The Internet is Making You Paranoid (plus: how to repair)
Sometimes, when we scroll, we’re looking for a quick hit. And sometimes we’re scanning for danger.
If you commute to work (as I sometimes do), you probably look out at a sea of people scrolling, scrolling scrolling on their phones. The common narrative about these scrollers is they’re bored, mindless, looking for a “quick hit” from a cat video or viral takedown video.
But as with so many truisms about the internet, this is not the whole story. Sometimes, we’re also checking our phones out of anxiety, worry, a sense of danger, even what we might think of a sense of paranoia: a hypervigilance against threats, imagined or real, threats we can in reality do little about.
I know all this because once, a long time ago, someone I loved very much was very, very unwell. I was terrified that they would die or otherwise act in ways destructive to themselves. The way my brain coped with this (since they lived in another city) was to have me compulsively check my phone to see if they were online dozens and dozens and dozens of times a day. It felt like if they went offline at the wrong times, it was a sign that things had finally gone catastrophically wrong. (So too, if they were awake and online too much at night).
For those of you who have never entered a state of electronic hypervigilance: it is, more or less, a form of torture. It consumes one’s every waking thought. It distorts time. It removes one from the real world. It suffocates the mind, ultimately deprives it of other life. It diminishes one to a tiny spot of worry, in my case hovering over a green dot that indicated my person was online. I was, in many ways, caring for this person, who knew all about this obsessive online hovering, but I’d argue that none of that made my hovering any less “creepy”. It was, needless to say, not especially helpful for them and deeply deeply unhelpful for me.
Even at the time, I knew all this, and yet I clung to knowledge and tracking as my only mechanism of pseudo-control in a world out of control. Which is, it turns out, what many of us are doing with the internet.
Research shows that digital life is making many of us paranoid—as many as one in five of us, as it turns out.1 Certainly this can be true in the most obviously pathological sense. Some studies show this is true of those who already are experiencing bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. (And indeed, I have friends with these diagnoses who have believed they were being viewed through the internet, by the cameras of their devices!) But other studies show it’s true of all of us, at least some of the time, even if we don’t have these diagnoses. In fact, the researcher Daniel Freeman, who wrote an excellent book on Paranoia, found that (somewhat to his surprise) paranoia was far more widespread than researchers had previously imagined; rather than being a symptom of various psychoses-inducing illnesses, it is more closely related to anxiety, and also heavily tied to our increasing levels of social mistrust. Freeman seems to have been genuinely surprised by his own findings. In studies of those who did not appear to have any form of psychosis or bipolar disorder, still “I was very surprised to discover that around a third of participants were regularly troubled by paranoid thoughts. At least once a week—and in many cases more often—over 50 per cent felt that they needed to be on their guard against other people. Forty-two per cent thought that people might be making negative remarks about them. Forty-eight percent believed that strangers and friends alike had looked at them critically. And 34 per cent worried people were laughing at them… paranoia was far more common than anyone had suspected.” Looking at another study, he notes: “Asked whether over the past month people had laughed at them behind their back, a third believed this somewhat or totally, Thirty-eight per cent said they were either somewhat or totally certain that people had done things to annoying them and 27 per cent that someone wanted to hurt them. Twenty-eight per cent had been distressed because of persecution.”
These are low-key worries in some ways (less extreme than believing the government is out to get you, for example), but they are distracting, distressing, and persistent, and often deeply affect the way people navigated their world. And frankly, in times when my social world has been in upheaval, in one way or another, I have totally been there. It’s also notable how this lower-grade-but-very-common form of paranoia is largely about our social lives, and a distrust of the social world, of the people around us, the people who should matter. It’s heartbreaking, but useful to note because it suggests that paranoia both is partially caused by and contributes to the fracturing and fraying of the social fabric in important ways.
And, of course, this anxiety about the social sits in our pocket or on our screen all day long. Something of the paranoid structure I am describing—a continual alertness to threat—continues to this day in my life, even though I am lucky enough not to have a diagnosed disorder, and continues in large part online. It continues in my life in the way that I sometimes relate to my phone or the news or even to social media: for me, my phone is not an object of fun. It is mostly not a place to go for any sort of entertainment or even relief from boredom. Rather, it is something I check to see if anything has gone wrong, if the worst has finally happened. When I see notifications, I check them compulsively because I am, at heart, wondering: is there an emergency I must respond to? Is anyone mad at me? Are people hanging out without me? It might look mindless, but it involves nothing of ease or pleasure.
