It requires peculiar skill to write an empty book about one of the biggest burning issues of our time. Nicholas Kardaras’s tedious, grating and sermonistic Digital Madness riffs and rants on the ills of our hyper-connected digital-first world without offering new information or insight. It took me back to the early days of the pandemic when India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged citizens to take a stand against the Coronavirus by—banging pots, pans and plates and loudly proclaiming resistance. This book, too, spends thousands of words on something undeniably important but ultimately leaving one with the feeling that it could have been a self-help email.
The book’s thesis is simple: our digitally connected world is affecting us adversely. This is hardly a controversial or new insight. The trouble lies in the exploration of this malaise. Kardaras adopts the kitchen sink approach—blame everyone and everything and some of it will possibly stick. All that’s wrong in the world today, says Kardaras, can be attributed to social media and our digital devices.