Liviu Poenaru April 2026 No, we are not facing only an erosion of epistemic trust, but an epistemic shift. The problem is not simply that people trust less; it is that they increasingly trust differently. The collapse of confidence in institutions, science, journalism, images, and expert systems does not produce a population of lucid skeptics calmly examining evidence. More often, it produces subjects who are epistemically disoriented and therefore newly available to substitu

Excerpt from L. Poenaru, LOST IN SELF-CONSUMPTION. Blackout Selection and the Anti-Darwinian Regime of Extraction (in press, Cambridge Scholars) What kind of system selects individuals only to erode the very capacities it depends on? What form of selection no longer aims at preservation, stabilization, or reproduction, but instead organizes the progressive depletion of those it identifies as most functional? And what does it mean, biologically and structurally, to live with

What kind of technology claims to connect the world while quietly training it to disintegrate from within? Social media are atomic bombs with a slow temporal logic: they do not flatten cities in a second, which is precisely why they remain socially acceptable. Their devastation is cleaner, more profitable, and easier to deny. Instead of immediate ruins, they produce chronic erosion: of attention, of sleep, of self-worth, of trust, of developmental stability. The usual defense

What if the most dangerous shift is not that machines produce falsehoods, but that they produce credibility without ever passing through truth? The empirical trigger for this reflection lies in a report published in Nature by Chris Stokel-Walker (2026), documenting a controlled epistemic contamination: researchers deliberately fabricated a fictitious disease, Bixonimania , embedded it within counterfeit academic articles, and subsequently observed that several AI chatbots re

Liviu Poenaru, PhD What if Global [Dis]order is no longer primarily produced by external conflicts, but by the progressive internalization of validation systems embedded in everyday interactions with artificial intelligence? Sycophancy - the tendency of AI systems to excessively agree with users' beliefs, including inaccurate or biased ones - signals a transformation in epistemic regulation. Instead of generating contradiction or cognitive conflict, these systems privilege al

THE MENTAL FORECAST Recent neuroeconomic findings on addiction become more intelligible — and more troubling — when they are situated within the broader ecology of digital consumption and what we conceptualize as unconscious economic codes. Neuroeconomics shows that decision-making is not neutral but continuously shaped by valuation processes: the brain assigns subjective value to stimuli, updates this value through reinforcement learning, and selects actions accordingly. Wha

THE MENTAL FORECAST AI psychosis and AI neurosis are not formal diagnostic categories, but emerging conceptual tools designed to capture how interaction with generative AI systems becomes entangled with existing psychopathological processes. They function as analytical lenses rather than fixed clinical labels, allowing clinicians and researchers to detect transformations in subject–technology relations before they are stabilized within diagnostic systems. The distinction rema

Feb. 2026 MENTAL FORECAST The much-discussed “war of intelligences” between humans and artificial systems did not unfold as a confrontation. Almost immediately, the predicted conflict was transformed into something psychologically more complex: a large-scale dynamic resembling a global Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm syndrome refers to a psychological response in which victims develop emotional attachment, loyalty, sympathy, and sometimes even affection toward those who capture

Feb. 2026 Could a biological signal circulating in the bloodstream influence whether people interact with others face-to-face or through social media? And more specifically, does inflammation push individuals toward digital social environments, or could social media use itself contribute to inflammatory stress? A recent study by Lee, Jiang, and Way (2026) examined whether systemic inflammation predicts the type of social interaction individuals prefer. Using C-reactive protei

Behavioral change is rarely a matter of willpower; it is a matter of structure. The sequence Awareness–Replacement–Repetition describes a minimal architecture of transformation. Awareness is the epistemic rupture: the moment when an automatic pattern becomes observable rather than enacted. It shifts the subject from identification with the impulse to metacognitive distance from it. Without this first move, behavior remains embedded in conditioning, affective memory, and imp

Feb. 2026 What is a digital phenotype? It is the behavioral “fingerprint” generated by our daily interactions with smartphones — patterns of movement, typing speed, sleep timing, app switching, communication rhythms, and sensor-derived data that, when aggregated, can reflect psychological states. Because many of these variables are proxies for biological rhythms — sleep–wake cycles, motor activity regularity, autonomic arousal inferred from usage bursts — smartphone apps or p

Feb. 2026 Repetition is not, in itself, therapeutic — taken alone, it does not heal. It acquires transformative potential only when it alters the subject’s mode of relating to experience. If we differentiate three axes of change — awareness, replacement, and repetition understood as learning — we can identify both the strengths and the blind spots of classical psychoanalysis. In Sigmund Freud’s formulation of the compulsion to repeat, particularly in Beyond the Pleasure Princ

