We’re Living in the Dystopian Future That Neil Postman Predicted Forty Years Ago
The Posture of Our Age
Heads down. Phones out. Fingers scrolling. This is the humanoid posture of our age.
We see it everywhere. Sit in a coffee shop and look around you. All eyes on devices. Wait in line at the post office or grocery store. All eyes on devices. Sit at a red light and look at the drivers in the cars around you. Same story. More disturbing still, look at the drivers on the highway going full speed. Even some of them have their eyes darting between the windshields and their smartphones.
We see it in ourselves too. Sit down to read a physical book with your phone nearby. Observe how long you can go without scrolling, texting, or checking some notification. When you’re standing in line at a coffee shop and have forty-five seconds to spare, notice how hard it is to resist the urge to pull out your phone to do something— anything—to fill that blank space. More disturbing still, monitor how much time elapses between the moment you wake in the morning until the moment you unlock your phone and start scrolling.
For many of us, it’s only a matter of seconds.
Scrolling Ourselves to Death
Brett McCracken, Ivan Mesa
Drawing from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and applying his insights to today’s scrolling age, this book helps believers think carefully about digital technology and inspires the church to turn difficult cultural challenges into life-giving opportunities.
From the rising of the sun to its going down, we scroll our way through the day. We scroll our way through life. And we are scrolling ourselves to death.
The death march of our scrolling society is not just a metaphor. In many ways, the smartphone is literally killing us (and not just in distracted-driving automobile accidents). Researchers have made compelling correlations between smartphone (especially social media) usage and rising mental unhealth (depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, loneliness), especially among teens and young adults.1 Consider the staggering rise in suicide rates among US youth and young adults since the dawn of the smartphone age. Between 2001 and 2007, the suicide rate for kids ages ten to twenty-four was fairly stable, but since 2007 (the year the iPhone debuted), it has skyrocketed, rising 62 percent between 2007 and 2021.2
Technology has also helped accelerate a “loneliness epidemic” with demonstrable, wide-ranging negative effects on overall health.3
The ominous term “deaths of despair” has become part of contemporary vernacular. And after steadily climbing for most of the last century, average life expectancies in the United States have, since 2021, started to decline.
Certainly more than technology is at play in these trends. But not less. When we consider the variables that have most changed in society in the last two decades, any answer we come up with will center around digital technology. We didn’t know what “social media” was twenty-five years ago. The term smartphone was first coined in 1997. The World Wide Web is barely three decades old. Each of these things has utterly reshaped the world in the last quarter century. And things continue to move fast—so fast that we rarely pause long enough to ask questions or ponder unintended side effects. As Antón Barba-Kay put it in A Web of Our Own Making, digital technology has so vastly transformed human life over just a few decades that “there is now arguably a greater chasm between someone age twelve and someone age fifty (or forty, or thirty) than there ever was between people separated by a millennium of pharaonic rule in ancient Egypt.”4
Our critical faculties struggle to keep pace with the scope and speed of the digital revolution. As a result, we’re often blind to the ways we’re being transformed. If we could jump forward in time a few decades, we could see more clearly. But since we can’t do that, our best path to wisdom is often in the other direction: looking back in time, learning from bygone eras and voices. What we can’t see now can be illuminated, at least in part, by the insights of generations past.
One book I return to again and again is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. The book was prophetic when it released in 1985, and it’s even more prophetic now, four decades later.
Which Dystopia?
Just as today we look back to Postman’s book to help make sense of our cultural moment, so too did Postman look to the past from his vantage point in 1985, at the peak of what he called the “Age of Show Business.” The old books Postman looked to for insight were a pair of dystopian novels: George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Working on his book in 1984, Postman pondered: Had Orwell’s vision of that year come to fruition? Or was Huxley’s dark vision of the future more accurate?
What we can’t see now can be illuminated, at least in part, by the insights of generations past.
Postman concluded that Huxley’s dystopia, not Orwell’s, better predicted the shape Western society took in the latter half of the twentieth century. As he explained,
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.5
If Postman was astute in 1985 to observe the Huxleyan shape of our “trivial culture”—where opted-in distractions and diversions kept us numb and dumb—how much more accurate does his prophetic vision describe life in 2025?
When Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves, he had television mostly in view as the chief purveyor of trivial information that swept us away in a “sea of irrelevance.” Forty years later, we still have TV—albeit hundreds more channels and a growing number of streaming TV platforms. But we also have YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and other always-on pipelines of content, algorithmically designed to grab our attention and keep us watching and scrolling, eyes glued to screens.
“Amusing ourselves to death” is still a highly accurate descriptor of what mass media does to us. But now the dominant form it takes is scrolling. And while Postman, who died in 2003, never lived to see the way smartphones, streaming, and social media would transform the world, his wisdom and warnings ring out with potent relevance.
Just as Huxley helped Postman make sense of his world in 1985, Postman can help us make sense of ours.
Notes:
- See especially Jean Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (New York: Atria Books, 2017) and Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future (New York: Atria Books, 2023); and Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin, 2024).
- Sally C. Curtin and Matthew F. Garnett, “Suicide and Homicide Death Rates among Youth and Young Adults Aged 10–24: United States, 2001–2021,” NCHS Data Brief, no. 471, June 2023, https://www.cdc.gov.
- Tatum Hunter, “Technology’s Role in the ‘Loneliness Epidemic,’ ” Washington Post, April 11, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/.
- Antón Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 15.
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 20th anniversary ed. (1985; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 2005), xxi–xxii.
This article is adapted from Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa.
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