I'm a long-time fan, Nicholas, but I disagree with your premise. We are infantilizing ourselves. Putting the blame on "the power of modern digital media" just illustrates the problem. I have two husky-shepherd rescues. The most recent rescue has no impulse control and falls apart when she doesn't immediately get what she wants. Her older brother, who has lived with us for five years, waits patiently for food, for walks, for me to come home from an errand. The newest addition to our family, is learning. Humans can learn to put their phones down too, without being overly dramatic about it.
Great article. I'm Gen X, and I often think the pre-smartphone era, around 2000, was a better model for being online. Because you couldn't access most early social media from your phone, your desktop computer became the proverbial "scrolly chair."
How did tools designed for connection become instruments of control? How did the most powerful communication technology ever invented become a machine for making people distracted, anxious, polarized, and addicted — while convincing them they were having a wonderful time?
The cage is real. The door is not locked. But you have to notice the bars before you can walk through the door.
Interestingly, I’ve seen dozens of street photographs of Edwardian women walking and reading a book at the same time. When you see so many, a pattern emerges that’s strikingly similar to today’s dreadful habit of walking with your head buried in your smartphone.
Seems like a good faith solution to me. Phones have become ubiquitous with modern living. If you can manage to set boundaries around the less healthy aspects then good for you. People are looking for ways to solve the problem. It doesn't follow that the algorithm responding to that demand means the demand is suspicious. And people have to start somewhere. The roots of this cultural disease run deep. Let's not make fun of those first faltering steps towards a cure.
it's funny that it's such a short post (thus part of the same logic of fed content): Carr gets to critique, and to post and get likes and shares. We all play these games.
Yes, it's kind of manifesting the classic Stockholm syndrome, no? We are giving things special status just to convince ourselves that we are in control! That ship has sailed. I presume we will have temples and churches for them some day (punn intended).
The best available outcome, published as guidance in the paper of record, is an adult quarantining a device to one chair and buying a pig-shaped stand to shame herself every time she reaches for it.
The piece is saturated with the language of addiction and self-disgust, delivered cheerfully as lifestyle content. And the friend’s “Why can’t you be chill about it?” contains the whole ideology: failure to self-regulate against industrial-scale capture gets coded as a personal temperament problem.
Platforms engineer the compulsion, then leave individuals to manage the damage through furniture and shame.
I have my own equivalent of the scrolly chair. I commute across London (by train and tube) in a high vis vest that says phone free commute. I consider myself an intelligent man, but this feels like an entirely rational response to the need for ringfenced quiet time to rest my brain.
The list of titles doesn't feel repetitive to me so much as it speaks to the scale of a problem we haven't solved. We're hardwired to eat, and still adapting to an age of plenty. We're hardwired to look under every bush for fruit - now we're adapting to the possibility of checking and fixing, 24/7. You rightly say our attempts to resist the phone look infantilizing - maybe I'd say it reveals us to have biological brains that follow impulses rather than being the hyper-rational decision-makers we imagine. Which is exactly why a device like this makes sense.
The extent to which one finds oneself disoriented when an object is removed is equal to how much one’s identity has merged with that object.
I'm a long-time fan, Nicholas, but I disagree with your premise. We are infantilizing ourselves. Putting the blame on "the power of modern digital media" just illustrates the problem. I have two husky-shepherd rescues. The most recent rescue has no impulse control and falls apart when she doesn't immediately get what she wants. Her older brother, who has lived with us for five years, waits patiently for food, for walks, for me to come home from an errand. The newest addition to our family, is learning. Humans can learn to put their phones down too, without being overly dramatic about it.
I don't disagree, though I'd say that, based on my experience, dogs are considerably less likely than humans to act against their own best interests.
Yup. We are our own best friends and our own worst enemies.
Great article. I'm Gen X, and I often think the pre-smartphone era, around 2000, was a better model for being online. Because you couldn't access most early social media from your phone, your desktop computer became the proverbial "scrolly chair."
I think what’s usually overlooked is that people were primed by decades of television to submit to smaller screens once they were developed.
As Boris Kriger writes in Algorithmic Captives,
How did tools designed for connection become instruments of control? How did the most powerful communication technology ever invented become a machine for making people distracted, anxious, polarized, and addicted — while convincing them they were having a wonderful time?
The cage is real. The door is not locked. But you have to notice the bars before you can walk through the door.
Interestingly, I’ve seen dozens of street photographs of Edwardian women walking and reading a book at the same time. When you see so many, a pattern emerges that’s strikingly similar to today’s dreadful habit of walking with your head buried in your smartphone.
The term "smartphone" indicates that the phone is smarter than the owner…‽
I call it handbrain, because the phone is a substitute for ones brain
To keep mental health: think without a handbrain
I love this—
"They’re symptoms of the illness they seek to cure. We’re addicted to reading about our addiction to phones."
Seems like a good faith solution to me. Phones have become ubiquitous with modern living. If you can manage to set boundaries around the less healthy aspects then good for you. People are looking for ways to solve the problem. It doesn't follow that the algorithm responding to that demand means the demand is suspicious. And people have to start somewhere. The roots of this cultural disease run deep. Let's not make fun of those first faltering steps towards a cure.
Ugh!
"Ten Reasons to Quit Social Media Now" Jaron Lanier, developer of social media
it's funny that it's such a short post (thus part of the same logic of fed content): Carr gets to critique, and to post and get likes and shares. We all play these games.
It’s precisely as long as it needed to be.
Yes, it's kind of manifesting the classic Stockholm syndrome, no? We are giving things special status just to convince ourselves that we are in control! That ship has sailed. I presume we will have temples and churches for them some day (punn intended).
A smart phone is an enabler of brightly coloured cartoon apps...
I find the Scrolly Chair sad.
The best available outcome, published as guidance in the paper of record, is an adult quarantining a device to one chair and buying a pig-shaped stand to shame herself every time she reaches for it.
The piece is saturated with the language of addiction and self-disgust, delivered cheerfully as lifestyle content. And the friend’s “Why can’t you be chill about it?” contains the whole ideology: failure to self-regulate against industrial-scale capture gets coded as a personal temperament problem.
Platforms engineer the compulsion, then leave individuals to manage the damage through furniture and shame.
I wrote about this in "The Attention Wound: What the Attention Economy Extracts and What the Body Cannot Surrender." https://yauguru.substack.com/p/the-attention-wound?r=217mr3&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Irony, I loved your piece but I only found it whilst scrolling 🙄
I have my own equivalent of the scrolly chair. I commute across London (by train and tube) in a high vis vest that says phone free commute. I consider myself an intelligent man, but this feels like an entirely rational response to the need for ringfenced quiet time to rest my brain.
The list of titles doesn't feel repetitive to me so much as it speaks to the scale of a problem we haven't solved. We're hardwired to eat, and still adapting to an age of plenty. We're hardwired to look under every bush for fruit - now we're adapting to the possibility of checking and fixing, 24/7. You rightly say our attempts to resist the phone look infantilizing - maybe I'd say it reveals us to have biological brains that follow impulses rather than being the hyper-rational decision-makers we imagine. Which is exactly why a device like this makes sense.