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Nuclear panic isn’t quite dominating collective consciousness like it was in the Cold War era but, if you’ve been following the news lately, you’ll know that the Middle East is on high alert following an attack by the US on Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities. If you grew up in the middle of the 20th century during the time of nuclear tests and the spectre of mutually assured destruction, this might sound all too familiar.
It’s got us thinking about generational panic, and what our equivalent might be. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to develop and dominate discourse, we ask the question: is tech anxiety our generation’s nuclear panic?
Deakin University’s Paul Harrison shares his thoughts.
Generations aren’t just distinguished by the years they span; fashion, music, politics and other trends tend to help define a generation. Think the jazz revolution in the 20s, big collars in the 70s, and angsty teen-grunge in the 90s.
There’s another marker that distinguishes generations from one another and helps us contextualise historical events: generational panic.
But what exactly is generational panic?
‘Any kind of collective panic is predominantly about two things,’ says Harrison. ‘One is that we have limited access to information and limited capacity to process that information, and that we are social creatures, so we look to others to help us to work out how we should operate in the world.’
When individual or small-group panics crop up, Harrison says our biological conditioning is what causes panic to catch fire and spread.
‘Where there is a strong movement for something or away from something, it tends to be built around our social groups – the groups that we aspire to belong to and the groups that we belong to,’ Harrison says. ‘We have limited capacity to gather information and also process that information, so we become subject to a whole bunch of biases, like confirmation bias, selective perception, even the post hoc ergo propter hoc bias – all these things that influence how to operate in the world.’
The nuclear panic wasn’t one event. Rather, it contextualises a long period of brinkmanship, escalations and the bomb-boasting bravado of the world’s superpowers.
In 1945, the US dropped the first (and so far, only) atomic weapons used in war. The two bombs razed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the second world war and proving to the world that nuclear attacks could cause destruction on an unprecedented scale.
With World War II over and the Soviet Union and the United States hoarding their own nuclear arsenals, the 1950s settled into a stalemate called the Cold War. There was a feeling of ‘profound anxiety’ across the world, thanks to the underlying threat of nuclear war. That feeling didn’t evaporate in the 50s, though; there were a series of close calls across the next few decades. Even in Australia, the threat of nuclear war was real and largely out of our hands.
‘If you were growing up in the 70s and the 80s, the nuclear codes were with a bunch of white men in countries away from us that we had no kind of control over,’ Harrison says.
In the early 1980s, people in the US developed a collective anxiety about Satan and evil – an era now referred to as the ‘satanic panic’.
The fear was rooted in a series of ‘baseless conspiracy theories’. These were sparked in equal parts by a book called Michelle Remembers — which brought satanic rituals into mainstream consciousness — as well as growing and widespread reports of child sexual abuse in preschools and daycare centres.
As the 1980s satanic panic festered and spread, communities became obsessed with ‘finding’ satanic symbols in everyday places. There were TV programs dedicated to outing so-called devil worshippers; there was even a campaign against tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons.
While the generational panic has long since abated, it has left its mark on popular culture, as evidenced by cult-favourite entertainment like TV show Stranger Things and movie The Exorcist.
While HIV/AIDS was indeed a genuine public health concern, the panic surrounding the epidemic was another thing entirely.
The illness was first documented in the United States in 1981, a time when gay men were seemingly inexplicably becoming ill with serious immune conditions.
AIDS has killed some 42 million people since the epidemic began (though treatments have come a long way since the early 1980s), but the panic was less about the disease itself and more a moral panic about the lifestyles of the people being infected.
Because HIV/AIDS mostly affects gay and bisexual men, there was a baseless moral component that could be considered a collective or generational panic. Bigotry from high-profile people like Reverend Billy Graham (who, in 1993, said ‘Is AIDS a judgment of God? I could not say for sure, but I think so.’) and homophobic terms like ‘gay plague’ prompted an moral panic about AIDS, homosexuality, and the wrath of God.
According to Harrison, one reason that generational panic is so galvanising is that the perceived threat usually feels out of our control; we can’t do anything to stop it, and we don’t get any say in what’s happening.
‘It’s an unknown, it’s outside of our control,’ Harrison says. ‘We know that one of the biggest factors for anxiety is this desperate need to control the future.’
Anxiety about technology is far from a new phenomenon. In hindsight, fears of technology throughout history seem unfounded and even silly, but they were felt intensely at the time. We may fear AI now, but common (and outdated) technologies may have given us similar concerns in the past.
‘When the first railways were constructed in the early 19th century, there were widely publicised concerns that human bodies might not survive speeds over thirty miles per hour,’ says Harrison. ‘Doctors worried that passengers’ organs might shift irreparably, or that the sheer velocity would detach the soul from the body.’
Like the cycle of grief, one school of thought suggests tech-related anxiety goes through stages, beginning with apprehension for the unknown, then escalating to real fear, and eventually resulting in acceptance. According to a report by the Thinktank Center for Data Innovation, there are four stages of tech anxiety, and in late 2023, we were hitting a point called the ‘height of hysteria’.
Tech anxiety seems to be exacerbated by the current era of unprecedented advancement. There’s a passage in Cixin Liu’s sci-fi novel The Three Body Problem that sums it up (no spoilers, we promise):
‘Humans took more than a hundred thousand Earth years to progress from the Hunter-Gatherer Age to the Agricultural Age. To get from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age took a few thousand Earth years. But to go from the Industrial Age to the Atomic Age took only two hundred Earth years. Thereafter, in only a few Earth decades, they entered the Information Age. This civilisation possesses the terrifying ability to accelerate their progress.’
AI might stoke a collective technology anxiety because the technology itself is so rapidly advancing, with chatbots already outpacing humans in everything from photography to science.
Perhaps our tech anxiety around AI is rooted in one significant fear: it could replace us.
You only need to watch shows like Black Mirror to know that technological advancement can stoke our fears. The same was true of the era of nuclear panic, too, with novels like On The Beach dealing with scenarios of an atomic apocalypse. Harrison says that while the source of our anxiety differs, the features of generational fear are similar.
“The contemporary anxiety panic, mentioned in all the popular press, suggests we are living in an era uniquely overwhelmed by worry and psychological distress,’ he says. ‘But it’s unlikely that our current state is any more anxious than previous generations, so for example, people who lived through world wars, nuclear standoffs, or economic depressions were likely to be as or more anxious as now.’
Whatever the case, Harrison says that generational panic and fear can help us learn something about the human condition.
‘We speak often about the virtues of critical thinking, but what we may need just as urgently is a cultivated epistemic humility, the acceptance that as so many things are unknown, perhaps unknowable, our collective goal should not be to eliminate fear, but to learn from it,’ he says.
Senior Lecturer and the Unit Chair of Consumer Behaviour in the Department of Marketing at Deakin Business School.
