You Can’t Blame the Phones Forever

Yes, smartphones suck. Now what?

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I’m riding the F train uptown to Herald Square, and everyone’s on their phone. It’s the easiest scene to pick, if you’re in the market for “stock phone addiction lede” to whip out for your latest screen time thinkpiece (I’ve been there). The portrait is the perfect embodiment of the issue, after all: a group of strangers, stuck somewhere with time to kill, sacrificing their former camaraderie, the fleeting glances, knowing stares, and winking understandings of old on the altar of an endless doomscroll. What better encapsulation of a society plagued by its devices, done in by drab monotony?

In March, the sex and culture writer Magdalene J. Taylor wrote one such piece, entitled “It’s Obviously the Phones” (it was missing only the subway scene). After noting a troubling decline in the rates of young people hanging out since 2008 (the year following the iPhone’s debut), she writes:

Economic despair, political unrest, even climate fears were among the reasons I’d heard cited. But all of that, honestly, feels pointlessly abstract. It puts the problem entirely out of our hands, when in fact I believe it may quite literally be in them.

The problem is obviously our phones.

Taylor’s post blew up, in Substack terms, the thousands of likes reflecting a symphony of agreement among readers. It’s easy to see why Taylor’s post did so well. It succinctly summarized the way lots of us feel intuitively about our devices: that, despite shifts in the economy and the decline in third spaces and the continued dysfunction of capitalism, the phones, really, are responsible for the profound social malaise Taylor describes. Her conclusion—that it’s obviously the phones—seems pretty unassailable at this point. Phones have been added to our lives, and our lives are worse.

In fact, it’s precisely the unassailability of this point which feeds into another, and I’d argue more significant, element of this conversation. Yes, the phones are the problem. That question, as far as I’m concerned, is settled. But clearing it out of the way reveals a far trickier problem, one which, frankly, I have a feeling most of those nodding vigorously along to pieces like Taylor’s are loathe to confront: what are we going to do about it? It’s an impossibly thorny question, but I think a good first step in answering it is considering what’s really at the core of our phone dependence. Because the phones are here, and they’re not leaving.

Within this discourse, 2007—the year of the iPhone’s introduction—is often treated as a definitive break in technological history (the social indicators in Taylor’s piece begin to plummet, remember, in 2008). While the introduction of the iPhone was clearly a seminal moment in recent history, I think it makes more sense to treat its introduction as a natural step in a long-unfolding evolution than as a material break in technological history. Because decontextualizing the invention of the smartphone overlooks a crucial component of the device’s origin: there was a demand for it! The iPhone didn’t just pop up out of the blue, in a vacuum; people wanted it. Nathan Heller made this point about technological innovation in the New Yorker in April, in a review of the essay collection “Scenes of Attention,” by D. Graham Burnett and Justin Smith-Ruiu (this one opened with the screen-filled subway scene):

True, tools and lives are faster, [the authors] write. But claiming innovation as the original cause is backward: “Human beings make the technologies—and they make them in the context of other human beings needing and wanting various things.” It wasn’t as though people, after millennia of head-scratching, suddenly “discovered” the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and the telegraph, and modernity unspooled. Rather, people’s priorities underwent a sea change with the onset of the modern age, turning to efficiency, objective measurement, and other goals that made such inventions worthwhile. The acceleration of life isn’t an inevitability, in that sense, but an ideological outcome.

Now, I’d probably place more emphasis on the “material” and less on the “ideological” than Burnett and Smith-Ruiu do, and I’d also grant that adhering to “people’s priorities” was not necessarily Steve Jobs and Co.’s primary motivator in inventing the iPhone (profit was). But the smartphone’s introduction fits into a larger pattern, along with the genesis of the personal computer, iPod, etc., of consumers’ continued demand for small, individualized, multi-use devices. The smartphone does not just appear out of thin air; it’s the product of that technological evolution.

Similar, “boogeyman”-style arguments—which position individual people, technologies, and ideologies as singular prime movers—are rampant amidst the smorgasbord of well-intentioned efforts to explain technology’s most deleterious effects. Fix just this one thing, such arguments go, and you’ll solve everything.

This is the outlook embodied in a book like “Filterworld,” the author Kyle Chayka’s recent effort to describe what he sees as the profoundly conformist influence of the internet. According to Chayka, social media has had such assimilatory effects as producing identical coffee shop aesthetics and inspiring a boon in tourism in Iceland. In a February review of the book, the internet writer Max Read wrote:

Sometimes, uncharitably, I imagine that what’s at the bottom of the consumption of this kind of writing is a desire not to overcome one’s apparent helplessness in the face of “the algorithm” but to affirm it—a compulsion to wallow in one’s perceived estrangement from the motions of culture and commerce and politics in the 21st century, to have one’s learned helplessness excused. Articles and books in this vein (and I have written plenty of them!) tend to emphasize the power, scale, novelty, and opacity of the platform giants, and to de-emphasize user agency, statistical context, historical precedent, and even little things like “the economy” and “the world outside.”

“The Algorithm,” in particular, has emerged as a popular scapegoat in contemporary luddite-curious culture. If only the millennial tech titans pulling the strings behind our online existences would tell their programmers to just tone it down already—the violence, hate speech, misinformation, body shaming—and everything would be alright. Technology writer Kevin Munger dispelled this notion masterfully for Mother Jones in the spring:

“The algorithm” does not exist. And widespread use of the phrase implies a false hope that we can fully understand our dizzying information system. If it were only the algorithm on YouTube radicalizing us, or the algorithm on Facebook weaponizing misinformation, then we would know how to fix these things. We would just need regulators to pressure Mark Zuckerberg into fiddling with some code, and things would go back to normal.

