(Mariem Bab, a journalist from Al Jazeera, English Edition contacted me on July 5, 2026 with the following: “I am writing a piece on youth disillusionment, protest culture and counter culture for tomorrow. Could you share your perspective on the following? Preferably, if you could respond sometime today that would be great!” As far as I can see, the piece was never published. Since then, I extended my answers a bit. /geert)
Mariem Bah: You’ve argued that social media platforms are engineered to induce chronic exhaustion, guilt, and hopelessness to extract data. Can you unpack that “sad by design” concept — how deliberate is this architecture, and how aware are users of it?
Geert Lovink: Users of Facebook, Instagram, X, Snapchat, and TikTok intuitively feel the exhaustive design. I have not made this up; the most convincing evidence comes from Meta’s whistleblowers and the insiders who designed these features. Please watch the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma and follow the work of the Center for Humane Technology. Read the accounts of Frances Haugen and Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, in which recent academic literature is summarized. My take is slightly different, coming from the humanities, the arts, and critical internet research. I am skeptical of the medicalization. Users are not victims.
Theorizing the real existing user experience is key. Often, that is enough. There are thousands of personal accounts of technologically induced sadness and related mental states. Quantity of the evidence is not the issue. We are not sick. The comparison between drugs and social media is powerful but unfortunate. Both create dependencies and habits, yes. But the techno-social dimension gives it a different twist. The human need to be connected and to keep up to date with what’s going on is real. There is a human right to communicate, without ads and hidden algorithms. This is entirely possible and can be realized overnight. Yet, a radical overhaul of social media platforms seems unthinkable. Over the past decade, the internet has gone into a state of paralysis. Instead of a radical overhaul, with new beginnings, there will be even more surveillance. Media in general seem beyond repair—a realm we should ignore. Instead, we’re ordered to focus our attention on AI.
MB: You’ve written about youth feeling trapped — hating the platforms and their toxicity, but unable to delete them without risking social death. What does that paralysis do to someone’s sense of political agency more broadly?
GL: I am part of social movements. My contribution often involves arranging and maintaining internal communication, creating spaces for reflection. Alternative media, also known as tactical media, not only spread counter-information but also provide an autonomous space for strategy debates and culture such as music, film and video, radio, theatre, literature, history, and theory. Almost none of these functions are available on social media. Rapid expansion in the info realm is not in the interest of protest movements. There’s no sense of engagement on socials, just incoming outrage and noise. Social media creates division and suspicion. Only in a very short period of confrontation is it beneficial to open up. What’s so appealing about social media is the 24/7 liveness and the updating aspect. One is always on, involved. At least, that’s how it feels. The paralysis kicks in when dramatic news no longer stops and patterns start to repeat, causing overload and exhaustion. Disengagement kicks in and kills the urgency to take initiative. What rests is doomscrolling.
Big Tech disaster feeds are not supposed to be disrupted by reflection, discussion, and cultural forms of processing events. Instead, social media has been tasked with disrupting other flows. As these channels are open to cynics, bots, and adversarial forces, the focus quickly switches to them, away from the question of what’s to be done. Social media thus disperses energy and leads to disorganization. Tatiana Battichelli from the Berlin Disruption Lab shows us that we are capable of disrupting Big Tech. We are many. However, in Europe it is only regulators (including their dissident colleagues) that we hear about. The media realm is exclusively in the hands of lawyers.
MB: I spoke with Max Bassin from the band Geese, who described their music as political but stream-of-consciousness, absurd, apocalyptic imagery sitting right next to earnest, existential fear and hopelessness. Is that mix of dark humor and sincerity a product of their generation and the tools they’ve been given to process their emotions?
GL: If only it were sufficient to express love, desire, and joy. In my view, the aesthetic expressions of anger, fear, indifference and despair are the essence of culture and the driving force behind the arts. To deny access to darkness literally kills the soul. There’s no way to judge whether blues, existentialism, rock & roll, or punk lead to radical, moderate, or reactionary politics. It works better the other way round, when culture is part of a social movement. Protest and resistance manifest at all levels of life, so let’s not overemphasize the political level in the traditional sense. However, the question of organization has lately been pushed to the background and needs to be put back on the agenda. We now have to admit that micropolitics dissolved into nothing. Many of us believed that dissolving power as such in everyday life would be sufficient. Instead, we face the void. Silicon Valley is built on the individual level of the user. Instead of empowering, it suppressed forms of organization in favor of micro-impressions that are becoming extractivist data.
MB: You’ve described youth turning to hyper-ironic, cynical memes as a primary creative outlet — a kind of “nihilistic aestheticism” that mocks collapse rather than tries to prevent it. Is that a form of resistance in disguise, or a genuine surrender to hopelessness?
GL: Memes are red pills. They help to see through power structures. Understanding self-evident tech as ideology is, in essence, a good thing, and can be one of many factors that lead to political action. Yet awareness and analysis have proven not to be enough to provoke change. If the techno-social stops actors from coming together, either in real, virtual, or hybrid spaces, then the short moments of awakening run empty. I have also described memes as a cultural expression of copium. Knowing how to cope in this depressing, intense, polycrisis-driven world is meaningful. When I ask, “How do you cope in this digital age?” I get surprising answers. Survival is not the same as surrender.
MB: A pro-Palestine protester I interviewed told me he keeps showing up to protests while privately fearing his actions are meaningless. Does social media intensify that specific doubt — making activism feel performative — or does it also sustain movements in ways offline protest can’t?
GL: Political resistance grows out of collective despair. A line is crossed, and you need to act together. When the protest gets repetitive, don’t go and figure out something else. Change channels, tactics (but keep coming together; do not dissolve precious connections and networks). Internal debates and individual doubts are not related to social media. Period. It is childish to reduce the impact of a protest to the number of likes and impressions. It is useless to measure the impact of Gaza flotillas through ‘likes’. It is perverse to have to ‘like’ violence. Engagements, as the industry calls it, is not the point, and none of the activists and people on the ground actually think in those terms. Should it be designed differently next time? That’s the better question.
MB: A Vietnam-era protester told me the draft gave 1960s activism a personal urgency that’s largely absent today. Do you see the internet as filling that gap with a different kind of urgency, or mostly diffusing it into passive scrolling and outrage fatigue? And if there was something like the draft that would cause a sense of urgency, would young people today react the same way, or do you think they would accept their fate?
GL: The draft is coming much closer to the average Western youngster than you would think. This drastic measure is around the corner in most parts of Europe if Russia invades the Baltic states or Poland. What happens when Japan gets implicated in the Chinese invasion of Taiwan? How will you respond when the democratic opposition in Taiwan gets crushed—people you actually know, who are your friends, like in my case? The draft is a huge issue in Ukraine and a real one for our friends. Some of them flee. There is an anti-draft movement that’s interesting in this context. In the first months of the full-scale Russian invasion, a number of our Ukrainian male artists, designers, and geeks started to tinker with cheap Chinese consumer drones—also to escape being sent to the frontline, as they say. The rest is history. The Ukrainian drone industry keeps breaking conceptual paradigms. I happen to follow it closely, and each time I am stunned. This is revolutionary innovation. These conceptual jumps can only come from an artistic avant-garde mindset. They are not just military in nature.