As a dedicated STOE guy, I know that true monocausality is unlikely, and therefore I appreciate this effort to complicate the most blunt version of the STOE. One point missing from this piece, however, is the concept of network effects and society-wide displacement, as opposed to individual use. We can run a study on what happens when a bunch of individuals turn off Facebook for a couple months, but those individuals still live in a community dominated by Facebook. We can't run a study to see what happens when an entire community shuts off Facebook for a few months or years. For example, the concept of displacement is prominent in this piece, but only analyzed on a personal level, as a personal tradeoff between phone time versus socializing, sleeping, and so forth. That analysis overlooks how displacement is equally important at the community level. It's plausible that the rise of the smartphone in tandem with social media killed local newspapers. Today, if you pay someone to log off Facebook for a few months, they end up less informed, not just because they've lost access to information but because Facebook has destroyed all alternative community-level infrastructure for staying informed. So yes, we can't blame every bad thing in life on "the phones," but I'm still comfortable concluding that "the phones" are unambiguously bad for us, on net.
I think this is plausible but pulling out one thing you said: "Today, if you pay someone to log off Facebook for a few months, they end up less informed, not just because they've lost access to information but because Facebook has destroyed all alternative community-level infrastructure for staying informed."
This implies that people pre-smartphone were as informed if not more informed than people today. This strikes me as very unlikely. At best, they were informed about *different stuff* and then we'd have to debate which type of information is best.
Right clearly today people are way better informed about the actions of other people who they think are doing bad things but who they don't interact with normally. This goes for people committing war crimes in Gaza to people being trans in public on other cities to Lindy West. Has that greater level of information benefited solving any of the issues that people have with them?
Absolutely, and as a self-described STOE guy who is still high on "Amusing Ourselves To Death" by Neil Postman (and "Everything Is Television Now" by Thompson), I'd very gladly argue that the information volume and mix is absolutely worse in the new smartphone society. Higher volume might be worse! Even if I'm wrong about that, I think the network effect remains an important point, because it's so hard to test network effects and community-level displacement empirically. One of the more convincing studies mentioned in "After Babel," if I remember right, is that the piece-by-piece rollout of Facebook in some European communities allowed for a natural experiment at the communal level rather than the individual level, and there was a measurable negative effect--I forget on which measure, tbh--associated with a community's widespread adoption of Facebook. We might never have a lot of evidence like that, unfortunately, so there's a limitation on our ability to empirically determine the "right" answer. But just because an effect is hard to study empirically doesn't mean we can ignore or discount it.
In addition to Allan SB's really important point, this essay (and every other one like it) fails to grapple with the actual reason people believe the STOE. It's because we see it in ourselves about our own relationship with our phones. No RCT is going to convince me that I read as many books as I did 20 years ago, or that checking my phone first thing when I wake up is healthy.
I think Derek's point about "what the phone displaces for you" is important! Most people haven't displaced reading a ton of valuable books.
My experience is very like yours and so I've taken a bunch of steps to curtail my digital use (and I'm reading a lot more as a result!) but I don't think we're representative.
I agree that the particular things we would do otherwise are not representative but that doesn't mean that the other things people were doing were not valuable.
But also, my point is not about what is displaced so much as that people recognize that their relationship with phones is unhealthy and thus want to avoid that for kids.
“The strongest, most reliable finding from years of randomized social media research is not that Facebook makes you crazy; it’s that, for better or worse, Facebook is how you find out what’s going on in the world.”
Gulp. I’ve never used Facebook. I’ve only been reading The New York Times, The Washington Post (but no longer), The Atlantic, BBC News, Reason, and several Substacks, along with watching TV newscasts and discussion programs. Is there a more real world that’s accessible only through Facebook?
This reminds me of Matt Yglesias’ piece from this week about bubbles. It’s great you get your news from those sources! The overwhelming majority of Americans do not read any of those sources
Thanks for your reply. I was commenting on the author's statement, "Facebook is how you find out what's going on in the world." That's awfully comprehensive, as if everybody who is anybody were viewing the world through Facebook.
"There's a small black rectangle that gives you insight into the true nature of the world. You love the rectangle, but it slowly drives you insane. You hate the rectangle, but gradually lose contact with friends and family so you can study its kaleidoscopic gleaming offerings".
