The smartphone is our era's cigarette – and just as hard to quit
In the long lost year of 2011, I managed to graduate college without owning a smartphone. Even then, four years after the birth of the iPhone, I was not yet an unreasonable outlier. All my immediate friends owned flip phones. The pressure to join the future had not yet overtaken us.
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We texted, we talked, and we went whole days without considering, very much, the phones in our pockets. No one dipped down every 10 seconds to tap their screens. All the small black pieces of plastic could do was communicate with one another, take fuzzy photos, and churn through pixelated websites none of us would bother visiting. Our attention spans were whole, resilient. The internet, with its tendrils of early social media, remained locked behind the laptop screens in our dormitory rooms, bookending days lived elsewhere.
I think a lot about this era as the 2010s draw to a close, a decade that will remembered for its seismic political upheaval: kicking off with the first black president, ending with a former reality TV star and nativist con man in the White House. Yet the 2010s weren’t merely the Trump decade. They were also dominated, from start to finish, by a single piece of technology that has obliterated the promise of the internet and corrupted human interaction. The smartphone is to the 2010s what cigarettes were to much of the 20th century, a ubiquitous and ruinous marker of the zeitgeist.
By now, you know what the smartphone has wrought. You are alive, after all. You are probably reading this article on one. Few technologies have so rapidly consumed every demographic, every age, every cultural and sociological setting, urban and rural, rich and poor. In the late 2000s, we allowed a few corporations to persuade us that this advanced, alien technology – assembled via de facto slave labor in Asia – was essential to human existence. We readily bought in, condensing our lives behind the sleek glass. The scroll hooked us like a drug, triggering the exact right loci in our brains; suddenly, we could never be bored again, doped by endless Facebook and Instagram feeds, retreating from unnecessary conversation or thought into an infinity of trivia. The internet never left us.
In the 20th century’s conception of the 21st, the smartphone is usually missing. Space colonization, apocalyptic nuclear war, and uncanny androids were always far easier to dream up than the concept of human beings willingly carrying around supercomputers with sophisticated tracking devices. Captain Kirk’s communicator can’t play Candy Crush. There are no Amazons or Googles in his 23rd century to harvest the data we generate so advertisers can up-sell us into further debt. The surveillance state, back then, was mere big government. Today, thanks to smartphones, our lives are mined by public and private entities alike.
The massive, virulent spread of social media – and with it, a lot of corrosive and dangerous misinformation – is inseparable from the smartphone. In some countries, the internet itself is synonymous with social media apps. Before the smartphone’s 2010s dominance, the internet was a flawed, if occasionally liberating, secondary reality, where chatrooms and message boards could gather like-minded peers, literate blogs could spur debate, and news websites had not yet been crushed by the fragmentation to come. To even imagine the internet, then, as a dystopian matrix meant acknowledging there were still periods we logged in and logged out. We could flee it all by going outside.
As the 2010s close, we are twitchy and anxious. Children, reared with smartphone-addicted parents, compete with the screen’s chemical glow for attention. When they are unruly, they are granted their own. To venture into any public square – bus, train, doctor’s waiting room, even library – is to confront a vast majority of the human populace in thrall to devices they cannot ignore for more than a minute at a time. It wasn’t like this a decade ago, and we weren’t exactly living tech-starved existences then. In the future, to pacify prisoners, perhaps wardens will simply dole out smartphones, the threat of a rebellion nipped by an Instagram account and access to Fortnite.
If smartphone manufacturers and app makers will never consider creating less addictive technology – profits always trump morality – it will be up to us to take our time back. Do we look each other in the eye? Do we attempt to talk? Do we choose the deliberate, rewarding consumption of information – the book, the essay, the scientific article – over digital crumbs? Do we reclaim our attention spans and pay attention to our loved ones? Do we fight for our democracy?
Today, we look back in horror at our ancestors who smoked in bars and boardrooms and airplanes, casually filling their lungs with nicotine, doing only what was expected of them. How could they? we wonder. Someday, we can only hope, our descendants we look the same way at us.
Ross Barkan is a writer and journalist in New York City
