On Moral Panics

“There is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy, and homicidal mania,” says The New York Times article titled “Lunacy in England” published in 1894.

Moral panics are a recurring feature. They are bursts of exaggerated fear that some new thing will wreck society’s core values. The history of mankind is riddled with ideas that were once considered indisputable truths but now sound like a silly joke.

With bicycles, doctors cataloged entire diseases like “kyphosis bicyclistarum” (cyclist’s hump), and attributed conditions like tachycardia, anemia, and eyestrain to bicycle riding. People were “rendered mute” by heavy breathing while riding, and dancers “were crippled by overdeveloped leg muscles”! And there was a “bicycle face” — a scary permanent disfigurement of clenched jaw and bulging eyes (haven’t seen much of that in the Netherlands).

When locomotives started getting widespread, The Lancet — still a very reputable medical journal today — warned that “the immense velocity posed danger to the respiration, and the carbonic acid generated by the fuel would inevitably suffocate people in the tunnels. An 1861 Lancet inquiry warned of “the danger of excessive railway travelling to newly married women.”

When cars appeared on the scene, doctors warned that driving at 20 mph or more would cause “road madness.” A 1904 Literary Digest piece worried that cars would render walking obsolete and cause leg muscles to atrophy.

Apart from racist and nationalist moral panics, which were the most terrifying and caused millions of deaths, most of these can be roughly split into two categories.

First: knee‑jerk resistance to novel ideas and inventions. It doesn’t really matter who uses the new thing; people just hate the change itself. Call this a “Novelty Panic”.

Second: panics about changing social structure. Here, the technology is only scary because it shifts power: who can work, travel or spread ideas. This is a “Power Panic”.

The Novelty Panics happen all the time and are rather harmless if not amusing. Even the telephone was considered scary: the British Medical Journal in 1880 reported a manageress struck deaf by a thunderclap conducted through the wire. New media of information almost always cause moral panics. With radio, educators warned that it would destroy children’s attention spans and ruin family conversation. A 1936 Gramophone article said radio would leave children “addicted” with “vacant expressions” and an inability to concentrate on books. Sounds familiar? The same fear was recycled almost verbatim for television, then video games, then smartphones. In 1982, the Surgeon General said arcade games caused “aberrations in childhood behavior.”

But many moral panics are Power Panics and driven solely by anxiety about the changing social structure. What’s weird is that these panics were directionally right: the technology changed things, just not in the way the critics imagined.

The men in the late 1890s were correct to fear the bicycle, particularly its effect on women, just for all the wrong reasons. Coach drivers usually wouldn’t take on an unaccompanied woman, so bicycles allowed them to travel on their own, become more independent, and take new jobs.

In the mid-1850s, reading was thought to cause hysterical nymphomania in women and was diagnosed as “reading addiction, reading rage, reading fever, reading mania, or reading lust”. An 1864 New York pastor’s tract literally argued novels caused insanity. It’s the same pattern: reading is knowledge, and men wanted to control who had access to it.

Some of the most basic things that have since become the recognizable markers of a particular society were ridiculed. When Jonas Hanway carried an umbrella through London for the first time in 1750s, coachmen pelted him with rubbish and tried to run him over. Coachmen disliked it specifically because people used them more when it rained, just like Uber on a wet Friday night. Any threat to the existing social structure was met with skepticism. Hanway himself was no saint: he wrote a tract claiming tea drinking caused bad breath, ugliness and weakened the nerves.

What unites both categories is that, with time, the lurid predictions look ridiculous, even when the underlying changes were real. We can drive bicycles and train quite safetly. And there might be people out there who dislike the idea of women voting or having a job but I have no interest in talking to them anyway.

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The pattern repeats every time a new technology is invented. Our time is no different: we have our own panics. There’s online privacy, the effects of social media and short-form content, and, of course, AI. Some might turn out serious. Others will only get a laugh from a few people who remember.

We can apply the same test to figure out where they’re likely to end up. Let’s look at online privacy which I wrote about before. There are certainly some changes to the social structure since Google and Meta have created the most successful advertising platforms ever invented, which affected and disrupted many traditional players. But the targeted ads themselves rarely harm any specific person in a concrete way, so I treat most of this as a Novelty Panic.

With smartphones, it feels like the tide is turning. In the last 6 months, I’ve read countless stories on outlets like FT on the correlation between the rise of smartphones and anxiety, along with falling fertility. Multiple countries have now outright banned phone use for school kids, which is a sign of the second category: people trying to reassert control over who gets access to information and coordination tools. At the same time, this panic is very similar to all the previous fears about information media. But smartphones are very complicated and I’m not ready to give judgement. They can both connect people but also create tremendous anxiety and evaporate time.

AI is probably the most interesting question, because it is changing the social fabric, or is about to do so. The job displacement hasn’t even started but the datacenter buildout is here and people are noticing. OpenAI and Anthropic are visibly taking power and many things are changing in the process. And as we have seen before, the actual outcome is almost guaranteed to be orthogonal to what people fear at the moment. We’ll see.

When you read the next scary story about new technology, ask whether it’s just another “bicycle face” or someone is afraid to lose their position.