Your Phone Is Doing Exactly What Tocqueville Predicted in 1840 - why this debate, and why these debaters
Two philosophers who actually corresponded argue about whether the social media lawsuits fix the problem or just treat the symptom.
Why This Topic
The recent wave of lawsuits against Meta, TikTok, Snap, and other platforms is the kind of legal story that looks like one thing on the surface and is actually something much bigger underneath. On the surface: states and school districts suing tech companies for designing products that psychologically harm children. Underneath: a genuinely unsettled philosophical question about the relationship between individual freedom, democratic society, and the systems we build to connect people.
The specific trigger is damning enough on its own. Internal documents from Meta show that the company’s own researchers identified serious psychological harm in teenage girls, including depression, anxiety, and in some cases suicidal ideation, and that leadership chose not to act on those findings. More than forty states have now joined litigation arguing that this constitutes fraud, negligence, and deliberate targeting of a population that cannot meaningfully consent to the product being sold to them.
But the question we wanted to ask was not just whether Meta did something legally actionable. The question was: what kind of problem is this, really? Is it a bad actor problem that law can fix, or something deeper that law can only partially address? That question turned out to have two very good, very incompatible answers.
Why Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville spent nine months in America in 1831 and came back with two of the most prescient books in the history of political thought. Democracy in America is usually cited for its observations about American institutions, but the part that is most relevant here is his theory of soft despotism, which he developed in Volume Two.
Tocqueville worried that democracy produces a particular kind of unfreedom, one that looks nothing like tyranny. The old tyrant broke men. The new power, he wrote, softens and bends and guides them. It does not coerce but compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies. Citizens become isolated individuals who have given up their connection to each other and, in exchange for comfort and guidance, surrender their capacity for self-governance to whatever power offers to organize their lives for them.
The reason Tocqueville is the right voice for this debate is that he is describing, with striking accuracy, the design philosophy of the modern attention economy. The algorithm does not force anyone to do anything. It compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies. It offers comfort and stimulation in exchange for attention and data. His 1840 vocabulary maps almost directly onto the 2024 product roadmap.
He also had something specific to say about the role of voluntary associations and local institutions in democratic health, arguing in Democracy in America that these were the mechanisms by which citizens developed the habits of self-governance that made them resistant to manipulation. The dismantling of those institutions, in his framework, is not incidental to the social media problem. It is the precondition that made the social media problem possible.
Why Mill
John Stuart Mill is the right counterpart not because he disagrees with everything Tocqueville says, but because he disagrees with the conclusions Tocqueville draws from what they both observe. Mill’s harm principle, stated in On Liberty in 1859, is the foundational document of liberal legal theory: society may constrain individual liberty only to prevent harm to others. Applied to social media, this principle is not vague. It is precise.
Children cannot meaningfully consent, which means the platforms have been operating without valid consent from a legally and developmentally incapable population. The internal documents establish that the companies knew this. The harm principle produces a clear verdict: this is actionable, the liability is real, and the remedy is legal accountability.
Mill is also the right voice for a more complicated reason. He was not naively optimistic about democratic society. His essay on the tyranny of the majority in On Liberty shows that he understood, in a way that overlaps significantly with Tocqueville, that conformity and the suppression of independent thought are genuine dangers in liberal democracy. He and Tocqueville actually corresponded, and the documented mutual respect between them makes their disagreement here more interesting, not less. They are not enemies. They are two people who looked at the same problem and drew different conclusions about what follows from it.
Who Else We Considered
Herbert Marcuse vs. Friedrich Hayek was our first instinct and honestly the stronger ideological matchup. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is almost prescient about the attention economy, and Hayek’s anti-paternalism would have produced a cleaner left-right battle. We set it aside because Hayek died in 1992, which puts him outside the range of thinkers we use, and because the Tocqueville-Mill pairing has the additional advantage of documented historical relationship.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau vs. Mill was a serious contender. Rousseau’s concept of amour-propre, the corrosive self-comparison that civilization manufactures, maps onto social media dynamics in a genuinely interesting way. We held it back because Rousseau’s argument tends toward “civilization itself is the problem,” which makes it hard to stay grounded in the specifics of the court cases. He is the right philosopher for a more abstract episode about whether modern life itself is the addiction. We are saving that one.
