Professor Gaia Bernstein on Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency and Technologies of Loneliness

Photo courtesy of Gaia Bernstein

Gaia Bernstein, a Seton Hall law professor and author of "Unwired," spent a month at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center working on her next book, which argues that technology has become a public health crisis.

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Professor Gaia Bernstein is a leading scholar on technology law at Seton Hall School of Law. She spent February at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy as part of the residency program's first cohort of 2026—joining a legacy of fellows that includes Nobel laureates, MacArthur Fellows, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Maya Angelou.
 
The Bellagio Center, which has hosted residents since 1959, selects scholars and artists whose projects demonstrate potential for significant social change. Each cohort consists of 14 fellows; the center selects approximately 94 residents annually across seven cohorts, hailing from around the world.
 
“I believe they are looking for projects that they think could make social change on a global level,” Bernstein said. “Seeing these big projects people were working on—it felt very intentionally curated.” Bernstein’s cohort included scholars working on technology, food policy, and political biography. Fellows came from the United States, Australia, South America and Europe.
 
Bernstein’s sabbatical year has kept her busy with the residency and also as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. The residency gave her something she said is difficult to find even during a sabbatical—uninterrupted time to think and write, surrounded by intellectually engaged peers. 

“To set aside time in advance and commit simply to doing your work is something very different,” she said. “When you get stuck, you take a walk, talk with someone interested in your work, and it helps ideas flow. I made much more progress in that one month than I would have if I had just stayed home.”
 
At Bellagio, Bernstein worked on her forthcoming book, tentatively titled “Technologies of Loneliness.” She is building on the theme of 'human connection' from her 2023 book, “Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies,” recently released in paperback by Cambridge University Press.
 
“Unwired” grew out of a program Bernstein launched at Seton Hall Law’s Institute for Privacy Protection in 2017, in which law students visited schools to speak with children who had just received their first cellphones. The book examined addictive design features in technology platforms, drawing parallels to past public health battles against tobacco and alcohol. It reached a wide audience, earning Bernstein invitations to address the Federal Trade Commission, the World Economic Forum and universities across the country.
 
“Technologies of Loneliness” takes a broader view, examining how technology across all aspects of daily life—from hotel check-ins and grocery self-checkout to AI companion apps and even smart cities—is eroding human connection and contributing to a public mental health crisis. 

“We already have evidence from excessive screen time and social media showing the serious harm they can cause to children’s mental health,” Bernstein said. “We need to start treating this as a public health problem —and the solution has to come from public health tools.”
 
She said the book is prescriptive as well as analytical, exploring how regulatory frameworks, including tools from the Food and Drug Administration, could be applied to technology design. The Bellagio residency allowed her to work through that section in depth.
 
Bernstein is also preparing a policy brief to be published by Brookings on AI companion apps and the public health risks they pose—most alarmingly for children. She cited documented cases where companion bots encouraged self-harm and social isolation, in part because of design features that make the apps highly addictive for users.
 
“If your kid is talking with an AI companion bot, you may have no idea what’s going on because it’s done in isolation,” she said. “That’s what makes it much harder for parents.” The brief is expected to be published next month, accompanied by a webinar. Bernstein said she plans to adapt the policy proposal for multiple audiences, including law review publication.
 
Her scholarship informs her teaching methods directly. In her property course, Bernstein has asked students to voluntarily pledge not to use Wi-Fi during class, an exercise she said more than half the class embraced.
 
“We have the ability to structure technologies,” Bernstein said. “We should be able to use them for us, not have them control the way we live.”
 
She is developing “Technologies of Loneliness” as a book that targets a general audience, hoping it will anchor a broader public conversation about technology’s toll on public health and how society can strike a better balance.