Podcast · Futucast #465 · 2024-07-01 · 1:04:24 · In Finnish
Social Media and the Anxious Generation — Sami Miettinen on Futucast #465
Published as “Sami Miettinen & Mikko Alasaarela | Sosiaalinen media ja ahdistunut sukupolvi #465”
Hosted by: Isak Rautio
The same three people, the same book, the same studio, the same afternoon — and a conversation that goes somewhere else. Negotiator 258 was recorded first; this one picks up where that left off and, as Rautio predicts on air, wanders into different territory.
The pre-roll argument about games
It opens mid-thought, on the question Miettinen wanted more of: is a game’s addictiveness the default, and is passive consumption simply the easier thing to build? Alasaarela’s answer is a friction theory — whatever produces addiction most easily is what gets built. Somebody may win by other means, but it is harder, so passivity wins the market.
From which Miettinen asks the more interesting question: we have built games that are extremely good at getting young men to cooperate at killing each other. Could you build something equally addictive where the cooperation produces something positive?
His own history complicates his position and he says so. He once played in Finland’s best Clash of Clans team — twenty-nine badges, real collective effort — and there was genuine community in it. Rautio’s counter is that it too was conquest and violence. Neither treats that as disqualifying: Rautio played airsoft as a child, which simulates shooting your friends, and it hurts just enough to be a real game with unwritten rules you have to learn. Basketball and football do the same thing more positively.
Miettinen’s parental rule was cartoon violence at most; otherwise his daughters played what they liked, and he considers the skills real. One of them he got playing Baldur’s Gate 2 as a teenager, is now a working doctor, and currently suffers mainly from a laptop that will not run the sequel — which her father has already finished.
Haidt, restated for a different room
Alasaarela restates the thesis for Futucast’s audience: Haidt’s goal was to move from correlation to causation, and to show that smartphones affect boys and girls through different mechanisms.
Rautio’s own reading, which is more structural than in the sister episode, has two parts. Young people now live in distorted communities: the ones that used to matter have shrunk while very large digital ones have grown, and children are being raised by arbitrary people around the world who managed to get their attention, usually by extreme means. And you are never alone as a child. Previously the school day ended when you left; if you wanted to avoid your bullies you went somewhere else. Now everything is on Snapchat, which is why the experience of loneliness has risen so sharply — the social medium turned out not to be social.
Miettinen’s addition is that the stalker need not even be a person: it can be the expectations of the virtual world, the self-loathing, the rabbit holes you jump into yourself.
On games versus social media Rautio makes the distinction Haidt makes: games carry immediate interactivity — you are usually on a voice channel with your friends, which is closer to natural interaction than posting and waiting. What they lack is the other thing. The example is a pickup football match where the ball almost crosses the line: the attacking side says goal, the defending side says no goal, and the point is not the ball, it is how the children resolve it between themselves. A game has the rules coded in and settles it for you.
The RC-car experiment
The best single piece of evidence in either episode is Alasaarela’s, and it is homemade.
A wellbeing influencer he was talking to mentioned giving his son a tablet to watch remote-control car videos, a shared hobby. Alasaarela asked whether he let the algorithm choose everything after the first video. He did. So they ran it.
Video one: genuinely good, fun, useful for a five-year-old. Video three, purely algorithmic: pack of dogs chasing RC car. By the fifth or sixth: explosions on RC cars. It did not take many steps, and the father concluded on the spot that the algorithm would no longer decide what his child watched.
The generalisation is the important part. The recommendation engine is not trying to radicalise anyone; its only objective is to keep you in the chair, because that is where the advertising money is. But the fastest way to hold attention in the first three seconds is a strong emotional trigger, and stronger triggers work better — so the examples drift steadily outward. A mild interest in vegetarianism ends in militant veganism; the political version ends on one edge or the other; the girls’ version starts at glitter and arrives at anorexia content. Alasaarela cites the New York Times piece headlined on how YouTube radicalised Brazil as the documented case.