I suspect this is true of the internet as it is of many technologies that infiltrate our lives. They are sold as sources of ease and pleasure, critiqued as sources of distraction or laziness, but they are, in fact, sites of anxiety and fear.
The history of negative internet emotions doesn’t start with that fear, however: arguably, it starts with uncertainty and disappointment.
Manufactured, carefully engineered disappointment, in fact. If you work in the tech industry like me, you learn pretty quickly that your job is to disappoint people. I mean this in a very specific way: through the principle of intermittent reinforcement. Essentially, humans and monkeys and dogs and even pigeons are susceptible to a phenomenon where, if they know they will receive a reward if they do a particular action, they will be somewhat interested in that particular action. But if, when they complete the action, they sometimes, but not always, get a reward, they will compulsively do that action over and over again, seeking that reward far more continuously because receiving it is uncertain.
This psychological principle of intermittent reinforcement explains our addictions to gambling and video games, which provide this addictive pattern. It explains, frankly, much of why many of us are addicted to the emotionally unavailable, who also provide a version of this, engineered or not as the case may be. And then, of course—perhaps you spot it already—there’s the constant intermittent reinforcement provided by our phones.
The disappointment involved here is crucial to this kind of compulsion. We only get ‘addicted’ online if we are frequently, even mostly, disappointed, and only intermittently rewarded. And we are mostly disappointed. Most of the time if I scroll instagram or check my emails I do not find anything I truly wanted to see. Mostly I get junk, people I barely know posting coquettish selfies, and so on. But every once in a while, someone posts something I really relate to, or sends me a cool opportunity, or messages me out of the blue. Disappointing and calm-destroying though it is, this pattern works all too well—I’m on my phone all the time. And the science suggests that if only the good stuff showed up on my phone, I’d actually be less interested.
Why do our brains work this way? It’s probably for the simple reason that we don’t need to constantly check on something we’re sure is going to be good. This is our brain’s anxious mechanism for making sure we are always looking in the places where there might be a tasty treat (say, in hunting and gathering) but where we’ll only catch it if we check compulsively.
Like so many things in psychology and neuroscience, a French existentialist playwright couldn’t have created a better (darker, weirder, more perverse) mechanism. It helps us survive, but it’s torture.
And: although intermittent reinforcement describes the intermittent presentation of rewards, I suspect the internet also does this in reverse, so to speak. It provides an intermittent sense of doom and stress that can be just as addicting.
Which brings us to paranoia. It’s not just the chronically disappointed (that is, nearly all of us) who feel compelled to be on our phones. You know who else is always checking and checking and checking things? The paranoid. The paranoid are those who are desperately worried that the worst will happen. Like those addicted to positive intermittent reinforcement, they too can consume an endless amount of semi-meaningless information and never be satisfied, searching searching searching to make sure they’ve not missed anything.
Again, I use the word paranoid here not in the most clinical of senses. One does not have to have some kind of formal psychosis or delusion to be paranoid in the sense I mean it. Rather, I mean someone who is shaped, profoundly, by their constant vigilance against a threat; who has begun to experience their own subjectivity as in large part about a blanket suspicion of others, or at least a large swathe of others, or at least of events.
The paranoid, in this sense of the word, are doom scrollers on steroids: it’s not just that they can’t look away: they’re actively looking for doom. They are the people who are compulsively reading the news (heaven forbid.) Why do they need to know about the news right away, when they can rarely do anything about it? To avoid the Bad Surprise.
As the cultural critic Eve Kosofosky Sedwick writes in her essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” “The first imperative of paranoia is There Must be No Surprises.” Bad Surprises, that is—for the paranoid, bad things are certainly coming, and we must be alert at all times, never caught off guard. The paranoid person engages in a
unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia [that] generates, paradoxically, a complex relationship to temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would in itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known.
That’s why we need to keep checking those notifications, a lot of the time anyway. The paranoid-internet-scroller-and-notifications-checker is compelled to look, to feel they could somehow know the future, to be constantly looking at events as clues about possible threats. There is simply something about the structure of this kind of fear that makes us feel the need to be in-control-through-knowing, to never feel we are caught off guard.
