As we head toward the year 2026, Chat GPT has 700 million weekly users, and the average young person will spend 25 years of their life scrolling on a screen. This technology, brought about by the largest concentration of capital humanity has ever seen, is 100% profit driven, and nobody knows what exactly it will do to our brains in the long run.
Psychologists warn that cases of “AI-related psychosis” are on the rise. The informal diagnosis refers to the experience of delusions and paranoia following prolonged interactions with large language model (LLM) chatbots.
Headlines fit for Black Mirror are increasingly frequent. A 16-year-old was driven to suicide after turning to ChatGPT, initially for help with schoolwork and then for emotional support. Another describes a man driven to megalomania after spending 300 hours conversing with a chatbot—which convinced him he’d discovered a new form of math with the power to crash the internet, build force fields, levitate, and perhaps even talk to animals.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X to “express concern” about users’ increasing emotional reliance on ChatGPT. But experts reveal that the industry’s deceptive design choices actually fuel such psychotic episodes. In order to increase engagement, chatbots employ “AI sycophancy,” or excessive praise, to affirm users’ beliefs, even if sacrificing truthfulness. Unsurprisingly, this taps into addictive tendencies and manipulates users for profit.
But such tactics aren’t unique to chatbots. For years, social media platforms have tracked our behaviors, compiled in-depth data about how to influence our decisions, and sold it to the highest-advertising bidders. Instagram, X, and TikTok compete to steal our attention in the pursuit of profits. The longer we scroll, the more data they collect, and the more ads they can sell. They prey on basic neurobiological mechanisms to maximize engagement.
These companies exploit the same psychology that makes gambling addictive to keep you hooked on your phone. The “pull to refresh” pattern mimics pulling the lever on a slot machine to trigger dopamine. The “infinite scroll” pattern keeps loading content endlessly to keep you scrolling longer. The “time fog” pattern removes timestamps on videos, turning what seems like minutes into hours of hypnotic mindlessness. The endless loop of “doomscrolling” has had a devastating effect on the cognition and culture of an entire generation.
Cognitive and cultural decline
A study conducted by researchers at UC Irvine found that the average attention span in 2004 was two and a half minutes. Today, that figure clocks in at just 47 seconds, i.e., less than a third of what it was two decades ago.
In the same time period, reading for pleasure has fallen by 40%. Last year, the OECD reported that literacy levels are “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. Math, science, and reading comprehension scores are also down globally.
The most notable cognitive shift took place in the mid-2010s, when the smartphone became widely adopted in developed countries. The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen, while the average “zoomer” spends nine. The 2025 Harvard Youth Poll found that less than half of young Americans feel a sense of community. In 2023, the same poll found that six in ten youth find “little or no purpose or meaning” in their everyday lives.
The screen age has ushered in an era of alienation and creative stagnation. Fashion, film, and television shows are endlessly recycled from decades past, illustrating a pervasive sentiment of cultural nostalgia. Books are becoming less complex. Songs are getting shorter, more repetitive, and their lyrics are getting simpler and convey more negative emotions. It’s no surprise that the term “brain rot” was Oxford’s 2024 word of the year.
What’s the solution?
Young people are not unaware of their condition. A 2023 Harris Poll found that 80% of Gen Z feel too dependent on technology. 60% wished they “could go back to a time before everyone was ‘plugged in.’” In an attempt to ditch their screens, young people are reviving flip phones and forming “Luddite” clubs, a reference to the 19th century movement of British laborers who smashed machines to protest increasing automation.
The solution, however, isn’t individual boycott, but collective organization. Artificial Intelligence has massive potential to raise the collective productivity of society on a healthy basis, but only if it is implemented under democratic workers’ control. A socialist revolution will harness this technology to emancipate us from our daily drudgeries. It will be humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.