The devil’s finest trick, per Charles Baudelaire, was (is) to persuade you that he doesn’t exist. America unwittingly took a Faustian bargain back around 2012 with Satan’s offer of the smartphone as his portal to an alternative universe. Well it’s foreclosure time for our youth in the form of a mental-health crisis. Congratulations, America, your children are no longer your own.

We discussed three years ago the way machine-learning algorithms subliminally insinuate themselves below the conscious level into our very souls via social media. View the whole lot of them – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram – in terms of extraction machines whether for commercial exploitation or ideological conditioning.

Consenting adults may be fair game. What’s new and the topic for our session is the dawning realization that the devil’s workshop actually rewires the brain during puberty. There is then no turning back. Consent has been programmed in.

The Chinese are targeting America’s soft underbelly having perfected that smart bomb first developed by our own Silicon Valley (click: The Insidious Effects Of TikTok On The Human Brain). Well, Peggy Noonan just introduced the work of the widely admired social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (click: Can We Save Our Children From Smartphones?) and his new book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic of Mental Illness” as he explores the simultaneous rise in teen mental illness across various countries, attributing it to a seismic shift from a “play-based childhood” to a phone-based childhood beginning in the early 2010s (Haidt Interview).

But don’t cry for that generation having been “washed out to sea” or, for that matter, our very own future when you can just focus on the fact that Mark Zuckerberg, just now having surpassed Elon Musk in net worth, has reportedly constructed his doom bunker in Hawaii. There’s some mighty fine irony there when you discover that he and his billionaire founders knew full well from the outset they were creating something addictive that would “exploit a vulnerability in human psychology.” How befitting it would be were that gilded underground bunker to become his final resting place with him being so close to his master after a career marked by selling souls.

Those still among the human race might want to reflect on the way the continual, shallow stream of content has supplanted our once-vivid existence, distorting our view of time, self, and the world (I Used To Be A Human Being).