With this understanding, we can extend our image of the paranoiac to many online varieties: people googling their dates, people stalking their ex online, people scrolling through their partner’s phones looking for signs of infidelity, people constantly looking at reviews of products to see if they’re being scammed, conspiracy theorists who dissect seemingly innocuous facts in various online fora, people involved in weird games with the stock market, social media commentators over-dissecting things, and so on.
And (it shouldn’t surprise us!) the same internet that is designed to disappoint us by flooding us with boring and useless information to surround anything good or useful is very, very “good” at keeping the paranoid busy. After all, we’re talking about a model of the internet designed to have too much information, much of it fake and AI generated these days. The same internet designed for intermittent reinforcement, for information overload and mostly-disappointment, will also perfectly trigger our paranoid impulses. And while most material is disappointing if one is looking for entertainment, but all of it could potentially be a sign of danger. Almost anything could be perceived as a threat, and there’s an endless amount to go through.
What keeps the disappointed addicted and distracted and blue keeps the paranoid painfully on edge.
Sedgwick wasn’t writing about the internet then, of course (her essay was first drafted in 1995, when the internet looked very different, and rather more hopeful). Back in the 1990s, she didn’t quite have this analysis to hand, so let me suggest it now: to slowly ease your mind out of the trap of paranoia in the internet age, you have to recognise that you’re being given bait for paranoia all the time, and most of it means absolutely nothing. As therapists (and clinicians in Freemans’ programs) say to their paranoid patients, or teach through their special programmes: not everything that seems like a “sign” is a sign. More than this, we need to recognise that on the internet, there are just too many signs. If we start looking, we’ll quite literally never stop. We have to be brave enough to let go and break the cycle.
There is, of course, another aspect of the internet that makes it easier to be paranoid: the way it is, increasingly, a place for all of us to be watching each other. (Plenty of others have written enough about how social media is like a panopticon, where we are all observing and performing for each other all the time.) This has, in every sense, made people crazy. It can fuel intense interest in whether or not someone has, say, seen one’s instagram stories. Being “seen” could be superficially good or bad, as the case may be (we’d love to see our crushes are looking at us; we dread being observed by those we fear socially…) But either way, it’s likely to make us more alert to others, and not in a good way. It’s bad enough that the internet is designed to provide too much information, it now also operates by telling us how many people are paying attention to us, which is perfect fuel for paranoia. If your brain starts looking for signs that something is off, not only will it find evidence of possible trouble, it will also find evidence that the internet is in fact looking back at you.
Indeed, the same research I mentioned earlier, which suggested that people who use social media become more paranoid even if they don’t have a diagnosed mental health condition, shows that those who overshare on social media, or who look at people they are not “friends” with on social media, are especially likely to become paranoid. They are, perhaps, those of us who are most aware of the possibility of eyes on them, and who are most aware of how they might have eyes on others. This self-and-social awareness psychologically backfires, as so much awareness does.
This trap is unfortunate because we are also living in an era that is ripe for paranoia in general. As I wrote in my social atrophy piece, we’re living in a more socially isolated time, and social isolation appears to lead people to lose some of their cognitive function that relates to social interaction, while activating the parts of the brain engaged in imagination. The result is a modern brain that is bad at understanding others and their motivation but keen to imagine things about them, usually in unhelpful and paranoid ways.
And this, of course, has lots of negative effects on how our society functions. As I put it in my forthcoming book, we’re living in a world that is structurally isolating, where social trust is at its lowest ever, and that limits all of our ability to think well about politics, and even about ourselves. With low social trust comes scams, hatred, xenophobia, and much more. The result of a weakened social judgement and a heightened imagination is paranoia—we begin to believe people hate us, are out to get us, are not responding to us for sinister reasons, are talking to us behind our backs. Individually, we’re distrusted and alienated, and collectively, too.
Even in the 1990s, Sedgwick was building on a long line of scholarly analysis that saw paranoia as a fundamental feature of various kinds of American conservative or reactionary thought. Paranoia is the perfect reason to distrust the other, and want nothing to do with them, so it serves reactionary, isolationist, and other similar impulses well. But more than this, Sedgwick suggested, paranoia can simply be a real fixation, or cognitive inflexibility, that was also part of what many (on-the-left!) academics engaged in when they were involved in the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that were part of so many critical takes on society. Sure, the right is suspicious of the outsider or the nonconformist; but the “left” is also suspicious, of, well, anything that seems like it’s part of a power structure. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that while reactionaries may be especially paranoid in certain ways, the paranoid style inevitably becomes part of us all. And I am not convinced that intelligence of whatever kind provides immunity, either—for a sharp brain works against itself in paranoia; the smarter you are, the more you can dig yourself into a hole.
