It’s now almost a reflex: an election is held, and someone pushes the big red Death of Democracy panic button. When Trump won, liberals saw a gold-plated Hitler in a red baseball cap. Then Biden took over and conservatives warned of Stalin or Pol Pot reborn, where your kids would be forced to go to gay camp and pray to RuPaul before lunch (they’re doing it again with Zohran Mamdani in New York). The hysterias flip, but the impulse stays the same: to imagine top-down tyranny as the looming threat to our livelihoods.
Neil Postman would know better. Forty years ago this year, the late cultural critic wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, a pessimistic yet prescient polemic worth revisiting in the age of the political hysteria of the algorithm. In it, Postman predicted that America wasn’t trending towards existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s 1984, but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that resembled Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. He was right. Democracy was not in danger of being overthrown, but over-entertained.
Postman saw “that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.” He was, in fact, observing his own obsolescence. In the near future, books and literacy, serious social criticism, maybe even democracy itself would become afterthoughts in a world mediated through screens, because those mediums turned everything into trivialities.
If he were alive in 2025, Postman would not be surprised to see that our Soma comes in the virtual variety: TikTok’s infinite scroll, crypto speculation, and algorithmically tuned content streams designed to blur time and lull us into a flow state. Every flick of the thumb offers a micro-hit of novelty, outrage, or reward. Karl Marx once believed that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, but we killed God and began worshipping the murder weapon instead.
Trump is the perfect man of this Postmanian moment. He’s a one-person technological diversion who doesn’t even try to conceal anything — he haphazardly tweets out war plans and private conversations with world leaders while friends and enemies alike hang on his every word, however nonsensical or contradictory. Although he has authoritarian tendencies, he’s ironically too wrapped up in his own media representations to be an effective dictator. If he were to suddenly transform into one, no one would notice — not because of censorship or gulags, but because they’d be too distracted by other push notifications.
To be fair, there’s plenty of dissent in the streets, but it’s the paper-thin kind that’s designed to be shareable online. These protests don’t hint at emerging mass movements; they mask the lack of them. The vast majority of January 6 protestors had no plans to stage a coup, and once they breached the US Capitol, they opted to take selfies, not power. Last month, millions took to the streets in No Kings marches that seemed designed to wrest attention from President Attention and little else.
Meanwhile, there’s a more profound crisis no one is marching about: no one has faith in anything anymore — not leaders, not institutions, and barely any faith in friends, family, or community. They’re a victim of the self-flattering effect of our me-first libertarian ideals and the user-centric technology that surrounds us. In America, there are no kings, but also no subjects either. Everyone is a king unto themselves.
To Postman, this transformation has everything to do with media theory. In the Sixties, theorist Marshall McLuhan famously declared, “the medium is the message,” arguing that the dominant form of media of each era alters human perception and social organization. Postman agreed, but with a twist: he thought a better formulation would be “the medium is the metaphor.”
In other words, each dominant medium supplies the underlying metaphors by which a society understands reality. As such, the printing press changed how we thought and democratized knowledge. A print-first culture, the argument goes, created the apex of human civilization and produces citizens who are capable of participating in rational-critical debate: because the medium itself encourages habits of logic, nuance, and focus.
Television, on the other hand, is a visual medium governed by the logic of spectacle and attention for its own sake. It prioritizes immediacy, novelty, and emotional impact. It flattens complexity into sensation.
In Postman’s view, once television became the dominant cultural form, it didn’t just reshape entertainment — it reshaped everything. Politics, religion, education, journalism — all began to conform to the imperatives of show business. A sermon became indistinguishable from a TV commercial. A newscast adopted the rhythms of a sitcom. A presidential debate turned into a pageant of postures and soundbites. The result was a shift in epistemology: a society once anchored in reasoned argument had become entirely unserious and stuck in an all-consuming present tense.
“The metaphor of our age is no longer the flickering image, but the infinite scroll.”
