It was a night out, many years ago. A friend pushed through the club crowd that stood between us and thrust his phone in my hands. “I think I’m on the verge of a bad trip…” he murmured. I glanced down at his phone, which he had opened to a webpage with advice for me to follow.
I escorted him into an Uber. We rode in silence, our faces occasionally punctuated by the passing of street lights. But the silence was arrhythmic, as his Apple Watch flashed warnings that his heart rate was too high. His phone buzzed and lit up every few seconds with a new notification. Bzz. “Hey man what’s up, did you get home alright?” Bzz. “Make sure to log your fitness goals.” Bzz. “Check out 60% savings right now!”
I looked at him with a sudden clarity. “Is this…how you operate?” I had no idea that other people kept their notifications on like this. I unstrapped his Apple Watch and buried it, along with his phone, in the tiny purse I had brought for the night, hoping to shield us both from the sensory cacophony. But no matter how much I tried to smother the devices with my hands, I could feel the vibrations through the fabric, see the ominous light emanating like a war between toy soldiers. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.
♦
That was the mid-2010s. We were still in the early-ish days of social media: late enough that everyone was already on Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, and then Snapchat, but early enough that we had not yet noticed how these platforms were rewiring our behavior. Twitter discourse was active, but still good and deep and thoughtful. As writer Eugene Wei once put it, social media was closer to being like “listening to your coworkers at a karaoke bar” than performatively “watching Beyonce play Coachella.”1
As we approached the end of the decade, the darker parts of humanity tumbled into social media’s spotlight. The mid-to-late 2010s were frightening not just for those directly involved in public controversies, but for those who were turned into consumers, rather than drivers, of human experiences, separated from their own souls by a thin glass wall. Phones became the culture wars’ standard-issue firearms, easily whipped out from a pocket to capture raw and violent delights for the public to watch from a safe distance. Those ugly years were followed by––depending on whom you ask––a slow correction back to saner ways of being, or the total vanquishment of independent thought, as the brainworms wove themselves triumphantly through Western civilization.
In March, sociologist Jonathan Haidt released his new book titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which argues that phone use has caused significant harm to children and teenagers. Haidt claims that, starting the early 2010s, anxiety and depression rates––along with self-harm and suicide––have skyrocketed among young adults in the West, with adolescent girls being particularly hard-hit. The obvious culprit, he thinks, are the guns we placed unthinkingly into their hands: smartphones. To curb this downward mental health spiral, Haidt tells parents and schools to limit access to smartphones and social media, and instead encourage more play-based interactions in the physical world.
Haidt’s book is making waves throughout the Anglosphere; he’s given interviews to major media outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and NPR, to name a few. But while the rest of America debates the gravity of our, and our children’s, arrested development, one industry is conspicuously absent: tech.
For the most part, tech’s founders, venture capitalists, media influencers, and operators––barring the staunchest critics—have been strangely silent in public about how phone use is shaping our culture. Social media executives––including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, X CEO Linda Yaccarino, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Discord’s Jason Citron––have defended their platforms against allegations of harm before Congress. Zuckerberg, testifying before Congress in February, specifically rejected the social media hypothesis while outlining dozens of steps Meta would take anyway to appease concerns. But none has commented on Haidt’s book.
Surely, something has shifted in our digital lives. 58% of American adults think they use their phones too much, according to 2022 Gallup research: up from 39% in 2015.2 30% of teenage girls describe their phones as a “net negative” on their lives. The way we use social media today is not the same way we used it a decade ago: that much, I think, we can all agree on. And if our psyches are the product of information we consume, it seems plausible that these changes could have had some impact on how we all think and act.
Silicon Valley built the iPhone. It built Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram––the very platforms at which Haidt is pointing his finger. But when it comes to one of the most important technology debates of the year, tech is missing in action. Why is tech reluctant to partake?
♦
Many tech workers have a wholesome relationship to technology because of how they first discovered it: as lonely, awkward kids, saved or inspired by a dial-up connection to the Internet. I grew up in a Mid-Atlantic suburb, where my only real friends lived in a gray plastic box in my dad’s office. I don’t think I would survived adolescence without my online tribes: the camaraderie of MUDs, or Multi-User Dungeons––text-based roleplaying games––where I first learned to socialize and collaborate with others; Neopets, where I learned that the web was not something to be passively consumed, but built; and online message boards, where I debated religion and philosophy with other, equally lonely, strangers. I can think of several occasions when I was asked to write about my friends for homework assignments and declined to mention that these “friends” were bearded 30-something gamers in Idaho and Oklahoma. The idea of forbidding my younger self from accessing these worlds feels profoundly misguided.
