Don’t Break Up With Your Phone: It’s not it, it’s you
We have a phone problem, and we all know it. There is that article about battling cell-phone addiction in the New York Times. There is Eric Pickersgill’s Removed photo series, which highlights the presence of our phones as props, as invisible bubble-barriers, as lonesome black holes. Phones, we know, are harmful to the environment and possibly our biology. They’re products of slave labor. Their software is designed to exploit the architecture of our psychology in order to maximize on-screen time and profit. Tellingly, they interfere with our ability to safely enjoy that most potent symbol of American freedom: our cars.
Former Google Design Ethicist Tristan Harris and his Center for Humane Technology describe the threat as a hostile takeover:
There are plenty of compelling reasons to be leery about our phones and how we use them. And for those seeking guidance and discipline, the head of the emerging phone police is Catherine Price, Dr. Oz guest and author of How to Break Up With Your Phone. The book’s title is telling; it imbues the phone with humanness, with a personality as a once-but-now-no-longer-partner. Price’s strategy seems to be moving people away from seeing their phones as personal objects and, instead, toward seeing them as impersonal tools. A sample piece of her advice explains that, “Your phone should be a tool, not a temptation.” Another one goes like this:
While there is reason to be cautious about the presence of phones in our lives and their ability to diminish the quality of our daily lives, there are also strong reasons to be wary of the people, and the industry, which tells us that we need to police our phone use more carefully in order to achieve “screen / life balance.” (If you’re keeping track, that’s three things — work, life, screen — now on the scales for perfect calibration.)
The rapid adoption of smartphones since 2007 and the current, post-saturation pushback that Price typifies are part of a larger pattern in which capitalism offers us contradictory messages, products, and services: A handful of the largest corporations own both the regular and supposedly healthier, organic brands. Conglomerates peddle unhealthy food, then offer diets, gym, memberships and expensive medications to combat the resulting illnesses. We’re sold painkillers, then offered expensive treatment for the resulting addiction. We’re battered with messages extolling salvation through consumption from the time we’re born, and when we’ve finally bought too much and have gone into debt, we can buy a self-storage unit (now a $38 billion industry) in which to place our excess things. And on and on.
Capitalism does best when it profits from the problem and the solution—it steals our time from us, then offers to sell it back. The business of breaking up with our phones is no different. The “digital minimalism” and “digital wellness” site, Bagby, will sell you a bag to put your phone in or a wall-hanger ($95) in which to place your phone so as to help your household be more distraction-free. The message, overall, is that you can buy your way out of the the inconveniences caused by the things you’ve bought. Here, the logic of the passive consumer, of money’s ability to buy whatever and to solve our problems, is never questioned. In fact, it’s strengthened.
While there is plenty of great incentive to buy into the the ditch-your-phone mantra (spending more time doing the things you love or with the people you love sounds like a great idea, and I’m all for it), Price and sites like Bagby never effectively question the root causes of our seemingly boundless interest in our phones and so never arrive at real or insightful responses. Instead, they hold ever-more consumption (of self-help books, analog alarm clocks, wall-hangers, personal coaching) to be the solution to the problem of our over-consumption.
Our economic and cultural systems place consumption above all else. Capitalism, cannibalistic in nature, will eat anything, including the consumers and the planet that, for now, sustain it. In this system, there is nothing that cannot be be bought and sold, including our desire to break free from being monetized, which has now been monetized.
Consider Price’s advice from earlier. If we trade “phone” for “book,” we can get closer to understanding her fundamental misdiagnosis of the problem of why we’re so drawn to our phones:
If this seems ridiculous, it should. Books are far from necessary, and the best books don’t strive merely to make us feel “good.” Putting a book down because it’s superfluous or causing us to feel complex, difficult emotions would be a stupid thing to do. Likewise with our phones.
Our phones aren’t just utilitarian tools. They’re well-made, slickly designed, and they can contain an endless array of pointless distractions (if we want them to), but they also connect us to our friends, family, the news, and the world. They’ve turned us all into writers, photographers, directors, curators, DJs, critics, and, perhaps most importantly, have given us all an audience. They’re how we author and curate the story of our lives that we tell to others and to ourselves. They’re a book we read and compose simultaneously. It makes no sense to view a book as nothing more than a tool, and it makes no sense to view our phones that way, either.
Phones, for many, are the primary mode of self-expression. Much like the photo of the woman below, who looks at her screen while herself being watched, they are the condition of our current world. They’re how we see others and how we shape how others see us. When understood this way, asking people to put down the phone is nearly equivalent to silencing them, which is a bad idea. The problem isn’t that we’re using technologies to express ourselves, the problem is that, as it it turns out, we’re just not that good at self-expression. We’re bad writers, bad photographers, bad critics, terrible DJs, and even worse thinkers and curators. Most of us don’t have the knowledge, training, expertise, interest, determination, or even the desire to do all or any of these things well. So instead, we do them badly.
The result is that the internet is filled with vile, short-sighted and reactionary hate speech, with violence, threats, dumb advertising, and a general lack of thinking. Sure, the companies running the social media arenas to which our phones are the primary entry-points should be doing more to understand the way their platforms are being abused, to vet content, and to limit the garbage. But they are as perfectly amoral as we should expect any company to be, and their money doesn’t come from limiting or restricting what people can post. An article about the lives of Facebook content moderators, “The Trauma Floor,” offers a small window into just how bad things are at the moment. We live-stream our mass murders, our suicides, our torture. We lash out in hate, fear, anger, and ignorance. These are human things, and they always have been, it’s just that now, companies can profit directly, and the audiences are larger than ever.
The fact that companies are failing to shape these platforms in ways that emphasize some of our most basic human values is only half or maybe even two-thirds of the story. The remainder belongs to us. Facebook and Twitter aren’t solely responsible for the fact that people want to use them to spread bad ideas, some of that’s on us. People could do better.
While the promise that spending less time on our phones will make us feel better is a tantalizing one, at best it’s overly simplistic, and at worst it’s untrue. Telling someone to break up with their phone by re-arranging the software or placing it out of reach misses the point by a thousand miles. Arguing that we use our phones so heavily because the software is well-designed is the equivalent of insisting that people read books for the fonts or the size and shape of the pages. To put down the phone is to put down the book, to stop authoring, stop reading, stop thinking, stop trying.
What we need is to write more, to get better at it, to read more, share more, to expand our thinking, to continue to engage with others, with the unknown and the uncomfortable. It is great when this happens in person, but I’m glad I can be exposed to all kinds of new ideas through my phone, too.
Don’t Break Up With Your Phone: It’s not it, it’s you
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