Beyond the Scroll: Why Local Governments Must Move Past ‘Social-First’

Part 1: Addicted and Alone

I’ve been sitting with three essays that, together, spell out what’s gone wrong in our digital age. Social media and screen culture are quietly warping our society—not in theory, but in practice. You can see it in three places:

• Fueling addiction and loneliness

• Hollowing out literacy and reason

• Turning our very lives into background noise for others

These shifts cut right to the heart of governing. Effective leadership depends on trust and human connection—and both are harder to build when people are isolated, distracted, and treated as an audience instead of partners.

This isn’t just something for communications teams to wrestle with. Executives and elected officials need to pay attention too. Trust in local government is slipping, and if we keep leaning on “social-first” communication, we risk accelerating the problem. We need to fight like hell to buck that trend—and that means building something deeper, steadier, and more human.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll dig into each of these fault lines—addiction and loneliness, the decline of literacy and reason, and the commodification of our lives—and explore what they mean for the challenge of governing effectively.

We’ll start with screen addiction.

David Foster Wallace was one of the most celebrated American writers of the late 20th century, best known for his sprawling novel Infinite Jest and for essays that wrestled with culture, addiction, and meaning. He also struggled personally with depression and, as he once confessed to journalist David Lipsky, his deepest addiction wasn’t to drugs or alcohol, but to television.

That confession—and the broader warnings Wallace offered about screens and loneliness—were revisited in a recent essay by cultural critic Ted Gioia (Sept. 26, The Honest Broker). Reading Gioia’s account today, Wallace’s words land like prophecy. What Wallace feared from television in the 1990s is now multiplied a thousandfold through smartphones and social media: addiction, isolation, and manipulation disguised as entertainment. (Gioia’s essay is worth a full read, believe me.)

Wallace anticipated the cycle we now live in: addictive screens that isolate, fragment communities, and monetize our attention. He also offered a harder truth—if we don’t build up the self-discipline to resist, both individuals and culture itself will grind to a halt.

What does this mean for local governments trying to communicate in this environment?

The Real Cost of Screen Addiction

Wallace linked screen addiction to three interlocking crises:

• Loneliness and depression. Screens offer diversion but leave people emptier, fueling a cycle of sadness and withdrawal.

• Societal fragmentation. Instead of a community of relationships, we become an “atomized mass of watchers.”

• Manipulation and control. Entertainment masquerades as harmless, but in reality, our attention is monetized for advertisers and platforms.

He knew the pull was nearly irresistible.

“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this,” he told Lipsky.

Technology would only get more addictive, more convenient, more pleasurable—and it would always be offered to us by people who don’t love us, but who want our money. That line—“machinery in our guts”—is haunting.

Here’s Foster Wallace in an 1996 interview with Laura Miller.

For local governments, the question isn’t only whether we can resist the Siren song of the screen, but whether our communities can. And if they can’t, what does that mean for our ability to govern effectively?

Where High Performance Communications Fits

Wallace’s warnings map directly onto the Five Elements of High Performance Communications. If screen culture is pulling us toward addiction and fragmentation, these elements point the way back toward connection, trust, and effective governance.

1. Strategic Priorities & Planning
Wallace saw that entertainment is designed to hijack attention. That’s the business model. For governments, this means resisting the temptation to default to where the attention already is. A viral TikTok might win a morning, but it doesn’t build trust. Strategy must anchor communications in mission and long-term outcomes, not dopamine hits.

2. Organizational Leadership
The “machinery in our guts” begins with leaders. If city managers and executives chase likes and shares as their ultimate measure, they’re modeling the wrong thing. Leadership requires courage to prioritize depth, clarity, and truth—even when the algorithm rewards outrage or spectacle.

3. Citizen Engagement & Listening
Wallace warned of an atomized society, disconnected from real communities. Governments can’t counter that by just producing more content. They must create spaces where residents connect with each other, not just with a screen—neighborhood forums, small-group dialogues, design sessions where listening replaces scrolling.

4. Branding
Wallace hated the culture of irony and sarcasm, arguing that it tears down but never builds up. That’s what much of online branding does: it amuses, entertains, or provokes, but rarely creates trust. Government brands should emphasize compassion, honesty, and even vulnerability. Residents don’t need to be entertained; they need to believe their government is competent, trustworthy, and human.

5. Content Creation
Finally, Wallace believed art could heal. His novels, for all their difficulty, were meant to make people feel less lonely. That’s the challenge for government content too: not just grabbing attention, but telling stories that connect residents to each other and to their institution.

Beyond “Social-First”

Here’s the core warning for governments: social platforms are designed for addiction, not connection. If governments build their primary communications strategies inside that system, they risk reinforcing the very problems Wallace described—fragmentation and manipulation.

High Performance Communications offers an alternative. By anchoring communications in mission, modeling leadership restraint, engaging authentically, branding with honesty, and creating meaningful content, governments can resist the addictive churn of social-first strategies. They can build long-term trust instead of chasing short-term reach.

If residents feel like passive consumers of content, governing becomes harder. If they feel like partners in community, governing becomes possible. That’s the choice before us.

I’ve written before about cities that are showing a better way—moving beyond a “social-first” mindset to build trust through real engagement and storytelling. From Sunnyvale’s budget narratives to Amarillo’s comprehensive plan and Plano’s listening initiatives, the examples are out there. Each proves Wallace’s warning doesn’t have to define us. Governments can resist the pull of the scroll.

Wallace saw the danger of screens turning us inward, isolating us in loops of addiction and loneliness. But screens don’t just change how we spend our time—they change how we think. Next week, we’ll turn to Andrew Sullivan’s case for how the decline of deep reading and reasoning weakens democracy itself, and why that matters for every city manager, executive, and elected official trying to lead in a noisy, distracted age.

Onward and Upward.