The evidence *for* the harms of smartphones comes from randomized trials. The evidence *against* is observations of social trends in non-Anglophone countries. That seems kind of weak, no? Maybe happiness would be rising still faster in Eastern Europe without smartphones. If we want to say phone harms are specific to English-speaking countries, we need some equivalent randomized trials in other countries.
I also found the case against phones negatively affecting politics very... social sciencey. Failing to observe a shift in one measure (affective polarization) in a short experiment doesn't really speak to the internet theory of political decline. Affective polarization is mostly a US phenomenon, but populism and fascism are rising in the US, Europe, South America, and India. The ways in which social media might drive these trends aren't amenable to short randomized experiments the way individual well-being is.
Sometimes in an argument, one side is basically just correct. Yes, unquestionably phones have some benefits. Cigarettes do too.
Neil Postman coined the term "information action ratio" to talk about how a lot of the information we receive now has little bearing on our actual lives and how much we can actually act on it. He wrote this in the 80s, and I think the smartphone is just an accelerant.
You cite several studies where people are less informed after their smartphone usage drops, but if i'm being honest i don't know if being "informed" is really helpful for the average person. It is also hard to determine any change in political persuasion when someone only does it for a month or two. They have been consuming information their whole lives, and it takes a longer time to undo that. These days it is often culture war stuff, and this study has shown that that's accelerated since the 80s: https://sites.harvard.edu/aakaash-rao/job-market-paper/
Finally, the fact that this only really shows up in Anglosphere countries is interesting. I wonder if it's partly because we were already relatively developed in the mid century. A lot of things people are upset about are in america boil down to "i can't live on a single factory income, own a home, and send my kids to college like they used to in the 50s". Readers of The Argument know the flaw in this line of thinking. But other countries don't necessarily have a similar Golden Age to harken back to.
Both good points. One of the reasons I have trouble quitting twitter is it’s the only place to find out about world events as they happen. I’ve realized that there’s absolutely nothing I do with having this information an hour before I otherwise would, but I still “need” to be the first to know about these things. I think I’d be just as informed in the ways that matter if I quit twitter, even if I did worse on a daily news quiz.
I wish someone would write a book about the universal pessimism in America (and I guess other English speaking countries). Some time in the last ten years it basically became taboo to say something good about the economy or politics, and I haven’t seen a comprehensive explanation for what specifically caused this to happen when it did.
this was my biggest reason for staying on twitter for so long. there are certainly things i have "missed" and a part of me feels bad about it but then i have to remember my life did not change at all by learning this information later than i would have before.
The "theories of everything" related to phones and social media fail to acknowledge what the issues and lawsuits are really about: social apps are explicitly marketed to children, which is what makes them more dangerous to people who grew up with the constant connection to social technology. That's why Meta and YouTube lost: they developed products that are safe for adults to use and choose but initially didn't think about how those design patterns would apply to children. When they realized that children made them more money because kids couldn't look away from the design patterns, they doubled down because the lifetime value of an addicted customer is much higher when their cognitive development is connected with that addiction.
We don't treat adults and kids the same when discussing either cigarettes or alcohol. They're more dangerous for people under 18, hands down. For adults who didn't grow up with smartphones, it's not that hard to turn off the digital brain.
Talking about "theories of everything" generally caters to my "adult americans who write online professionally seem to have failed to grow up" theory of everything. That the lawsuits and regulations are primarily spearheaded by parents is important: instagram is Joe Camel, and the individual choice of that elder millennials and gen X techies see in using a phone is irrelevant to the developing brain.
It seems clear to me that the problem isn't the smartphones themselves, but the business model that arose around social networks and news delivery. If the successful business model were building intellectually stimulating and positive social connections, (I have no idea how this business model would work, or if it could possibly be sustainable) then people would have a very different opinion of these devices. The smartphones are just physical manifestations of a business model that monetizes anxiety.
I like smart phones and am skeptical of the damage. But I will say - most people do not need national news at all. It just doesnt affect their lives. Especially if they are getting their news in the form of emotional short form video vs text.