Boredom, long form and the anxiety itself
Miettinen’s proposed counter-measure is unfashionable and simple: lengthen the format. Everyone still listening to this conversation, he notes, has held their attention for a long time — probably while walking a dog or cooking, which is fine. Children need the same desensitisation, and he observes from his own household that sitting through even a good film has become painful. Audiobooks work well as a substitute because the audio channel is strong enough when a secondary activity absorbs the restlessness.
Which produces the episode’s sharpest formulation. The book is called The Anxious Generation, and Miettinen argues the anxiety is the mechanism: it is the negative feeling that makes you need to do something quickly, that makes you a consumer of short video and snack content. Remove it and you get resilience, antifragility, concentration, and the capacity to change things.
Rautio supplies the neurochemical footnote, and Alasaarela the correction that dopamine is a neurotransmitter rather than a hormone. Haidt’s one-liner is that dopamine is popularly misunderstood as the feel-good chemical, when the dominant sensation after a hit is not that was satisfying but I want more — which is exactly what the algorithms exploit, together with random reward: unpredictable, variable payoffs, which produce the fastest addiction known.
What happened to boys
Miettinen raises Haidt’s hikikomori — the young man entirely content in a poor life inside his parents’ ecosystem — and the incel-adjacent version beside it. What is missing is the antifragile route into healthy adulthood, which for a heterosexual man historically ran through wanting to be interesting to women: you had to demonstrate status, capability or at least potential, which in practice meant cleaning your room, exercising, studying and making an effort. His genuine puzzlement is why the hikikomori has become the more attractive option.
Rautio’s caution is that this discussion has been pushed around by the culture war into blame and deflection, and that the strongest statistical correlation remains between having romantic experience and a range of other outcomes.
The family unit that was supposed to replace it
The longest stretch, and the most careful. Finland has one of the world’s lowest ages of leaving home — 19 — partly because strong social safety nets remove the need for loyalty to the family that raised you, and because social mobility is exceptionally high, so there is little reason to stay in the back room the way an Italian might. The cost is that the tie is cut somewhat cleanly and a certain inherited cultural capital is missing, which is then supposed to be replaced by finding a partner and building your own.
Miettinen’s view of what a healthy version looks like is explicitly not about marriage or heteronormativity: it is a commitment through which two people become a unit that pools resources and shares risk, so that when one takes a larger risk the other covers the flank. What he sees instead is individualism producing very weak cohabitation from which no commitment ever emerges.
Alasaarela’s account of why is demographic. Around 70 per cent of divorces are now initiated by women. Women’s education level has risen substantially, the traditional division has ended, and on average there is no longer an equally educated man to be found — while expectations of men’s contribution to the partnership have risen at the same time. The gap between expectation and contribution is what produces the dissatisfaction: both may bring the same money, but one carries much more of the children and the household, because men have found the new role harder to adopt.
Miettinen raises meta-work as the concept worth teaching — the invisible management layer of who decides what gets done — and notes it cuts both ways: there can be a reluctance to give up the monopoly over that layer, which leaves a nominally equal partnership running as a command relationship. Both agree that the missing skill is arguing well: people fail to recognise their own triggers, run the same fight repeatedly, and now find giving up easier than before, because the social expectation of permanence has gone.
Rautio’s counterweight is worth recording: a household of constant conflict is not obviously better for a child than two separate ones, since the child learns nothing healthy and may be used as an instrument. Neither treats the nuclear family as the required answer — only that some reason to have children has to exist, and smartphones, dogs and everything else are good reasons not to.
Where it ends
Rautio asks the closing question: since we are not going back, what could actually be changed?
Alasaarela’s answer widens to the whole frame. This is a competition for attention and for resources, and the strongest wins; the question is what is strongest in future. He cites Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0: once AI is good enough, we will hand over decision-making willingly, because the machine’s decision is experienced as better than our own. We are, he argues, already close — we have already ceded a great deal of our decision-making, our lives and our time to algorithms. Whether synthetic intelligence eventually dominates the cognitive layer to the point where humans are its appendages is, in his view, a fully possible scenario on an unknown timeline; and even now, people frequently do not act in their own interest because of what has been done to their attention.
From the same session: Neuvottelija's own episode
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