People often do what they know is bad for them or fail to do what they know is good. This kind of akrasia or lack of willpower or self-control is now being seen in digital technology—or are we being forced into digital tech against our will?
Humans are often described as rational beings, which means that we should make the best decisions possible with the information available. Experience amply demonstrates that this is often not so. Philosophers have a term for doing what you know is bad for you or not doing what you know is good: akrasia. From the root “kratos” for strength or power (the same root that gives us “democracy,” demos-kratos or “people-power”), scholars recognize two different kinds of akrasia: practical and epistemic.
Practical akrasia, the more common type, refers to behavior; it is evident when a person “acts in a way she believes she ought not to act” (Horowitz 2014: 718), that is, when a person does X “intentionally while judging that, all things considered, it would be better to do Y than X” (Vahid 2015: 296). Familiar examples include smoking when all evidence says that it is unhealthy, eating a piece of cake when you know it will ruin your diet, or committing robbery when you are well aware that robbery is criminal and hurtful. Epistemic akrasia, on the other hand, means believing a claim when you really should know better; some scholars assert that there is no such thing as epistemic akrasia, yet we encounter it every day in Holocaust denial, vaccine skepticism, and flat-earthism.
Akrasia, as the word suggests, is often attributed to weakness of will or lack of willpower and self-control (the kratos in akrasia is strength or power over the self). However, the problem is not as simple as that. There are multiple reasons why someone does what they understand they should not. Addiction is one explanation; another is a particularly strong desire (for nicotine, cake, or someone else’s property).
Is it sheer akrasia to forge ahead with ever more powerful and invasive digital technologies when we know—and should know—about their deleterious potential?
Further, non-mainstream values and associations (for instance, membership in a criminal gang) or competing interests and impulses within the person (losing weight versus the taste of cake), cost-benefit differentials (for instance, you want the pleasure of cocaine more than you care about its hazards), or short-term exceptions (what we might call interest or values holidays) account for many of our seemingly akratic actions. Finally, to tie together practical and epistemic akrasia, you may believe that vaccines are more dangerous than beneficial, or you may believe that they are part of some grand conspiracy.
Many of these forces figure into a specifically modern kind of akrasia, namely, technological akrasia. By this term, we mean using, developing, and promoting technology, even when there is a good chance it is more harmful than helpful. Humans have a long history of resisting new technologies because of their anticipated or experienced negative effects. The early 19th-century Luddites are best known as opponents of technological innovation, concerned that manufacturing machinery would ruin artisans’ skills, reduce their wages, and destroy their jobs altogether.
In the mid-twentieth century, television was assumed to rot the brain (it was, after all, the “vast wasteland,” as Newton Minnow diagnosed in 1961). According to Plato, Socrates even bemoaned the invention of writing for corroding memory and creating a false sense of knowledge. Of course, today “technology” generally means digital technology in its various guises: computers, the internet, cellphones, video games, social media, artificial intelligence, robots, etc. American and global society seem intent on barreling forward with digital technology despite its known and suspected detrimental impacts.
This impact is both individual and collective/societal. At the individual level, psychologists and media critics have warned about the mental and social damage of digital technology. One of the profound negative effects is shortened attention spans: media scholar Gloria Mark noted that 20 years ago, the average attention span was 2.5 minutes, but by 2012 it had shrunk to 75 seconds, and more recently to 47 seconds (American Psychological Association 2023).
But that is only one of myriad undesirable effects. In a 2023 review article, Mathura Shanmugasundaram and Arunkumar Tamilarasu report that digital technology (depending on the intensity of usage) contributes to “attentional overload” and consequently “continuous partial attention” in which we constantly divide our attention between multiple sources or tasks, resulting in “superficial understanding of information and a reduced ability to concentrate on any one of them” (2023: 2). Indeed, they argue that digital technology features such as “notifications, alerts, personalized content, reminders and gamification” are intentionally designed to entice and distract us.
They also find that high use of digital technology is associated with ADHD. More worrisomely, they explain that researchers have identified a condition called “digital dementia” or “the decline in cognitive abilities” expressed as “memory loss, attention deficit, reduced ability to communicate, and impaired decision-making abilities” (3). These cognitive changes progress to decreased concentration, shallow thought, lower comprehension—many teachers already complain that students cannot read or understand a passage of more than a few sentences, if even that—and “skewed perception of reality” (5).
Social media are becoming the most ubiquitous of digital technologies, particularly for the younger generation who have never known a world without them. A summary by Cleveland Clinic (2024) maintains that social media—which theoretically make us more connected and more informed—actually tends to make teen users more isolated, more misinformed, and more depressed. Other symptoms linked to social media consumption are anxiety, irritability, sleep disruption, lower self-esteem, and lack of focus and concentration. Steve Lundeberg (2025) adds that the top 25 percent of adult social media users are, perversely, “twice as likely to experience loneliness.”
