Jonathan Haidt has emerged once again from his bunker of peer-reviewed despair to remind us that our children are being processed into digital slurry by the unblinking eye of the algorithm. It is his brand, after all. The man has made a lucrative career out of telling us that the sky is falling, primarily because we can't stop looking at our phones to see if the sky is trending. His latest proclamation—that if we failed to conquer the 'social media' beast, we are surely doomed in the arena of Artificial Intelligence—is the kind of profound-sounding defeatism that wins you standing ovations at Davos and terrified nods at PTA meetings. It is the intellectual equivalent of a lifeguard watching a cruise ship sink and remarking that, perhaps, people should have practiced their breaststroke.

Let’s unpack the 'we' in 'we can't win.' Who exactly is this collective 'we'? Is it the aging cohort of social psychologists who still think a 'vibe' is something you find at a semi-underground jazz club? Or is it the broader human collective, currently busy filming themselves eating laundry detergent or arguing about the political affiliations of a cartoon dog? Haidt operates under the charmingly naive assumption that there was a 'win' condition to begin with. Social media didn't 'defeat' us; it merely revealed us. It pulled back the curtain on the average human mind and found it to be a chaotic, validation-seeking void. Expecting to 'win' against a mirror that reflects your own stupidity is the ultimate exercise in human vanity. The Left uses these arguments to demand a more refined form of censorship to 'protect' us, while the Right uses them to bemoan the loss of 'tradition' while simultaneously posting 400 times a day on whatever knock-off platform their chosen billionaire has built for them. Both sides are functionally identical: they are addicts complaining about the quality of the heroin.

Now, Haidt pivots his gaze toward the generative AI horizon, and predictably, he sees a tsunami. If a 140-character limit and a heart-shaped icon were enough to fracture the collective psyche and birth a generation of anxious hermits, imagine what a sentient toaster with access to every library in history will do. His logic is simple: if we couldn't regulate a 'Like' button without turning the world into a polarized dumpster fire, we have zero chance of managing an intelligence that can simulate Shakespeare while simultaneously planning the efficient harvest of our carbon. He is probably right, but being right about the end of the world is a thankless job that mostly involves being ignored by people who are busy downloading an app that makes them look like a 1920s flapper.

The irony, of course, is that Haidt represents the very 'intellectual' class that facilitated this slide into the abyss. These are the people who believe that 'conversation' and 'nuance' are magic spells that can stop the cold, hard logic of profit-driven engineering. They think that by writing enough op-eds, they can convince a silicon valley sociopath to stop printing money. It’s adorable, really. On the Left, we have the performative hall monitors, screeching for 'safety' while they curate their own digital echo chambers to ensure no stray thought ever disturbs their narcissism. On the Right, we have the reactionary luddites, screaming about 'freedom' while they hand their biometric data to any corporation that promises to let them be mean to strangers. It’s a snake eating its own tail, and Haidt is there to measure the diameter of the snake’s gullet with a calipers and a look of scholarly concern.

Then we have the 'Forkiverse'—that wonderful tech-bro buzzword for the inevitable fragmentation of everything. As the centralized platforms rot under the weight of their own toxicity, we are told to flee into the decentralized woods. It’s the digital equivalent of moving to a commune because you didn't like the local grocery store. It doesn't solve the problem; it just makes the problem smaller, weirder, and harder to track. And 'Vibecoding'? It’s the ultimate admission of intellectual surrender. We can’t explain why things are happening anymore, we can't quantify the decay, so we just assign things a 'vibe' and call it a day. It’s the linguistic white flag of a species that has given up on causality and settled for aesthetics.

Haidt’s alarmism is just another product in the attention economy he claims to despise. He sells panic to the already panicked. He offers the comfort of a diagnosis to a patient who is already terminal. We aren’t 'losing' to AI; we are simply being replaced by something more efficient at being us. If AI can generate a more convincing, more inflammatory, and more 'engaging' outraged tweet than a human can, why do we need the human? Haidt’s fear is rooted in the loss of the 'human element,' but he fails to see that the 'human element' is exactly what’s causing the mess. We are a species of vanity-driven, short-sighted primates who built a god out of silicon because we were bored of talking to each other and tired of our own thoughts. If the Forkiverse is the future, it’s just a million little rooms where we can all sit alone and vibecode our way into extinction. Haidt will be there, of course, giving a keynote about how we really should have seen it coming.