It would be helpful if some of these studies measured whether smartphones are helping people stay informed about things that matter, or just things the smartphone set are discussing (which may have substantial overlap! but I worry that it will be hard to operationalize the distinction in a measurable way)
Given some of the ways you present things (which may be foreshadowing of future articles) I'm wondering whether a lot of the effects of smartphones involve access to the world of online content, and it's quite plausible that the international English world of online content is unique compared to the non-English localized worlds of online content, such that native speakers of English get different effects from people who primarily stay in their native language and only venture into the English world as a second language.
"The Jonathan Haidts of the world, who blame phones for basically every modern malady"
Haidt's view is much more complicated than that. While you somewhat allude to his real view in this sentence "My favorite Jonathan Haidt argument is that phones replace play-based adolescence with phone-based adolescence", even that falls far short of capturing Haidt's full argument.
I think the intro to this wonderful After Babel post (https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-upstream-cause-of-the-youth-mental) by Seth Kaplan on community does the best job of summarizing Haidt's argument. It's actually, a "three act story" and while phones are the third act, the first two acts are the loss of community and the loss of the play based childhood.
I thought the "opportunity cost" section was interesting here, and perhaps a decent explanatory mechanism for why negative effects seem to be localized to Anglosphere countries. We have lots of really good other things for our adolescents to be doing (being relatively wealthy, independent, and risky, compared to the rest of Europe, East Asia, and the developing world). So when that's replaced by phone use, primarily social media, that's costly, because it replaces things like family + peer relationship development, outdoor activities, experiential learning, etc. Whereas the median child in, say, Lagos or Mumbai might have been much more likely to replace less beneficial activities with phone use over the last decade. No idea how you could run this through a positivist approach to generate some sort of causal inference, but not sure that's the best way of thinking about this.
Hmm, I would have imagined the opposite! That in Seoul and Berlin and quaint Italian and Japanese villages there are far better offline spaces for children to interact than in the United States, where everything is mediated through parents with cars.
But we are comparing different contrast classes to the Anglosphere.
In America, I think if the Smartphone Theory of Everything folks link up with the Cars (or Housing) Theory of Everything people we will start to have a good time.
As a dedicated STOE guy, I know that true monocausality is unlikely, and therefore I appreciate this effort to complicate the most blunt version of the STOE. One point missing from this piece, however, is the concept of network effects and society-wide displacement, as opposed to individual use. We can run a study on what happens when a bunch of individuals turn off Facebook for a couple months, but those individuals still live in a community dominated by Facebook. We can't run a study to see what happens when an entire community shuts off Facebook for a few months or years. For example, the concept of displacement is prominent in this piece, but only analyzed on a personal level, as a personal tradeoff between phone time versus socializing, sleeping, and so forth. That analysis overlooks how displacement is equally important at the community level. It's plausible that the rise of the smartphone in tandem with social media killed local newspapers. Today, if you pay someone to log off Facebook for a few months, they end up less informed, not just because they've lost access to information but because Facebook has destroyed all alternative community-level infrastructure for staying informed. So yes, we can't blame every bad thing in life on "the phones," but I'm still comfortable concluding that "the phones" are unambiguously bad for us, on net.
I think this is plausible but pulling out one thing you said: "Today, if you pay someone to log off Facebook for a few months, they end up less informed, not just because they've lost access to information but because Facebook has destroyed all alternative community-level infrastructure for staying informed."
This implies that people pre-smartphone were as informed if not more informed than people today. This strikes me as very unlikely. At best, they were informed about *different stuff* and then we'd have to debate which type of information is best.
Right clearly today people are way better informed about the actions of other people who they think are doing bad things but who they don't interact with normally. This goes for people committing war crimes in Gaza to people being trans in public on other cities to Lindy West. Has that greater level of information benefited solving any of the issues that people have with them?
Absolutely, and as a self-described STOE guy who is still high on "Amusing Ourselves To Death" by Neil Postman (and "Everything Is Television Now" by Thompson), I'd very gladly argue that the information volume and mix is absolutely worse in the new smartphone society. Higher volume might be worse! Even if I'm wrong about that, I think the network effect remains an important point, because it's so hard to test network effects and community-level displacement empirically. One of the more convincing studies mentioned in "After Babel," if I remember right, is that the piece-by-piece rollout of Facebook in some European communities allowed for a natural experiment at the communal level rather than the individual level, and there was a measurable negative effect--I forget on which measure, tbh--associated with a community's widespread adoption of Facebook. We might never have a lot of evidence like that, unfortunately, so there's a limitation on our ability to empirically determine the "right" answer. But just because an effect is hard to study empirically doesn't mean we can ignore or discount it.
