The Frantic Search For Digital Identity | J. D. Haltigan

It isn't obvious at all that children and adolescents are spending the bulk of their time on social media. Per se, it depends on how you define it. They're also texting instead of interacting face to face, for example. And then they're also exposing themselves to other content online, like pornography. But then there's something more fundamental, I think, that's often missed.

See, when we had little kids back in the 90s, my wife and I were the youngest parents we knew with the oldest kids. Even though we weren't that young, we didn't start having kids till we were in our late 20s. Now, one of the things that would happen was that we would take our kids over to other houses that had children, and when we got there, the parents would put on a television show for the kids to watch. I was never happy with that because what should have happened was the kids were thrown into the basement to think, speak, and they had nothing to do so that they had to play.

Of course, they were quiet if they were doing that, but they weren't inventing their own dramas. They weren't interacting face to face in a manner that made them come up with the creative conceptualizations that characterize dramatic play, like playing house, for example. That laid the groundwork for future adult relationships. Now, that was TV; it had nothing on screens because everyone was concerned about the detrimental effect of TV back then. But, my God, now you know screens are absolutely everywhere.

So, the screens have content, but they also interfere with child’s play. I'd like your opinion about that. And also one other thing that I've been thinking about—let me tell me what you think about this. You know, I watch all these strange identity issues that are emerging in adolescence, and even on university campuses in early adulthood. This preoccupation with sexual identity, with gender identity, and the variant forms of even more imaginative play that are associated with that, like the furry culture, for example.

What I see there is delayed dramatic play. I'm wondering if what's happening to some of these kids is that they get away from this oppressive family environment where they're never allowed any freedom. They burst out at the age of 17 or 18, and then they have to frenetically engage in a dramatic search for identity because they didn't do it when they were like three, which is when it really needs to happen. We radically underestimate the significance of dramatic play.

Then we have dramatic play on the part of rebellious adolescents constantly, you know, as they protest in the streets. That's right, 100%. You know, I've spoken with Jonathan Haidt and others, and I've really been kind of engaged in the discourse about the role of social media, you know, and how that plays into the development of emotional regulation. You're right, how do we define that?

But I think your point about, you know, it's basically more broadly than just whether they're on TikTok or whether they're on Facebook or whether they're, you know, on Snapchat. It's looking at a screen rather than at another face. You see that wherever you go. I mean, even when I do work on a supermarket deli now on a part-time basis, customers will come in, they'll be looking at their phone, or I'll be trying to look at my phone. It's a completely different world and landscape that we're now in that has sort of taken away the normal face-to-face communicative rough-and-tumble play, where you're actually physically looking at somebody rather than at a screen.

Your attention is not constantly looking at a screen. So, it's much more broader. And I think the other point, too, you said, “Well, it's not just social media.” You're right; it's social media combined with increasing secularism that has basically made us lose all sense of moral constraint. When there’s a weakening of all, you know, traditional classical religions and there's no orienting structure, you get thrown into the social media world where you can basically create anything.

That gives rise to what we see as this complete inability to form an identity in early childhood. Now, they're on the screens, where it's just basically a consumer market for identities, whether that's identities as furries or whether it's an identity as gender identity. Or even, like you say, I mean, it's a complete roleplaying world now that's happening on social media.

One of the individuals who's done a lot of great work on this is Katherine D, who’s Default Friend on Twitter. She's looked at some of this, and I think we're missing, to a certain extent, in all the discourse around the role of social media on mental health, you know, and the ability to establish a strong identity.

The fact that we’re now moving into a different era, where we’re actually living online rather than in the world, is why I’ve been constantly stressing the need for athletics-based programs or environmental programs where children are in nature, to get away from this sort of movement to a world that’s completely imaginary online.

Because that leads to all sorts of limitless ability to establish identities that—while they may exist in this creative realm—when you get back into the real world, they’re useless. They're dysfunctional, really, and that's sort of what we see. They’re also not subject, as far as I can tell, to the constraints that are characteristic of the real world.