Most teenagers, however––all the other kids in the cafeteria that I, and many of my peers in tech, probably hid from in the bathroom––don’t use the Internet that way. They do not go online to make friends who share their interests, or for intellectual enrichment more generally. They do not have a symbiotic relationship to technology: instead, their phones are commanders that tell them what to do. Social media is where they go to spy on their classmates, to post and consume performative images, or to sit alone and scroll.
As a preteen, I used to peruse the fashion magazines I received in the mail every month. I would gaze at the models’ chiseled jawbones and slight figures, standing in front of my bedroom mirror with my stomach and cheeks sucked in to match them. Though far from “healthy,” those magazines still contained less than a hundred images of such women per month. Today, a teenage girl can flick through hundreds of images of the most beautiful women from all around the globe anywhere, at any time. Many women I know are grateful that they were not exposed to the same firehose of content that teenage girls are today. And I cannot imagine how much crueler high school gossip and drama must be, when the action happens on a phone for all to see, instead of being confined to fleeting whispers in the cafeteria.
There are still benefits to using the Internet as a young person. And certainly, a parent who ascertains that their child is not at high risk for mindless doomscrolling, and believes the benefits will outweigh the harms, ought to be able to override best practices. But older Millennials in tech may have an overly rosy picture of what it means to be “online” for most people, based on positive experiences from days bygone.
It is worth noting that Haidt does not believe that we should forbid children and adolescents from using the internet. He is careful to distinguish social media from “the internet” more broadly, given it is social media that seems to cause the lion’s share of harm. Economics writer Noah Smith, building on Haidt’s intuition, has suggested that the “killer app” might be smartphones combined with social media, as the former makes it possible to check the latter endlessly.3 Haidt even thinks that a teenager watching the occasional TikTok video in a web browser is mostly fine. The issue comes when children and adolescents are receiving a steady stream of sounds and images around the clock.
Without social media, a precocious and intellectually hungry teenager could still peruse blogs, leave comments, and trade emails with their favorite writers, founders, and scientists; they could watch videos about robotics and order parts to build them at home; they could take online courses in mathematics and physics to supplement their school curriculum. Haidt’s proposal to restrict social media for children under sixteen still leaves plenty of “internet” left.
♦
It would be disingenuous to attribute the entirety of tech’s absence from the social media debate to a misunderstanding of what “phones” and “social media” entail today. Plenty of people in tech are also addicted to their phones. They may be on Twitter, instead of TikTok. But this “healthier” version of social media consumption is about as good for you as low-fat potato chips.
When I asked some of my tech friends about their views on phone addiction, I found that nearly everyone I spoke to––especially parents, or those with young siblings––agreed with Haidt’s argument that phones can be addictive. My savviest friends turn off notifications, switch their phones to grayscale instead of color, and intermittently delete and reinstall social apps. Those with children generally forbid or heavily restrict smartphone use.
One friend described, with fear and astonishment, how her not-yet six-month old son had army-crawled across her bed and snatched her phone off her nightstand, like Indiana Jones with the golden idol. He then held his conquest up to his face, basking triumphantly in the light. My husband and I, too, have observed how our infant son’s eyes now track our phones, how he has learned to coo and smile while under the watchful eye of a camera lens. And we both––no matter how much we love technology––intend to introduce phones gradually to our children, just as we would with any other powerful substance, like sugar or alcohol: commensurate with their brains’ developing ability to practice self-control.
Yet an alien visiting Earth would never know that so many people in tech have such careful relationships with their phones, which––when it comes to public dialogue––pass through their otherwise ruthless social filters unscathed. Those in tech are keen to warn others off from seed oils, microplastics, and the 9-5 corporate job, which they believe will turn us all into mouth-breathing “bug-eaters.” But if some shadowy global elite really wanted to keep a population docile, impotent, and entertained, what better tool could they ask for than the iPhone?
Perhaps tech believes that phone addiction is too obvious of a talking point to merit serious discussion, like expounding upon the evils of fast food or global poverty. Complaining about how phones are bad for you feels slightly antiquated, like evangelizing “flow state” or “detoxing”––we get it. For members of younger generations, being told to “get off the phone” might trigger memories of being scolded by parents or teachers for texting their friends. But given the virility of the debate on a national level, and the looming threat of regulatory control, there’s clearly more to discuss.