William James vs. B.F. Skinner was considered briefly because the variable reward schedule that makes social media addictive is literally Skinnerian, and James on habit formation provides a fascinating counter. The problem is that Skinner is more scientist than political philosopher, which narrows the debate in ways that reduce the fireworks.
John Dewey vs. Walter Lippmann was a late contender. Their documented disagreement about democratic competence in the 1920s has striking relevance here. We may revisit this pairing for a separate episode on media and public opinion.
Why Each Man Takes the Position He Does
Tocqueville’s position in this debate flows directly from his central argument in Democracy in America, and specifically from the chapters on individualism and soft despotism in Volume Two. His claim is not that the tech companies are uniquely evil. His claim is that they discovered and industrialized a vulnerability that democratic society had been developing for two centuries. The isolation that results from the dissolution of aristocratic community ties, the desperate need for connection that follows, the susceptibility to any power that offers to organize attention and provide stimulation, these are all things he described as the structural tendency of democratic societies. The platforms did not create the condition. They found it and built a business model around it.
This is why Tocqueville supports the lawsuit but refuses to treat it as sufficient. In his framework, the legal remedy addresses a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the absence of the associational life and local institutions that give democratic citizens the internal resistance to manipulation that they cannot develop in isolation. You cannot legislate that resistance into existence. You have to cultivate it, and the cultivation requires the kind of diagnosis that goes well beyond anything a court can provide.
Mill’s position is constrained by his own principles in interesting ways. The harm principle requires him to support the litigation fully on the children’s behalf, because children cannot consent and the harm is documented. He has no principled basis for hesitation there, and he does not hesitate. The more complicated question is what his framework says about adult users, and this is where the debate gets genuinely contested. Mill believes in the capacity of individuals, given accurate information and real alternatives, to make meaningful choices. His response to the adult dependency problem is transparency requirements, interoperability mandates, and legal accountability for the systems that impaired choice in the first place.
Where Mill concedes ground, and it is authentic to his actual writing that he would, is on the question of whether partial reforms tend to exhaust the energy for structural reform. His own analysis of the Reform Acts in England shows that he understood this pattern. He wins that concession at the cost of narrowing his disagreement with Tocqueville considerably, which is part of what makes the debate interesting: they are closer together than they initially appear, and the remaining gap is genuinely irresolvable given their starting premises.
A Note on the Sources
The primary sources for Tocqueville are Democracy in America, both volumes, with particular reliance on the chapters “Of Individualism in Democratic Countries” and “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear” in Volume Two. His letters to Mill, several of which are collected in the Selected Letters on Politics and Society edited by Roger Boesche, provided additional texture for the way he framed his disagreements with English liberalism. The phrase we draw on most directly, about soft despotism compressing and enervating and extinguishing and stupefying, is from Book Four of Volume Two and is one of the most accurate descriptions of algorithmic engagement optimization ever written, by someone who died in 1859.
The primary sources for Mill are On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and his Autobiography, which is useful for understanding the emotional weight he placed on individual development and self-cultivation. The harm principle as stated in On Liberty is clear enough to apply almost directly to the court cases without significant translation. His correspondence with Tocqueville, and his review of Democracy in America, show that he engaged seriously with Tocqueville’s concerns about conformity while maintaining his fundamental confidence in the capacity of informed individuals to govern themselves.
One honest constraint: Mill’s position on the East India Company, which employed him for thirty-five years, is philosophically uncomfortable in the context of a debate about manipulation and consent. He defended the Company’s administration of India on grounds that resemble paternalistic justifications he would reject in other contexts. We let Tocqueville land that punch in the like-and-subscribe section because it is historically accurate and because Mill would have found it genuinely difficult to answer cleanly.
What Comes Next
We are working on several upcoming debates that have emerged directly from questions raised in this one. The Rousseau vs. Mill episode on whether civilization itself is the addiction is on the list. We are also developing a Dewey vs. Lippmann debate on media and democratic competence that has become considerably more timely in recent years.
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