The truth is more unsettling: We are living with technology moving at an inhuman speed, operating at scales simultaneously smaller than we can detect and larger than anyone can comprehend.

Munger goes on to argue that a more appropriate term for the present technology ecosystem would be “apparatus,” a word which more aptly emphasizes the interconnected nature of the relationship between the internet and its users.

To be clear, the inner workings of smartphones, algorithms, and tech boardrooms led by some of the richest and most powerful men in history are certainly worth examining closely. Again, I am in agreement with the initial claim being made here: phones are a massive problem for society. And their negative effects are exacerbated, pretty clearly, by the profit-seeking, often immoral behavior of the tech weirdos calling lots of these shots. As satisfying as such explanations are, though, they fall to capture the entire story.

Munger’s coinage of “apparatus” is so appropriate in this context because it properly identifies the crucial missing component in most phone dependence stories: ourselves. What singularly blaming iPhones, “the algorithm,” or some spooky amalgamation of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Cook does is to absolve ourselves from our own roles in our poor technology habits; from acknowledging that we haven’t been strapped down into dentists’ chairs, Clockwork Orange-style, and forced to go tune into every meme, shitpost, and one-turn-Wordle compilation video on the internet for the last decade. It allows us to willfully ignore the unattractive sides of ourselves which very clearly love this shit. In the self-destructive, borderline-addictive, and commercially-tainted sense, of course. But which nonetheless can’t get enough.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about whether our collective devotion to our devices qualifies as addiction, in the heroin/gambling/sex sense of the word. Are phones really affecting the chemistry of our brains in the same way an addictive substance might? This seems to me a really important question as we consider the best way to “wean” ourselves off our phones and enter a more socially mindful future. Is it possible to just stop?

As it turns out, the answer to this question is quite layered and complicated. Would a potential phone addiction, for example, most aptly be categorized as a substance or a behavioral addiction? It seems obvious that it’d fit best under the behavioral category, but, as authors Ido Hartogsohn and Amir Vudka point out in this phenomenal 2023 National Institute of Health paper (I HIGHLY recommend reading the whole thing), phone dependency actually shares lots of qualities with, say, cocaine addiction. Beyond their shared quality of triggering the release of dopamine upon use, both smartphones and cocaine rely on the artificial magnification of natural, non-addictive impulses to create dependency habits for the user:

While the smartphone services a natural human need for sociality, it also magnifies that need and creates new and intense manufactured needs. If we compare sociality to coca leaves—a natural stimulant safely integrated into the life texture of countless cultures—then smartphone sociality can be likened to cocaine—a more concentrated synthesized version with a remarkably higher potential for addiction.

Anyone searching for an easy screen time out will surely be left unsatisfied by this resolution’s inconclusiveness; there is no definitive answer, it seems, no silver bullet, for diagnosing, and therefore being granted the key to ridding oneself of, excessive phone usage.

Which leaves us…where, exactly? I wonder how many people nodding along in unabashed agreement with Taylor’s “It’s Obviously the Phones” article actually bothered reading her piece all the way through to its conclusion. Those who did were treated with a much more confused and muddled—not to say mundane—prescription for actually solving the issue than her headline suggests:

What I really want for myself and everyone else is to just use my phone less. That is something we are in control of. I want people to prioritize the real world…De-centering phones is another real thing we can do to better our social lives. The economy is out of our control, but our own personal tech consumption isn’t.

Hartogsohn and Vudka, authors of the NIH paper, come away with an equally sober recommendation for developing a healthier relationship with our devices:

A more conscious, mindful, and constructive relationship with technology can be cultivated on both the individual level and the collective level. Mindless habits of digital consumption can be challenged by developing a more mindful approach to technology: by changing one's mindset in the use of technology, and by recalibrating the parameters of our everyday digital existence (e.g., turning off one's notification updates, or placing one's phone outside the room). Though they might sound banal, user experiences and research data show such measures can be surprisingly effective.

It seems the alternatively apocalyptic and utopian aspirations of some great “un-phoning”—vengeful premonitions, visions mirroring fantasies long endemic to the tech genre—shall not come to pass. I, too, am disappointed. I want the phones gone as much as anyone, and these recommendations are, well, pretty fucking boring.

But the obvious truth is that the phones are here to stay. Rather than waiting passively for some purple-and-teal lightning bolt to transmogrify us back to the sepia-tinted, phone-free haven of 1993, perhaps it’s time to stop rolling our eyes at and take more seriously the “banal” suggestions of the most well-versed thinkers on the issue: to consider what annoying, tiny, and trite steps we might individually take to get a better handle on how we spend our time.

In that regard, our collective struggle against our devices may not be all that distinct from any other commonplace resistance to temptation or, yes, addiction, which we might experience in other areas of life. In the same way that blaming the existence of sugar won’t make you eat less candy, merely pointing to the ubiquity of the smartphone as a means of combatting social inadequacy is an entirely perfunctory exercise. Such condemnation is a cop-out designed to evade the deeper, more existential questions we’d much prefer to, well, swipe up and ignore. In order to change our relationships with our phones, I’m afraid we’ll have to change ourselves.