In 2019, Yancey Strickler likened our changing digital landscape to a “dark forest”––borrowing a metaphor from Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem trilogy––in which an imagined forest is quiet, not because it is peaceful, or devoid of activity, but because it is dangerous.4 Any activity can only take place in safe, hidden spaces, away from predators who prowl through the forest.
One of the key reasons why tech people don’t talk about phone addiction in public is because they have soured on, and are sensitive to, critiques of their industry from outsiders. And they are right to be wary of opening the floodgates. In the years leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, initial exuberance towards Web 2.0 startups began to cool, and then curdle, as public concerns grew that too much money had been made by tech founders for little (or negative) social value.
The scrutiny that followed––investigations into “fake news” and misinformation perpetuated by social media platforms; Facebook’s 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal; the 2020 release of Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma; Congress summoning Big Tech executives to testify about Section 230, which absolves platforms from liability for content created by its users––left a black mark on Silicon Valley. But it also left a gap in the public imagination that had been previously filled by technologists, who inspired others with optimistic visions for the future. Many tech leaders felt that the critiques of social media platforms extended well beyond their appropriate strike zone, conditioning people to believe that technology itself is something to fear, and dampening our collective ambitions as a society.
Haidt pins 2012 as the year where happiness and mental stability began to plummet in the Western world. This massive collapse in well-being, it turns out, coincides with the widespread adoption of the iPhone. The mounting evidence for a crisis would likely draw more curiosity and conversation among technologists if not for the emotional baggage of the tech backlash.
Even if tech remains suspicious of outsiders, one might expect to at least see some accountability within the safety of tech circles. Unfortunately, a rift has widened between people who work in Big Tech––which includes Apple, the purveyor of the iPhone; Meta, which develops Facebook and Instagram; and Twitter/X––and those who consider themselves to be “technologists”––creative, ambitious individuals who believe that building is the path to improving humanity.
Many technologists consider Big Tech, with its product managers and salary levels, to be an entirely separate world from their own ecosystem––barring its role in developing artificial intelligence––even if both bear the same name to outsiders. Big Tech workers are pinned, like butterflies in a collector’s album, to the closed-loop superstructure of their employers’ campuses: they are physically and socially separated from the rest of “tech.” Even though most of Silicon Valley’s global influence is actually derived from Big Tech, these corporate fortresses––like any government bureaucracy––are inscrutable and off-limits to the average technologist.
Technologists want to be at the bleeding edge of the frontier. Deeper questions about social technology, then––and how to improve it––fail to capture their attention as they hunt for new opportunities. There is no benefit to gaining literacy on a topic that they have no privileged insight into, nor any ability to influence. They would rather discuss scenes that are still developing, such as deep tech or AI. Today, attempting to discuss the impact of social media with technologists will earn you strange looks, along with whispers about being “out of touch.”
Silicon Valley seems to think that by ignoring or dismissing the social media debate, it will be able to preserve its own freedoms and online culture. But if tech cannot manage its own norms, it will continue to attract outsiders who seek to impose external sanctions. The future of social media––used by billions of people around the world, often for hours every day––is being decided by critics who don’t work in, or care about, technology.
♦
While the national debate likes to portray the use of firearms as fundamentally irresponsible, the biggest safety gun advocates are, in my experience, gun enthusiasts themselves. Best practices are widely understood and enforced among the old-timers, who take pride in socializing newcomers into these norms.
The first time I went shooting was with my dad, as a preteen in Pennsylvania. I can’t remember if I shot any skeet that day. But I do remember the moment when I turned around, rifle in hand, to say something, and was immediately met by loud protests and exclamations from a dozen grown men. “Never turn around while holding a gun,” one of them admonished me. “Doesn’t matter if it’s loaded or not.”
Like gun enthusiasts, technologists can––with or without regulatory involvement––guide public norms that help others develop safe, healthy relationships to the tools they have created. To be a technologist is to be agentic: someone who acts on their desires, instead of being a passive consumer. A tech-native solution to addressing phone addiction, then, would mean teaching individuals to manage their own behavior around phone use, instead of pointing the finger at corporate villains.