Loneliness is as much a social as an individual/psychological problem, and observers like Robert Putnam have warned of increasing social isolation among Americans for years (as in his famous 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community); social media have only exacerbated a trend already underway. To make a bad situation worse, social media introduce or increase the potential for (cyber)bullying, invasion of privacy, breaches of confidentiality, unrealistic expectations of personal beauty or lifestyle, and misleading or blatantly false and dangerous information, not to mention foolish and antisocial “challenges” or dares like swallowing Tide Pods, drinking excessive amounts of Benadryl, or kicking in people’s doors (see https://www.smartsocial.com/dangerous-challenges for 25 stupid social media challenges).
All of these adverse effects, plus many more, apply to artificial intelligence (AI). Mike Thomas (2026) names 18 risks and dangers from AI, some personal, others social, and still others environmental. Among these are, as many latter-day Luddites rightly fear, job loss (not only individual jobs but entire job categories); growing socioeconomic inequality (and perhaps social deviance, as people don’t know what to do with their new-found idleness); privacy violations and surveillance; algorithmic bias against certain types of people; deepfakes and information manipulation; increased criminal activity like scams and data theft; market volatility as bad actors manipulate the economy; and of course environmental degradation via exorbitant electricity and water use, air pollution, and land expropriation by data centers.
To make matters worse, information scientists have identified akrasia in AI itself, in which large language models and similar “agentic systems” fail “to act in accordance with their own previously established ‘judgments’”—for instance, an AI that previously “demonstrated correct judgment…subsequently fails to reproduce its own answer under alternate but related prompting conditions” (Emergent Mind 2025).
The question, then, is, in view of all that we know about the drawbacks and psychological, social, and environmental costs of digital technologies, why are we rushing ahead with them? Granted, there are voices here and there pushing back or calling for slowing down, whether this means more regulation or banning the construction of massive new data centers. But the overall trajectory appears to be toward more digital technology, with greater and greater penetration into our daily lives.
First, it bears noting that three kinds of people are the most enthusiastic boosters of digital technologies: scientists (who want to see how far they can push knowledge and innovation), corporate leaders (who appreciate the potential for higher profits with fewer workers), and government officials (who grasp the national security and especially military applications of AI, drones, autonomous weapons, and maybe someday robot armies). Most of the rest of the population is, as Neil Postman (1985) intoned four decades ago, literally “amusing ourselves to death” with video games, web searches, TikTok videos, ChatGPT, and a plethora of other technologies we treat as nothing more than toys.
Is it sheer akrasia to forge ahead with ever more powerful and invasive digital technologies when we know—and should know—about their deleterious potential? The question returns to the problem of akrasia in general. Some people really do not know (although it is hard to believe that scientists and CEOs do not grasp the likely consequences of their actions; then again, that did not stop them from developing nuclear weapons or other deadly tech). Others, just like those who smoke or eat too much cake, know but do not care: they may consider the negatives exaggerated or, if so, worth the cost. Some, it is fair to say, are already addicted; others know no other reality, since digital technology has always been a part of their lives.
In the end, by invoking scientists, CEOs, and elected officials, we realize that we, as individual actors and citizens, are not entirely in control of our actions or our fates. What looks like akrasia is often more akin to surrender, to being overpowered by forces much greater and more pervasive than our individual wills. An example is presented in a recent Harper’s article, which discusses the attempt by a Michigan town to block data center construction, which was thwarted by legal threats from the data center company (Cockburn 2026). In America and the wider world, it is not always our personal willpower that leads us down ruinous roads; it is the superior power and will of players much bigger than us. If there is akrasia—lack of control—it is our inability to control these players and the interests they pursue.
References
American Psychological Association. 2023. “Speaking of Psychology: Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD.” https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans, accessed May 23, 2026.
Cleveland Clinic. 2024. “How Social Media Can Negatively Affect Your Child.” https://health.clevelandclinic.org/dangers-of-social-media-for-youth, accessed May 23, 2026.
Cockburn, Andrew. 2026. “The Data Center Divide: Why Politicians are Squandering the Anti-AI Backlash.” Harper’s (June): 55-61.
Emergent Mind. 2025. “Akrasia Benchmark in AI.” https://www.emergentmind.com/topics/akrasia-benchmark, accessed May 23, 2026.
Horowitz, Sophie. 2014. “Epistemic Akrasia.” Noûs 48 (4): 718-44.
Lundeberg, Steve. 2025. “Loneliness in U.S. Adults Linked with Amount, Frequency of Social Media Use.” https://health.oregonstate.edu/news-and-stories/2025-10/loneliness-us-adults-linked-amount-frequency-social-media-use, accessed May 23, 2026.
Postman, Neil. 1985. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin.
Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Shanmugasundaram, Mathura and Arunkumar Tamilarasu. 2023. “The Impact of Digital Technology, Social Media, and Artificial Intelligence on Cognitive Functions: A Review.” Frontiers in Cognition 2: 1203077. doi: 10.3389/fcogn.2023.1203077
Thomas, Mike. 2026. “18 Risks and Dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI).” https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/risks-of-artificial-intelligence, accessed May 23, 2026.
Vahid, Hamid. 2015. “Epistemic Akrasia, Higher-Order Evidence, and Charitable Belief Attribution.”
International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 5: 296-314.
