Bill Maher raged against the addition to smartphones, isolation, and “safety-ism” that are pervasive in the world during the New Rules segment of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher on Friday, arguing that the fear and loneliness that are the byproduct of certain technologies, not to mention “overreaction to the Covid pandemic,” are killing our brains.

“I say we finally start seriously looking at what phones are doing to people’s brains,” Maher said on Friday’s episode. “And not just phones. There has been a perfect storm of events in recent years that has led the Surgeon General of the United States to issue an advisory that America is suffering from a public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection. Or what Matt Gaetz calls another day at work.”

Maher talked about the rise in strokes, heart disease, premature death, even car accidents that have been linked to social isolation and loneliness, and pointed out that some national governments are appointing government officials to the task of dealing specifically with that separation from social society.

“It’s just become too easy to isolate now, said Maher. “We’ve got our phones and our gadgets to distract from having an actual conversation. Amazon to deliver instead of going to a store. GrubHub instead of going to a restaurant. Movies streaming on TV instead of going to a theater.”

“And even when we do go out, the earbuds stay in,” Maher continued. “We can’t even do casual chitchat anymore.”

“Remember when you’d roll through the checkout line with a six pack and a box of condoms and, you know you’d have a little moment with the checker where you’d be like, Somebody is having a party, huh?” he joked. “But there are no high fives at the self-checkout.”

Maher said people have “traded going out with people we like for going on Facebook to get Likes,” and bashed the idea of social media entirely. “Has anything ever been more misnamed than social media? It’s done more to kill being social than the pocket protector. It should be called anti-social media,” he said.

He summed it all up with a pithy observation using the titles of popular TV shows.

“Twenty years ago, the show that defined the zeitgeist was called Friends. Today, it’s Naked and Afraid,” he said.

And finally, New Rule: Now that I’ve heard author Michael Lewis say about his latest subject, crypto-crasher Sam Bankman-Fried that, “if you gave Bankman-Fried a choice of living in a $39 million penthouse in the Bahamas without the Internet or the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn with the Internet, there’s no question in my mind he’d take the jail.”.

I say we finally start seriously looking at what phones are doing to people’s brains.

And not just phones. There has been a perfect storm of events in recent years that has led the Surgeon General of the United States to issue an advisory that America is suffering from a public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection. Or what Matt Gaetz calls another day at work.

And this is not just in America. Japan and the UK have actually appointed a cabinet level position for Minister for Loneliness. Because the studies and the data from around the world show that the health consequences of so many people feeling so isolated are staggering. Skyrocketing rates of stroke, heart disease, premature death. It’s just become too easy to isolate now. We’ve got our phones and our gadgets to distract from having an actual conversation. Amazon to deliver instead of going to a store. GrubHub instead of going to a restaurant. Movies streaming on TV instead of going to a theater.

And even when we do go out, the earbuds stay in. We can’t even do casual chitchat anymore. Remember when you’d roll through the checkout line with a six pack and a box of condoms and, you know you’d have a little moment with the checker where you’d be like, Somebody is having a party, huh?

But there are no high fives at the self-checkout.

We’ve traded going out with people we like for going on Facebook to get Likes. Has anything ever been more misnamed than social media? It’s done more to kill being social than the pocket protector. It should be called anti-social media. And then AI came along and made it even worse.

You know, a 19-year-old from Southampton, England, recently breached the walls of Windsor Castle in an attempt to assassinate the Queen because his AI chatbot girlfriend told him it would impress her. Yes, there’s an AI Jodie Foster now.

And the idea that your girlfriend now is just a voice in your phone, just like in that movie “Her” is no longer science fiction. There’s one bot-chick on the market called Replica and she has 2 million users and boy, is she going to be in trouble when her boyfriends find out she’s seeing 2 million other guys. Everybody keeps saying how AI is coming for your job, and it may well be, but it’s also coming for your boyfriend.

Yuval Harari asks the question about the future: “What kind of relationships will there be when computers and objects understand you better than the people in your life?” I don’t know, but it sounds like it will be a profitable world for the makers of Jergens.

And if the technology wasn’t making the problem bad enough, we also have a media that is built on ginning up fear and hostility and convincing us no place is ever really safe. Poor Britney Spears can’t even dance in her own home without a couple of knives. We’ve become like that old lady from the Twilight Zone episode who hides behind closed doors because she thinks death is trying to get in.

But here’s the irony In real life: what’s killing you may well be you staying inside. The overreaction to the Covid Pandemic may turn out to be more damaging than the disease itself. The strategy of social distancing and staying home to work and staying home from school all for very long periods of time made us into different people. Safety-ism became a political identity, and now some people never want to go back to work, or school, or Venezuela.

Too many people got used to saying, No, I can’t make it to your birthday party. Not for any compelling reason, just for the sake of ultimate safety. Well, we’re just now starting to tally the collateral damage from ultimate safety, from long lockdowns and creating four-year-old germaphobe. And they include erasing two decades of progress in math and reading, school absenteeism as the new normal, an all-time drug high in overdoses and murders, huge increases in obesity and depression and the atrophying of social skills that lead to it.

You know what else was off the charts the last couple of years? Car crashes. They couldn’t figure out why. You know what they came up with? People’s heads are just so scrambled and they’re so full of pent-up rage being locked up and the kids home all the time and my stupid fucking husband. So they just got in the car and drove like a maniac and took it out on the road. So to quote every mother since the dawn of time: For fuck’s sake, go play outside!

I know. I know. Outside is full of flashers and rusty nails and germs and sharks, and stranger danger. But your mother was right. It’s actually worse to stay cooped up. Magazine surveys like to ask the question, How would you like to die? My answer is anything except going unnoticed until the neighbors complained about the smell.

Twenty years ago, the show that defined the zeitgeist was called Friends. Today, it’s Naked and Afraid.

Watch the clip above via HBO’s Real Time on YouTube.

The post ‘There Are No High Fives at The Self-Checkout!’ Bill Maher Rails Against Phone-Addicted Isolation, Loneliness, ‘Anti-Social Media’ That Are Killing Us first appeared on Mediaite.

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