Four decades on, Postman’s cultural diagnosis now feels not just accurate, but almost restrained. Where television reduced discourse to entertainment, social media reduces it to performance and dopamine loops. The metaphor of our age is no longer the flickering image, but the infinite scroll. And the scroll, unlike the TV show, never ends.
Each platform brings with it a new grammar of cognition. X is still defined by the written word, but in a way that favors brevity and snark. TikTok rewards emotion and mimicry. Instagram curates identity through visual branding. YouTube teaches us to talk quickly and passionately, and AI interfaces like ChatGPT threaten to flatten language into plausible-sounding filler that imitates thought without demanding it.
In Postman’s time, one could still imagine a crisis of democracy rooted in a shared set of spectacles — a Walter Cronkite broadcast, a presidential debate, a televised trial. Today, there is no common stage. The media environment is hyper-personalized and designed to flatter every user with the illusion of centrality. This is what Postman warned about when he lamented the loss of “the epistemology of the typographic mind” — a culture where ideas could be built, revised, tested, and transmitted in a coherent, cumulative way. What we have now is a hallucinated collective monologue, where everyone talks and no one listens.
But maybe not forever. Unlike in Postman’s time, there are signs that a counter-revolution is brewing. Curiously, it is Gen Z — the first generation raised entirely under the Internet’s Eye of Sauron — that now appears most divided over it. Among them, two distinct tribes are forming.
The first are the true children of the algorithm: grown-up iPad kids whose earliest memories involve the Black Mirror of screens and who now, as young adults, continue to live mediated lives. Their social life is dominated by apps, with their identities shaped by filters, likes, and short-form video confessionals. They date less, drink less, drive less, and often prefer the cocoon of home to the messy intimacy of in-person relationships.
They are also, not coincidentally, the loneliest cohort in modern American history. Their daily lives are saturated with stimuli, but starved of substance. Unlike their millennial predecessors, whose optimism was eventually battered into nihilism, many of these young people seem to have skipped straight to resignation.
And yet, within the same generational cohort, a surprising rebellion is emerging. A second group of Gen Z, equally fluent in the mechanics of digital life, is choosing to abstain from it. They are “rawdogging reality,” as the phrase goes — deleting social media, abandoning optimization, and seeking instead the solidity of old things. They knit. They golf. They go to church. They lift heavy weights and read heavy books. They quit dating apps and swapped TikTok for running or pickleball clubs. Part of it feels like aesthetic irony or a nostalgic affectation, yes, but there are hints of a scattered and half-formed countercultural movement.
In New York, members of the high school Luddite Club are now in college and are attracting converts to the tech-free lifestyle. On TikTok, paradoxically, videos under the #deinfluencing tag go viral by encouraging people to stop buying things. Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and other ritual-heavy faiths are seeing quiet revivals often led by twenty-somethings dressed like mid-century altar boys. The average age of the liturgy-heavy church I attend is mid-to-late 20s, and a group of friendly Gen-Zers in my neighborhood successfully convinced me to join an old social club.
Some cite moral clarity or traditional values; others cite a desire for structure, beauty, and meaning, all of which are notably absent online. Even the secular version of this backlash appears in odd places: in the preference for physical media, the resurgence of film cameras, the rise of “quiet luxury” over hyper-branding, and the revival of slow, analog hobbies once left for dead. Call it post-irony or post-digital asceticism, but the impulse is the same.
This rebellion, fractured and flickering, is one of the few hopeful signs in a culture otherwise anesthetized by its tools. Unlike the millennial generation, which largely absorbed technology as destiny — first in its techno-utopian promises, later in its gigified disappointments, these Generation Z refuseniks are not trying to reform the system. They’re walking away from it. That’s why the No Kings rallies often look like the world’s largest retiree convention. This new group’s politics, to the extent they have any, are not oriented toward revolution or regulation, but toward restraint, retreat, and restoration. They want silence. They want limits. And if there is any hope of clawing back a shared reality from the hall of mirrors that is the modern internet, it may lie with them. We can only hope.
