TECHNO-DESIGN PATHOLOGIES AND THE NEW ANXIETY REGIME

liviupoenaru
il y a 3 jours
3 min de lecture

Dec. 9, 2025

Digital platforms have perfected a class of design strategies that function less as tools and more as behavioral engines. What appears as a simple interface — an infinite scroll, an auto-play button, a vibrating notification — actually operates as an invisible governance system shaping vigilance, micro-arousal, and self-doubt. These techno-design pathologies exploit intermittent reinforcement schedules and frictionless loops described extensively in the behavioral addiction literature (Alter, 2017). Instead of supporting autonomy, they intensify cognitive load, stress responsivity, and the internalization of economic norms: productivity through visibility, value through engagement, and self-worth through metrics. The result is an erosion of quiet mental states and a restructuring of perception itself — what can only be described as a neuro-economic shaping of everyday consciousness.

These interface architectures gain power because they hijack fundamental neurobiological mechanisms: salience detection, reward prediction errors, attentional capture, and the interplay of dopamine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. Neuroscientific research on digital overuse demonstrates how platforms amplify reward uncertainty, vigilance, and attentional volatility, thereby creating psychological states optimized for compulsive engagement rather than autonomy (Montag & Walla, 2016). Social media metrics — likes, views, streaks — become externalized validation cues that force individuals into loops in which meaning is extracted from unpredictable signals. As users oscillate between anticipation and disappointment, the affective landscape becomes saturated not by pleasure but by vigilance. In neoliberal environments obsessed with performance and optimization, these dynamics fuel technostress, accelerate burnout, and destabilize identity formation — especially among younger populations whose neuroplasticity makes them highly vulnerable to algorithmic belief implantation.

Because these loops are engineered to dissolve boundaries — temporal, emotional, and self-regulatory — the user stops where the platform wants, not where they choose. Infinite scroll removes natural stopping cues; auto-play transforms passive viewing into automatic consumption; and notifications exploit predictive salience, creating an expectation of relevance even when nothing relevant is delivered. Long-term exposure to these architectures increases dissociation, attentional fragmentation, and compulsive checking (Alter, 2017; Montag & Walla, 2016). The individual becomes more reactive, less reflective, and more vulnerable to psychopolitical manipulation — a perfect terrain for neuromarketing, behavioral nudging, and the implantation of economic codes deep within the psyche.

Breaking these loops requires deliberate acts of counter-design: reinstating friction, restoring boundaries, and reclaiming intentionality. Timer-based sessions, metric fasting, and notification batching disrupt the reward contingencies that sustain micro-arousal. Choosing bounded media — articles instead of feeds, playlists instead of auto-streams — creates closure and restores self-regulatory agency. As Alter (2017) observes, the reintroduction of friction is one of the few effective methods for interrupting compulsive digital behavior. These gestures are not mere technical preferences; they are micro-resistances against a system designed to colonize attention and implant success beliefs, scarcity beliefs, and chronic insufficiency (Montag & Walla, 2016).

And the collective mental forecast is stark: without intervention, societies will drift into a new epidemiological landscape marked by digital derealization, metric-driven identity, chronic vigilance, and algorithmic anxiety as a normalized mental climate. In such a scenario, the economic unconscious no longer remains a hidden layer — it becomes the dominant perceptual regime scripting what people desire, fear, and aspire to. The human mind risks becoming an appendage of platform logic, governed by volatility rather than meaning. The objective, therefore, is not digital asceticism but perceptual sovereignty: recovering the capacity to filter, to refuse, and to think outside loops engineered to fracture attention and reshape collective subjectivity.

Liviu Poenaru

References

Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked. Penguin Press.

Montag, C., & Walla, P. (2016). Carpe diem instead of losing your social mind: Beyond digital addiction and why we all suffer from digital overuse. Cogent Psychology, 3(1), 1–14.