High on tech

Smartphones turned out to be addictive and destructive. Of course we'll adopt AI.

It was when I joined the Australian Financial Review that I hit the big time. I’m not talking about working for the country’s leading financial newspaper. I’m not even talking about moving (back) to Sydney, an apartment at Bondi Beach, and saddling up to cover the high-profile media sector.

No, I’m talking about getting my first mobile phone.

It was a Nokia 5110, which was in 1999 an essential piece of kit for any wannabe high flyer. The call quality was amazing, the battery life fantastic, and it boasted the ridiculously simple yet crazily addictive Snake. Yet it was, above all, a tool: something that merely augmented your life. It remained in my pocket probably 95% of the time.

I yesterday used my iPhone 14 Pro for seven hours and 29 minutes. My daily average for the past week is five hours and 30 minutes and I have absolutely no defense, other than lamely noting more than an hour each day is playing Wordle and Spelling Bee. I pick up my phone an average of 85 times a day; 126 times yesterday.

Seeing the numbers jolts me, although they’re not particularly insane: the US average for smartphone usage is around four hours and 25 minutes a day, up 30% in the past year. But they shock me because I not only know I’m addicted to my phone, but I can recall when I wasn’t. And back then I was able to concentrate for long periods. I was a better listener. My mind was more settled; my body less tense. I could recite the phone numbers of my friends, knew actual street names, and could navigate independently. And I can remember this vividly because the contrast with the past two decades is so, so stark.

“[Our] collapsing ability to pay attention is not primarily a personal failing on my part, or your part, or your kid’s part. This is being done to us all,” Johann Hari writes in Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again. “It’s being done by very powerful forces. These forces include Big Tech, but they also go way beyond them. This is a systemic problem. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns.”

My sense of dismay about all of this was renewed a few days ago by an authoritative piece in the Atlantic that hit a particular and particularly worrying nerve. In “End the phone-based childhood now,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt laid out a compelling thesis for the damage smartphones—and especially social media—do to kids. What really got me was his observation that comparing social-media and tobacco companies was “not really fair to the tobacco industry.”

“It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke,” Haidt said. “Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way.”

The effect is very real and incredibly distressing. Haidt says “something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s”: rates of depression and anxiety in the United States jumped by more than 50% in many studies from 2010 to 2019; the suicide rate rose 48% for adolescents ages 10 to 19, for girls aged 10 to 14 it soared by 131 percent. Similar patterns were seen in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. “By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data,” Haidt writes.

I’ve already seen my seven and three year olds pick up iPads as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. I’ve seen them howl as though a limb is being removed when the time limit kicks in, and endured the begging for just a few more minutes of play. Haidt has advice—no smartphones before high school; no social media before the age of 16; phone-free schools; and more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world—but, of course, there’s no suggestion life should progress without the devices or apps at the root of the problem.

And that’s what’s perhaps most disconcerting for all of us. Back in 1999, getting a (company issued!) mobile phone was a thrill. Being able to communicate by email was revolutionary. But while there were obvious benefits of these emerging technologies, no serious attention was paid as to whether wholesale adoption truly made sense. It was simply assumed that being able to communicate instantly and constantly was both preferable and superior, especially by companies, who jumped at the chance to squeeze more productivity from workers who quickly craved the fleeting dopamine hit of (irrationally) feeling indispensable.

Unanticipated consequences have that name for a reason. But the problem today is even as the true costs of always-on communication have become clearer—and some of the benefits less clear cut—companies haven’t even paused before again diving headlong into the unknown. AI is already upending industry after industry, especially in the “move fast and break things” tech sector. The distressing thing? What’s being broken is work as we know it, and people in the process.

Optimists will swear this us ultimately a good thing—that AI will free us from menial tasks and/or accelerate our ability to do better work, the so-called “creative” work AI isn’t wired to excel at. I’m not so sure. In a generally positive take on the long-term effect of AI, Scott Galloway noted companies were using it as “corporate Ozempic” to simultaneously cut jobs while goosing productivity. And, just as expensive weight-loss drugs are most popular among those who need them least, few companies are admitting their AI shenanigans because they know just how unsettling it is.

“My thesis is that firms (notably tech companies) have also discovered a weight loss drug and are also being coy about it,” Galloway said. “I believe AI is playing a larger role in layoffs than CEOs are willing to admit. There have been hints: IBM’s chief said the company plans to pause hiring for positions that could be replaced by AI, and UPS acknowledged that AI factored into its recent layoffs. But as a general rule, expect a CEO to be reluctant to state on an earnings call that the fastest-growing technology in history is already giving her ‘the ability to lay off people without any impact on the top-line’.”

A smart friend of mine (OK, it’s

Sam Weston

- read his stuff!) can see a world where computers just communicate with each other, and we’re … well, I’m not sure what we’re doing. Again, though, we’re not really being given a choice. The development of the internet was a choice. So was the mobile phone. So were smartphones. So were social-media apps. So was AI. So is the universal use of AI. Most of us, though, have no choice: decisions about the adoption and deployment of technology are made by companies driven by obsessive change (“transformation”) and short-term financial performance, not by any concern for our wellbeing. Yet we can’t work effectively—in the eyes of those paying our salaries—without adopting the very tech proven, on balance, to make us miserable.

Just a couple of days after the Atlantic article, the New York Times published a timely and depressing piece that chose to both throw in the towel on technology while being positive and peppy: “Is it possible to have a healthy relationship with technology while still using it daily? Fortunately, according to experts, the answer is a resounding yes.”

The “solution”? Basically “to forge a healthy relationship with technology, you need to be in control of it and not the other way around.” It’s the very theory Hari and others have thoroughly debunked: the problem is we’re not in control, there are gazillions of companies operating with the sole purpose of ensuring we’re not in control, and our broader environment often doesn’t allow us to be in control. Remember the long-cited “only check your email twice a day at designated times” approach? Try that at work and see how far it gets you, although today you’d have to amend it to “I check Slack once every three hours” and await the primal screams from virtual colleagues.

I don’t mean to be depressing, but it’s … depressing. It feels like we can only do what we can: limit the time our kids are on devices and, absolutely, keep them off social media for as long as possible. Try really hard not to pick up the phone at every opportunity, especially when you’re just bored (it’s good to be bored!). And, as adults, think critically about the need for social media. I haven’t been on Facebook for more than a decade, ditched Twitter/X before Elon made it even more ridiculous, and just a couple of weeks ago deleted my personal Instagram account (although I still have one where I post random images that take my fancy). They’re small acts of rebellion, but you’ve gotta start somewhere.

A note about whatever this is …

After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.

Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.

Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.