With this in mind, Sedgwick wanted to convince a certain kind of thinker to reconsider whether they needed to always give a reading of culture that involved suspicion. Suppose—she pointed out to a friend—it turned out the HIV virus was indeed made in a lab? What then would they, the queer people of their time, really know that they did not already? Surely they all already knew that the government did not like them or care about them... (I can imagine asking the same of a lefty vaccine skeptic today).
Instead of burrowing further into paranoia and conspiracy, Sedgwick wanted her readers then, and in a way is challenging us today, to learn to engage in a “reparative reading” of the world around us, so that we can be open to greater complexity and opportunity in our lives, despite the darkness and threats that surround us:
“to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates..”
It’s painful to consider that things might not always be signs of doom, that things might, despite all the signs to the contrary, just be kind of random, that they might m be a mixed bag, that things might go differently, even well, despite the fact that they so often go poorly. That’s why reparative reading is hard (in addition to the way it asks us to break a compulsion). It asks us to live with uncertainty and painful hope. But also, if we can manage the reparative reading, we become more free.
If you, like me, are a somewhat paranoid person, always fearing and steeling yourself against the worst, always wondering if other people really mean what they say, always sure something could go wrong, well, then, here’s the real news: we have to learn to do a reparative reading of our social media timelines, of our friends, of world events, so that we can be open to surprise in exactly the areas we think we already know. If we learn to do this, we won’t exactly lose all our paranoia. Instead, we will have it still but also gain a whole different set of lenses for the world that we can apply when we need to. I find it comforting to think that this is possible for me, for all of us: “It is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices.” Having gone to very dark places, we might now be able to also discover brighter ones we wouldn’t have reached otherwise, using the same sharp imaginative abilities we’ve always had in another way. Through my paranoia I have acquired not only a dark sense of humour but a dedicated practice of trying to re-read people in more generous, empathic, and, well, funny ways.
I’d go further and say, too, that to engage in reparative “reading” in our dark world, we have to get off the internet, we have to not just “read” differently but live a reparative life. I think about this almost as a problem of “wellness.” Modern life is so hard on us, mentally and physically, that we have to spend a good deal of time trying to reverse the damage. We have to physically exercise a certain amount more because we are glued to chairs for work, we have to therapise and “destress” precisely because we’ve been so stressed by a bad lifestyle in the first place. And, I’d suggest, we have to “repair” our brains from their paranoia because our world is paranoia-inducing.
This reparative work against paranoia needs to happen offline, to be blunt. All the best sociology on the subject suggests we mostly lose our fear and prejudice of one another when we are positioned as equals with shared goals and can interact over large periods of time—and that almost never happens offline. Increasing amounts of research suggest physical touch is very important, and that, too, can only happen offline. Of course, the real work here isn’t just repairing our individual selves but the social fabric so that we can live in less alienating, damaging ways in the first place. We need spaces and networks of people to help us do this—again, offline.
Ultimately, the problem with paranoia isn’t that there isn’t a threat. There may well be, though often not the one we think. Your spouse is probably not cheating on you, I want to say to those paranoiacally, digitally searching. (They’re probably complaining that you’re a snoop.) Bu—also—they could be cheating; cheating happens. That’s not the point, however. The point is about the kind of spouse that we are, regardless of the threats we face.
As with the spousal/relational problem, there are very real political threats that all of us face. There are threats to us, lots of them. But the question is what kind of subjectivity we want to cultivate in the face of such threats. The paranoid style often blocks us from seeing what threats there really are, as well as the opportunities that also exist in our social, political world. As Sedgwick puts it: “paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.” To build a reparative lens is to know how to know more things well than we could before.
A reparative reading, or a reparative life, doesn’t stop us from getting hurt. We will get hurt. But (I’d suggest) it stops us from becoming the kinds of subjects who can’t do anything other than get hurt.
And that matters a lot.2
Sorry for the Daily Mail link!—the reporting seems to have disappeared from other sites.
As you can probably guess, writing is my reparative practice. In writing I bind together meaning in a way that makes me more hopeful and less frightened of the world, even if only through a better understanding.