Board Editorial: The Cost of Disconnecting

All of us are familiar with Ms. Brown’s Wednesday phone-free campaign, backed by Phone Down by Lost Kings. Although some may find it amusing, the campaign comes from good intentions. Most students, including many Scroll board members, have tried some version of escaping their phones already—screen time limits, notification blockers, “Do Not Disturb”, deleting social media then redownloading it a few weeks later. As stated in a Pew research, average time on social platforms has dropped around 10% from its 2022 peak, with the steepest decline among 16 to 24 year olds. 

The desire to escape phones itself has created an industry. Digital wellbeing apps, subscription-based blockers, dumbphones sold at quite a premium, and wellness retreats built around “disconnection” are all trying to turn restraint into a revenue stream. According to research published by The Conversation, the digital detox market is currently valued at 62 billion dollars and projected to reach over 200 billion dollars by 2033. A 2026 study in the European Journal of Marketing describes this process as a co-optation—digital technology repositions itself now as a protector of our attention rather than its destroyer, and the economy that created the exhaustion sells you the retreat as well.

That contradiction seems to be uniquely modern, but it is not. 

There is this man, Edward Bernays, whose work influences modern consumer culture. Before Bernays, you bought a car simply because you needed transportation, and you bought soap to be clean. His philosophies changed advertising permanently. He connected products to personal identities and emotions, and now the product itself matters less than its message. His most famous campaign rebranded cigarettes as “torches of freedom,” breaking taboo around women smoking and linking smoking to female liberation. He staged a publicity stunt at the 1929 Easter Sunday Parade, arranging for fashionable young women to light cigarettes in front of the press, transforming cigarettes into a political symbol.

This became a hinge moment in the history of consumerism. Before Bernays, you consumed to live. After Bernays, you consumed to be. Sociologist David Riesman, in his 1950 study The Lonely Crowd, described this broader shift as a move from an “inner-directed” society to an “other-directed” one. In an inner-directed culture, identity comes from personal values, discipline, faith, and community. In an other-directed culture, identity is shaped increasingly by social approval and perception. 

Once people began consuming to express who they were, even resistance can become something that could be packaged and sold. In the 1960s, a counterculture rejected consumerism entirely, yet within a decade, businesses sold the hippie aesthetic back through fashion, music, and lifestyle products. Minimalism followed; the desire to own less was turned into an aesthetic and monetized. Then mindfulness—a contemplative practice centuries old—was absorbed into what the Global Wellness Institute now estimates as a 4.5 trillion dollar wellness industry.  

What you have to know is that Bernays wasn’t only selling products; he was a propaganda specialist. He wrote that “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” and someone will always shape what the public thinks and feels—that it might as well be done deliberately. His insight was that you could sell a version of reality, and if the version was compelling enough emotionally, most people would stick with it. That idea did not die with him, which brings us to today, when that idea arguably takes its full form in social media. The platforms automated and perfected Bernay’s logic. Algorithms sell you attention, rage, identity, belonging, and some enemies. 

The content itself hollowed out as well. AI-written articles now outnumber those written by humans. According to peer-reviewed journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, consumers no longer trust online content, and their preference for AI-generated material has dropped. When you scroll, you come across content produced by no one in particular and for no one in particular—just optimized for your engagement. 

So the people leave, or they try to. They download the blocker and book the retreat. Which brings us back to that $62 billion industry, and to the pattern underneath it, that every genuine human need eventually finds a price tag. When that need emerges as a resistance—someone notices it and recognizes its market value, packages it, and sells the identity of opting out back to the people who originally opt out. The aesthetic changes, whether you look back at the hippie, the minimalist, or the mindfulness movements. The commercial “detox” industry now thrives because personal solutions are easy to sell, whereas systematic change is hard. 

Once you see the mechanism, it is difficult to unsee it. And frankly, it's everywhere, not just on screens.