyalty tests, one of which includes the question of who won the 2020 election. The Big Lie is being internalised into the weft of the American state itself. None of this is normal, but through sheer political fatigue, it has become normalised.

In this environment, where Trump is dominating even the understanding of our realities without much contestation, with the kings of the American information network brought into his inner circle, and locked out of power, there are few tools Democrats have at their disposal. One though, would have been to properly exploit one of the few moments the American public would be looking at them in the next four years: the inauguration itself. It was yet another example of the old liberal Democratic elite not understanding the moment in which they find themselves, where they kept playing by old rules, observing the niceties of a constitutional order which Trump has basically killed. Obama was pictured laughing and joking with Trump at President Carter’s funeral. Joe Biden played nice with Trump on the day, welcoming him “back home.”

They knew what Trump was going to do. They sat in the Capitol rotunda knowing he would release the January 6th criminals who had marched through it, beating up police officers and hoping to execute Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence. They had spent months warning Americans that Trump represented a unique, perhaps fascistic threat to democracy- and yet when it came down to it, they played nice. This has the effect of not only further normalising Trump, but also to make themselves look utterly ridiculous: to send a message to the American public that they do not mean what they say, which is precisely what Trump wants everyone to think. The presidents past should have taken a leaf from Michelle Obama’s book, and not attended.

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The second Trump presidency is barely a week old, but it is clear it will be a series of revolutionary acts. The left and “mainstream” media needs to wake up, catch up and summon some energy and think deeply about how to respond. History may have been re-written by Trump for now, but it won’t always. And acquiescence is rarely judged generously in a regime such as this right now threatens to be.

The enemy is in your home. I'm writing this on the instrument of the enemy and you'll read it on his machine. Tech is now in league with the far-right.

There they were, seated on the front row for Donald Trump's inauguration, like a society of dastardly bastards. Elon Musk, a man who seems to diminish in life force the more he grows in power, and now resembles a crumpled tent of human skin. Mark Zuckerberg, who will always look like he's being bullied by his school locker, no matter how much money he makes or how obsessed he becomes by "masculine energy". Jeff Bezoz, a monument to moral ambivalence.

Somewhere along the line, technology went from something hopeful to something threatening. Not so long ago, it was the thing that would cure us, would connect us, ease our burdens. It was about the Arab Spring and Wikipedia and robotics and mRNA vaccines. Then, slowly at first, it became more disturbing. It turned out that the information superhighway led to a Russian bot farm. Now it feels darker. Intrusive. Degrading. Deadening. The product of men with low levels of understanding and high levels of confidence, who consider themselves above everyone else.

The pivotal cultural moment came in 2021, when William Shatner went to space. More than anyone, he represented that older, more idealistic view of technology. Star Trek, among other things, was a manifesto for the view that technology, reason, empathy and diversity are all intimately connected. It presumed, wrongly but not unusually, that only rational people could develop this kind of space-faring technology and that such figures would not fall victim to racist obscurantism.

Shatner spent a few minutes in suborbit on Bezos' Blue Origin capsule. He had a life-changing experience. He saw the lifeless vacuum of space on one side and the vulnerable life-giving basket of Earth on the other. "It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered," he said later.

Down on Earth, he attempted to explain this to Bezos. The Amazon owner looked at him with a face robbed of any notable features, without genuine interest or indeed any meaningful capacity for human connection. He just needed the Star Trek guy for marketing purposes. All this wanky existential shit was beside the point.

Behind him, people were opening champagne and cheering, like they were at a sorority party. Soon enough his dog-sized brain was distracted. He kept looking over his shoulder and smiling. Then he just ignored Shatner and turned away. "Give me a champagne bottle," he said to someone, with the grace you'd expect from someone so wealthy. "Come here. I want one." Then he shook it, sprayed it everywhere, and everyone laughed. Everyone but Shatner, who finally realised that he was not in Star Trek. He was in Idiocracy. And the rest of us are too.

I don't know what Bezos took from those old sci-fi shows. Probably nothing. I don't understand how Musk seems to have read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy without noticing any of its humanity, modesty and gentleness. Hell, a lot of these guys seem to have been watching Second World War movies without understanding which side you're supposed to be supporting, so it's hardly surprising that they've failed to comprehend more subtle fare. All we know is that the dream of technology is now under the control of men who are vain, foolish, self-centred, amoral, desperate for power, and in some cases openly fascistic.

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The political fightback against these figures is primarily about regulation. As the legal commentator David Allen Green argued recently, the sudden attraction of figures like Zuckerberg to Trump is fundamentally motivated by fear of legislation. In places like Brazil and China, but especially in Europe, tech companies are suddenly facing regulatory demands which they want desperately to avoid.

People sometimes act as if regulation is impossible. These companies are too international. They're too powerful. The technology is too chaotic. That is false. It's one of the most common fallacious arguments we encounter - that because a solution is necessarily imperfect we should not try it at all. In fact, these firms can be brought under control. Their appeals to Trump demonstrate just how weak they are in the face of European legislation.

There are viable regulatory approaches, even for tech like AI. We can introduce safety features as design properties, operate according to agreed international standards, mandate functioning audits with access rights and adversarial test systems. We can insist that governments hire tech experts on salaries at least approximating private sector wages so that they are not hopelessly outgunned by those they are assessing.

People say that you can't regulate things like AI because you can't keep up with it. In fact, we've long had legislative approaches for this type of scenario. You just deploy a sifting system which assesses new developments and then allocates a particular level of scrutiny depending on their importance. It's what the EU is doing with AI - categorising research and deployment on a risk-based scale, defined by threat to basic infrastructure, public transport, health and welfare and more.