One of the things I've been very concerned about—I’d like your thoughts on this—is I think it was... What's the boxer's name? Mike Tyson, who so famously said, "The problem with the virtual world is that it's made all of you all too comfortable with never getting punched when you deserve it." Now, that's a bad paraphrase, but he did actually say that. I think there's something about that that's actually very interesting and very correct.

I don’t know how many comments I've looked at online, but it's tens of thousands. I've started to develop something like a troll taxonomy. There is a culture online they call L's culture, and that’s laugh out loud or “I did it for the lulls.” It’s basically a culture of sadists and psychopaths. This is actually quite well documented in the relevant research literature because there has been ongoing research into the personality structure of provocative trolls.

They're dark tetrad types, so they'd fit into the cluster B psychopathology. They are narcissistic, so they want unearned attention, they're Machiavellian, so they use their language as a tool to manipulate rather than to communicate, they're psychopathic, which means they're predatory parasites. And that wasn't good enough, as it turned out, because that was the dark triad; they had to add sadistic to that.

That's where the lulls element really comes into play because the sadist takes positive delight in the suffering of others. That’s really the nature of L's culture, and it can thrive online because, well, people say things online all the time that would get them an immediate slap in the real world, like a morally required immediate slap.

And so they say things that... Now, the reason that concerns me, see, my sense is that we know that the base rate of psychopathy across cultures is about 4%, which isn't that high. But we also know that there were historical epochs in which the cluster B personality types probably got the upper hand. I would suspect that happened in the French Revolution. I think it probably happened in the Russian Revolution. Probably happened during the rise of the Nazis in National Socialist Germany.

You don’t need that many people to disinhibit in their psychopathy before your culture might be in grave danger. That's particularly true if they can organize, which they can really do online. I'm very concerned that the incentive structure online facilitates dark tetrad behavior.

Now, there's more evidence too, right? Because here's another problem: 25% or thereabouts of online content is pornographic, so basically criminal, right? It’s basically prostitution facilitated by electronic pimps. So that's not good. And then a tremendous amount of online activity is outright criminal, right? I mean, older people are just being scammed on an unbelievably constant basis.

So it might be that 50% of online activity is in the psychopathic, antisocial, and cluster B realm. It’s very, very difficult to regulate, and my suspicions are that is spilling over in a really counterproductive manner into the actual flesh-and-blood world.

I'm curious about your thoughts about that because one of the things that's odd about you on Twitter—in a good way—is that you are constantly drawing people's attention to the relationship between cluster B psychopathy and online and political behavior. So, what do you think about that as a hypothesis with regard to the pathological incentive structure of the virtual world?

Right, maybe it's a non-playable degenerating game, like it could be.

Well, I think in a lot of ways, that's exactly why—and I know you're familiar with the paper that I wrote on this—social media is an incubator of all this cluster B type of stuff. Because on social media, you have this indirect communicative, language-based amplification of all these traits.

Whereas male aggression in the real world doesn’t scale. You have an encounter; something is said; somebody gets punched in the face, and that’s it. What you have is on social media indirect aggression, and you have all these traits and antagonism and histrionic behavior that just basically gets amplified, and emotionally resonates and resonates and resonates, and balloons out. It builds and builds and builds.

One of the best examples of that is what we saw with Hamas. I mean, they filmed all their atrocities as they were going into Israel. That was one of the most interesting—in a morbid way—kind of aspects of that incursion. They were just filming. They were basically, in fact, doing it for the lulls, regardless of whether you think about how much atrocities or what was the exact specific atrocities that were committed.

They were filming them on GoPro for exactly that reason and to amplify that. So, you know, that is one perfect example of how this has all spiraled out of control. I will say for myself, you know, others have written about the cluster B stuff in terms of political ideology and how that's played out before. You know, the famous L. E. A. is one of them and others.

But I just see it so clearly because when you look at the traits and you look at what's happening online, it’s a perfect incubator for all these to continue to amplify and amplify and amplify without any mechanism that limits it. It just spills out, and then what happens is you have an event like October 7th, or you have an event like what you're seeing on these campus tent cities. All that's mediated and amplified online, and then it gets played out with all this petulant and room-to-room behavior on campuses.