What do Dogecoin and the Department of Government Efficiency have in common? Elon Musk, of course. This new government committee led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy is being tasked with cutting the federal budget. So this week, we examine the Silicon Valley mindset behind it.

In her new FX docuseries “Social Studies,” the artist and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield delves into the post-pandemic lives—and phones—of a group of L.A. teens. Screen recordings of the kids’ social-media use reveal how these platforms have reshaped their experience of the world in alarming ways. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how the show paints a vivid, empathetic portrait of modern adolescence while also tapping into the long tradition of fretting about what the youths of the day are up to. The hosts consider moral panics throughout history, from the 1971 book “Go Ask Alice,” which was first marketed as the true story of a drug-addicted girl’s downfall in a bid to scare kids straight, to the hand-wringing that surrounded trends like rock and roll and the postwar comic-book craze. Anxieties around social-media use, by contrast, are warranted. Mounting research shows how screen time correlates with spikes in depression, loneliness, and suicide among teens. It’s a problem that has come to define all our lives, not just those of the youth. “This whole crust of society—people joining trade unions and other kinds of things, lodges and guilds, having hobbies,” Cunningham says, “that layer of society is shrinking. And parallel to our crusade against the ills of social media is, how do we rebuild that sector of society?”

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Wearable tech, self-driving cars and AI mishaps. There were a lot of new product launches this year – some more successful than others. This week on Uncanny Valley, we talk about the tech out there that we are most excited about and the tech that has us most terrified for the coming year. Plus, we share our gifting recommendations.

Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

You can follow Michael Calore on BlueSky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on BlueSky at @laurengoode, and Zoë Schiffer on Threads @reporterzoe.