The problem is not that we do not know how to regulate or that we do not have the power to do so. The problem is that they are forming a defensive partnership with a far-right president to prevent regulation. It's a political issue, not a technical one. And political issues can be decided by political action.

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The response to what we're seeing is also personal. Tech is the most intimate product in our lives outside of our underwear. It's right there, all the time. The smart speaker can listen. The camera takes photographs of our most cherished moments. The laptop is the sight of our professional endeavours. If anything useful can come of this moment it's that we will think a little more clearly about what it's doing to us.

This week my partner encouraged me to remove Instagram from my phone's home screen. It was obviously prompted by Zuckerberg being a salivating android travesty, but that's not it really. The motive wasn't really political. It's that his nonsense gave us the excuse to think more deeply about the technology we use.

Instagram had started to make me feel empty. Each time I put it down I felt a little more hollowed out. On and on I scrolled. I learned nearly nothing. I never felt fully in control of what I was seeing - it was constantly inserting something I hadn't asked for. When there was something I was interested in, the app went out of its way to stop me being able to click a link and visit it, in case I leave. It felt infantalising and strangely demeaning. And also, why the hell was everyone so attractive? Why were they so goddamn happy? There was something terribly vapid about it all.

I don't want to give it up altogether - I still want a place to put up holiday photos and there's a bloke on there who does really good salsa recipes. But that's OK. You don't need to delete the app. You can simply remove it from the homepage. And doing that is an oddly profound experience.

Once I removed it from the home page, my behaviour changed dramatically. Suddenly, I had to go into the endless list of apps in the background, find it, and then open it. In other words, I had to make an active choice. And it turned out that when that was the case, I very rarely wished to do so. I've literally done it once.

When it was on the home page, I mostly opened the app by habit. I'm working and think I deserve a break. I'm waiting for the tube and think I deserve a distraction. I take out my phone. And then my mind stops participating. It is in fact my thumb which does the thinking. It acts on automatic: to the icon, open it, get lost, wake up ten minutes later feeling a bit empty again.

That moment - the flick of the thumb, the automatic movement - is the moment to seize on. It's the key test of technology. Is it empowering you? Is it giving you control? Is it giving you autonomy? Or is it overwhelming you? Is it making you passive?

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One of the most deadening aspects of modern technology is the notion of infinity. Spotify will never stop. Netflix will never end. Once one thing finishes, another is brought up. Sometimes - in the rare moments in which I have watched something meaningful - it will try to make me watch something else as I am still trying to take in what I just watched. That's very revealing. It's as if the very notion of emotional impact is inconceivable, as if its perfect user is this cup-like thing, this human receptacle, who will simply have this cultural slop sprayed all over them. There is no internal life to its idealised viewer. Just a corroded external shell.

More and more, I find myself relieved by endings. When I put on a record on, it ends. When I turn the last page of a book, it's over. When I finish a comic, it's done. That can feel inconvenient, but it is actually a moment of empowerment. You will now decide whether you want to hear the album again, or listen to a different one, or do something else entirely. You are not just lost in this endless conveyor belt of content, which you long ago stopped considering with a critical eye. You will make an active choice about what you want to do. You will be present in that decision.

How much autonomy do I have over what I watch? It feels like I do. After all, I can get all sorts of movies and TV shows instantly through streaming. You just press the button and there it is. But what happens when you veer outside of what they have to offer?

This is not difficult to do. I wanted to watch all the films by Mike Leigh recently. It's not exactly an obscure choice - he's one of Britain's most famous directors. But incredibly, his earlier work is not available. Secrets and Lies, Career Girls and the rest were not on Google video or on Amazon Prime. I'd veered very slightly off the beaten track and found myself in a wasteland. I don't have a DVD player anymore. Like a fool I figured I didn't need one. So that's it: no more options. You literally cannot watch the film.

Streaming gives you convenience, but not freedom. You can watch whatever you like, as long as it's what they want you to watch. Outside those limits, you have no recourse - no video shop to visit, no Ebay option to use. No choice. We actually have less control than we used to, while assuming things are the other way round.

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The political and the personal responses to technology are echoes of each other. In both cases, it is about control. Society has the right to decide how technology is used and pass legislation accordingly. People have the right to use technology which respects their choices and does not try to hack them into perpetual empty engagement.

In each case, the tech oligarch class acts to take control from others and hoard it for themselves. If the horror of the last few days teaches us anything, it’s that they need to be challenged on both fronts. It all starts when you delete an app off your home screen.

The alliance between Donald Trump and social media platform bosses such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg represents a global threat to free access to reliable information. Le Monde has therefore decided to stop posting its content on X and increase our vigilance on platforms such as TikTok and Meta.

Legislation to protect children in the digital realm is essential. But if it results in the loss of small cycling and cancer-care forums, something’s gone wrong

London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed (LFGSS) is an admirable online community of fixed-gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London. Sadly, this columnist does not qualify for membership: he doesn’t reside in (or near) the metropolis, and he requires a number of gears to tackle even the gentlest of inclines – and therefore admires hardier cyclists who disdain the assistance of Sturmey-Archer or Campagnolo hardware.

There is, however, bad news on the horizon. After Sunday 16 March, LFGSS will be no more. Dee Kitchen, the software wizard (and cyclist) who is the core developer of Microcosm, a platform for running non-commercial, non-profit, privacy-sensitive, accessible online forums such as LFGSS, has announced that on that date he will “delete the virtual servers hosting LFGSS and other communities, and effectively immediately end the approximately 300 small communities that I run, and the few large communities such as LFGSS”.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

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