Return to Myth

Upending algorithmic culture

Our cultural malaise—despair, alienation, idleness—is rooted in the loss of myths, particularly in literature. Social media and consumer culture have replaced these guiding signposts with trivial, hollow imitations.

Last week, a nondescript young man sat beside me on the London Tube. Within moments, amidst the clatter and chatter, peals of strange orgiastic moaning arrived.

I am subtly nosey. I glanced over. On the young man’s iPhone screen was a cartoonish-female—inflated lips, inflated breasts, inflated behind—straddling her disposable lover. The hypnotized audience of one thumbed through a menagerie of flesh, as if reading The Spectator. In fairness to him, he turned down the volume, as modern etiquette demands.

We Londoners have an acronym for this strange behavior: NFL—‘Normal for London.’ Later that evening, another gentleman, encrusted in grime and brick dust, kicked off his work boots and splayed across the carriage seats. No problem. Then he opened TikTok. A cyclone of gabbing and mewling renewed itself every five seconds or so. The gentleman then placed his phone on his chest and closed his eyes for a well-earned snooze, his phone emitting digital lullabies.

What’s so strange about that, you wonder?

The same scene plays in a loop throughout this city. Like a modern Sisyphus, they scroll, scroll, and scroll. But what does this endless scrolling tell us about our culture—and what have we lost in the process?

These scenes are emblematic of something larger—a culture losing itself to hollow distractions and forgetting the more profound myths and stories that once guided us. Who or what can compete with that dopamine crack pipe psychically stitched to our palms? No wonder reading amongst the youth is dying out. No wonder adults routinely confess they don’t have the concentration span to read a book or even a long article.

At risk of sounding reactionary, I’ll offer a thesis: Smartphones, as they are today, are damaging our brains. They steal our ability to reflect, replacing it with compulsive novelty-seeking. Once tools for connection, phones now fracture our attention and isolate us from meaning. In a decade or two, social historians will charge these devilish devices with infantilizing culture, degrading us into hypnotized dopamine junkies.

But first, a confession. One year ago, I downloaded an app called Freedom designed to wean my junkie-self off the modern opium of the masses: our phones. Like all addicts, I swore that my little love affair was no big deal. Wrong. That app revealed the extent of my addiction: I drained an average six hours and forty-six minutes each day scrolling through the inanities of my fellow addicts. That figure is typical: the average Brit or American spends, much like me, six hours on their phone each day chasing that dopamine dragon.

At this rate, the future for reading and thoughtful culture looks bleak. Myths and literature offer not just entertainment but guidance—signposts for how to live, what to strive for, and how to endure existential struggles. Without them, we drift in a sea of meaningless novelty, tethered to algorithms but untethered from purpose.

Not so long ago, newspapers and magazines with millions of readers splashed expensively wrought words on what many now consider ‘elitist’ culture—serious novels, theatre, classical music, and film. What we now consider ‘high’ culture was once just culture. From Aristophanes to Arthur Miller, serious enquiry into the human condition was once the preserve of the many, not just the few. Today, high culture has been almost entirely replaced by popular culture, which appeals to our basest desires.

The steady screen-based erosion of this thoughtful, mature culture has all but dissolved our sense of collective identity. Literature and the arts once provided us with a window into the human condition. A guide to our very existence.

The breakdown of these shared norms is what Emile Durkheim called ‘anomie’—a state of alienation and social chaos. For Durkheim, anomie arises when society loses its shared norms and guiding myths.

In the algorithmic age, our collective rites of passage have been replaced by mindless novelty—always seeking, never finding.

Algorithms are designed that way. Some of our brightest minds now expend their intellectual energies on making apps more addictive. Our smartphones are designed to keep sucking away our attention. They rewire our brain so that we seek out novelty. What results is a lurid sea of ‘content’ consumed and forgotten the moment one swipes the screen. We see this especially prominent with the rise of Instagram reels or viral videos on X.

And what is the result of this culture of condiments and no food? An arrested people paralyzed by sterile slogans, mindless therapy-speak and childish myths. A replacement of the rites of passage and profound struggles that once defined our sense of being. Everywhere one looks, billboards dispense sugary platitudes.

In the early twentieth century, the Oxford literary don, F.R. Leavis, earned the mantle of mad, literary reactionary. Leavis’s warnings about the hypnotic allure of screens were prescient, even in his day. He feared a world where shallow entertainment replaced serious engagement—a world that, judging by my daily commute, seems to have arrived.

In his timeless essay, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, Leavis warns of the coming lobotomization of our culture. For Leavis, American cinema surrendered to “the cheapest emotional appeals” all the more poisonous because such films offered a “compellingly vivid allusion of actual life”. Leavis feared the power of “hypnotic receptivity” inherent in the screen. Unlike the mad old English don, I don’t despair.

After all, we are hardwired for myth and story. So, what is the solution? Reader, I’m sure that in this time of dizzying innovation, we could at least stop rigging algorithms to reward the base, the trivial, the lowest common denominator. Let’s be realistic: few will abandon their phones, at least for now. But we all have a choice at every moment as to how to spend our time. Take out that novel in your bag instead. Gaze out of the window. Find online content that stimulates your mind. Wage war against the algorithm by only tapping on enriching content. Wonder about the inner lives of your fellow passengers. And culture itself can be restored.

Not so long ago, a director smuggled ‘high’ culture into one of the most acclaimed TV shows ever. David Simon’s The Wire owes its wild success to the ancient Greeks. The Wire is a Greek tragedy set in modern-day Baltimore. The show’s antagonists are, like Medea, Achilles and Antigone, strapped to their fates. Unfettered capitalism, unbreakable bureaucracy, and the unforgiving drug trade are modern, dystopian Olympian gods smiting their doomed puppets at will. Thousands of years on from ancient Greece, and the formula still works: The Wire is compulsive viewing.

The wild success of The Wire shows that our hunger for meaning has not disappeared. Beneath the noise of algorithms, the ancient structures of myth and tragedy still resonate.

For Tennessee Williams, the essence of life is conflict. Our modern malaise stems from what Williams called, “the vacuity of a life without struggle.” In his masterful essay, The Catastrophe of Success, Tennessee reflects on the runaway success of his play, The Glass Menagerie. Fearful of the phoniness that follows fame, he warns against excessive comfort and distraction: “The heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict.” For Tennessee, that conflict is stitched in the “very struggle of creation.” Without conflict, “man is a sword cutting daisies.” Conflict is necessary to overcome, to create, and lastly, to become who we are.

The last sentence of that essay warns us that time is short and is slipping away while I write this and you read it. Without conflict, without struggle, without creation, we are swords cutting daisies. The struggle to reclaim our minds—and our myths—is a conflict worth fighting.

So, reader, either throw that phone out of the window, or put it to good use.

Christopher Gage is a satirist and journalist. He’s a postgraduate Sociology student at London School of Economics. He writes the weekly newsletter, Oxford Sour.

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