Feb. 2026 What happens when diagnostic language becomes a social currency online?And what happens when the same digital ecosystem that shapes self-narratives also intensifies work strain and leaves molecular traces of chronic stress? The 2026 scoping review by Alexander and colleagues maps an under-theorized but increasingly visible phenomenon: post-secondary students adopting mental health labels through social media use (Alexander et al., 2026). The review shows how “label

Feb. 2026 What happens when a technological environment continuously stimulates the same arousal systems that evolved for survival, sexuality, and social belonging — and keeps them activated without resolution? Social media platforms systematically target this shared arousal substrate by delivering novelty, unpredictability, social comparison, sexualized imagery, and moralized threat in rapid succession. These stimuli recruit neural systems involved in salience detection and

Feb. 2026 The trial of Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives risks appearing almost absurd in its narrow framing. The courtroom debate revolves around whether Instagram or YouTube were “designed to be addictive” and whether specific internal emails prove intent to maximize user time. Yet the architecture of behavioral capture on social media extends far beyond isolated corporate documents. The real issue is not a single executive’s past growth targets, but a systemic ecos

THE MENTAL FORECAST What if the epidemiological signal we are observing is not only descriptive, but predictive? The study by Dai and Ouyang (2026) demonstrates that adolescents exposed to four or more hours of daily screen time show significantly higher odds of anxiety, depression, ADHD, and conduct problems, with sleep disruption and reduced physical activity acting as parallel mediators. The importance of this finding lies less in the headline association than in the media

THE MENTAL FORECAST A recent article in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction demonstrates that visual prompts presented for only a few hundred milliseconds can bias gaze allocation and increase the probability of selecting specific products (Luca, Legoux, Forster, & Khammash, 2026). Spatial positioning influenced attention at approximately 350 milliseconds, while chromatic salience — particularly red — exerted stronger influence closer to 750 milliseconds.

SELF-WATCHDOG SELF-WATCHDOG The contemporary subject is increasingly constituted as a self-contained unit of responsibility, coherence, and performance. Psychological stability, success, emotional regulation, and social legitimacy are framed as outcomes that must be produced internally by the individual self. This configuration is not a neutral psychological evolution; it is historically and politically produced through neoliberal rationalities that relocate social, economic,

Jan. 18, 2026 The digital environment has normalized a motivational regime long critiqued in educational psychology: reward–punishment conditioning. Decades before social media, Punished by Rewards demonstrated that external incentives — grades, praise, gold stars — undermine intrinsic motivation and degrade the quality of engagement. What the platform economy has done is scale this logic to everyday life. Likes, streaks, badges, and notifications operate as continuous micro-

Jan. 11, 2026 THE MENTAL FORECAST From a psychoanalytic perspective, the superego designates the psychic instance through which social authority is internalized as constraint. It is not reducible to moral conscience; it is the structure that produces guilt, shame, self-surveillance, and the internal demand to conform to an ideal. Historically, the superego emerged from identifiable figures of authority — parents, institutions, religious or cultural law — and operated through

Dec. 28, 2025 Neuroplasticity has become a central mechanism for how the brain reorganizes itself in response to repeated digital exposures. Contemporary work underscores that online environments rich in micro-rewards, algorithmic novelty, and variable reinforcement do more than occupy attention — they shape synaptic trajectories of learning. Platforms engineered for engagement are effectively training environments : repeated, patterned inputs that bias neural circuits toward

Dec. 25, 2025 What happens to mental life when belief, desire, and attention are shaped before we are even aware of choosing — and when this process is scaled like an industrial reaction? Recent neurobehavioral research reveals that distinctions between human and virtual sources of influence are not just sociological curiosities but neurologically consequential events. Qingxi Yao and colleagues (2025) show that virtual versus human influencers produce distinct patterns of br

Dec. 20, 2025 New interdisciplinary research confirms a troubling but clinically coherent reality: beliefs about success, money, and self-worth are not later cognitive distortions — they are installed early, quietly, before children have language for value. A landmark experimental study in Scientific Reports demonstrates that even preschoolers can associate possessions with happiness and social success, revealing that materialism is not a cultural accident but an early symbo

Dec. 18, 2025 THE MENTAL FORECAST What if leisure screen time is not merely eroding attention and mental health, but actively accelerating biological aging at the molecular level? This question is no longer speculative. Genetic epidemiology now forces a revision of how digital lifestyles are understood. Leisure screen time can no longer be treated as a neutral behavioral choice or a simple correlate of inactivity; it now appears as a causal biological exposure . Using Mendeli