In his viral essay on “dopamine culture,” Ted Gioia implores us to notice how tech platforms are designed to keep us helpless and dependent on continuous hits of happiness. The technology writer L.M. Sacasas, however, rejects the notion of technology “addiction,” because it devalues what humans are capable of. Sacasas believes that language about addiction “paint[s] a picture of hapless individuals at the mercy of large tech companies,” while “we have more agency over the conduct of our lives than a ‘dopamine culture’ framing seems to suggest.”5 In articulating this position, Sacasas says the quiet part out loud for the pro-phone tech camp: technology has brought me immense personal benefit. If you don’t feel the same way, figure it out.
But if technologists consider themselves to be an exceptionally talented, unusually self-motivated group of people, then they cannot also believe that what works for them––moderating their own phone use, and using social media primarily for personal and professional enrichment––will single-handedly solve society’s problems. If tech thinks and acts differently from everyone else, the rest of the world will likely require a different playbook.
In her book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, clinical psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden argues that genetics impact human behavior in myriad ways, including behavioral problems like impulse control. One’s genotype reflects a “type of luck in your life,” like your height or social class. Harden and her colleagues even developed a polygenic index––a composite of many different genetic factors, rather than just one gene––for impulsive behavior. After analyzing a sample of 1.5 million people, they found that high-scoring individuals were more than four times as likely to be convicted of a felony, and nearly three times as likely to be incarcerated. High-scoring individuals were also more likely to abuse substances and to report symptoms of antisocial personality disorder. If we believe that some people are naturally predisposed to struggle with impulse control more than others, it seems cruel to then say, “Well I can handle my phone just fine, why can’t they?”
Phone addiction, and its associated mental health issues, is a public health problem. When one-third of American adults are depressed or anxious6, there are negative consequences for everyone else. High rates of mental illness burden our health system with prescription medication and treatments, cause people to perform poorly at work, and infect others’ psyches with anxieties and gloom. There is also the counterfactual loss of entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and innovation that comes when a large portion of working-age adults are depressed.
Public health policies are notoriously difficult to legislate, because while some people are able to manage their own behavior, others are not. In the case of obesity, for example, it is technically every individual’s responsibility to manage their own weight. But more than two-thirds of American adults are overweight, and nearly one-third are obese. Clearly, self-management does not work in most cases. And as with mental health, high obesity rates impact even those with healthy weights, in the form of increased healthcare costs and decreased economic productivity.
People appear to be no better at managing their own phone use than their diets. It is difficult to find reliable statistics on phone use, but one estimate from technology writer and Andreessen Horowitz investor Andrew Chen suggests that more than a third of people receive social media push notifications, with opt-in rates around 50% across other types of apps.7 Just as we know the right behaviors to maintain a healthy weight, we may know what the right behaviors are to cultivate calm, focused minds––but that does not mean that they are widely practiced, or that individuals are even capable of implementing them without social support. Even if we abstractly think that other people’s health shouldn’t be our problem, we are all, inescapably, in it together.
Technologists often bemoan the widespread doomerism that pervades society today, wishing that more people would adopt their can-do attitude towards tackling big civilizational problems. Shouldn’t we try to understand what caused this decline in public spirit––even if the finger points partly in our direction––so that we can figure out how to reverse it?
Technologists don’t have to side with anyone’s current proposed solutions – whether that’s banning teenagers from social media, or holding tech companies responsible – to agree there is a problem, in the same way that we can agree that America has an obesity problem, even if one doesn’t support outlawing certain foods or mandating that restaurants list calorie counts on their menus. We may not yet have all the answers. But we can at least acknowledge that it’s worth trying to find them.
Moderating phone use, especially among children, is not anti-technology. On the contrary, it reflects a belief that technology is incredibly powerful: powerful enough to elect politicians, to bring down governments, and to shape our minds and actions on the most granular level.
Smartphones and social media have had an enormous impact on the world, and any impact of such magnitude will always come with unforeseen effects. If Silicon Valley wants to be the global leader it styles itself to be, it must accept not just the perks, but the responsibilities that come with power. Today’s social media debate is an opportunity to do just that. Those in tech can cultivate a widespread love of technology that improves people’s lives; they can help others see what they see.
Photo: Anant Sinha
- https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service ↩︎
- https://news.gallup.com/poll/393785/americans-close-wary-bond-smartphone.aspx ↩︎
- https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/honestly-its-probably-the-phones ↩︎
- https://ystrickler.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1 ↩︎
- https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/desire-dopamine-and-the-internet ↩︎
- https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/mental-health.htm ↩︎
- https://andrewchen.com/why-people-are-turning-off-push/ ↩︎