In addition to Allan SB's really important point, this essay (and every other one like it) fails to grapple with the actual reason people believe the STOE. It's because we see it in ourselves about our own relationship with our phones. No RCT is going to convince me that I read as many books as I did 20 years ago, or that checking my phone first thing when I wake up is healthy.
I think Derek's point about "what the phone displaces for you" is important! Most people haven't displaced reading a ton of valuable books.
My experience is very like yours and so I've taken a bunch of steps to curtail my digital use (and I'm reading a lot more as a result!) but I don't think we're representative.
I agree that the particular things we would do otherwise are not representative but that doesn't mean that the other things people were doing were not valuable.
But also, my point is not about what is displaced so much as that people recognize that their relationship with phones is unhealthy and thus want to avoid that for kids.
"... or that checking my phone first thing when I wake up is healthy."
But you will be extra informed!
Yes, I am more informed (about the kind of things people talk about on Twitter)
Most of my smartphone time though, is reading various substacks.
I pretty much always start the day with slow boring
Then the argument
The dispatch
The free press
And of course the wall street journal to round everything out
“The strongest, most reliable finding from years of randomized social media research is not that Facebook makes you crazy; it’s that, for better or worse, Facebook is how you find out what’s going on in the world.”
Gulp. I’ve never used Facebook. I’ve only been reading The New York Times, The Washington Post (but no longer), The Atlantic, BBC News, Reason, and several Substacks, along with watching TV newscasts and discussion programs. Is there a more real world that’s accessible only through Facebook?
This reminds me of Matt Yglesias’ piece from this week about bubbles. It’s great you get your news from those sources! The overwhelming majority of Americans do not read any of those sources
Thanks for your reply. I was commenting on the author's statement, "Facebook is how you find out what's going on in the world." That's awfully comprehensive, as if everybody who is anybody were viewing the world through Facebook.
"There's a small black rectangle that gives you insight into the true nature of the world. You love the rectangle, but it slowly drives you insane. You hate the rectangle, but gradually lose contact with friends and family so you can study its kaleidoscopic gleaming offerings".
Did H.P. Lovecraft invent this?
The evidence *for* the harms of smartphones comes from randomized trials. The evidence *against* is observations of social trends in non-Anglophone countries. That seems kind of weak, no? Maybe happiness would be rising still faster in Eastern Europe without smartphones. If we want to say phone harms are specific to English-speaking countries, we need some equivalent randomized trials in other countries.
I also found the case against phones negatively affecting politics very... social sciencey. Failing to observe a shift in one measure (affective polarization) in a short experiment doesn't really speak to the internet theory of political decline. Affective polarization is mostly a US phenomenon, but populism and fascism are rising in the US, Europe, South America, and India. The ways in which social media might drive these trends aren't amenable to short randomized experiments the way individual well-being is.
Sometimes in an argument, one side is basically just correct. Yes, unquestionably phones have some benefits. Cigarettes do too.
Neil Postman coined the term "information action ratio" to talk about how a lot of the information we receive now has little bearing on our actual lives and how much we can actually act on it. He wrote this in the 80s, and I think the smartphone is just an accelerant.
You cite several studies where people are less informed after their smartphone usage drops, but if i'm being honest i don't know if being "informed" is really helpful for the average person. It is also hard to determine any change in political persuasion when someone only does it for a month or two. They have been consuming information their whole lives, and it takes a longer time to undo that. These days it is often culture war stuff, and this study has shown that that's accelerated since the 80s: https://sites.harvard.edu/aakaash-rao/job-market-paper/
Finally, the fact that this only really shows up in Anglosphere countries is interesting. I wonder if it's partly because we were already relatively developed in the mid century. A lot of things people are upset about are in america boil down to "i can't live on a single factory income, own a home, and send my kids to college like they used to in the 50s". Readers of The Argument know the flaw in this line of thinking. But other countries don't necessarily have a similar Golden Age to harken back to.
Both good points. One of the reasons I have trouble quitting twitter is it’s the only place to find out about world events as they happen. I’ve realized that there’s absolutely nothing I do with having this information an hour before I otherwise would, but I still “need” to be the first to know about these things. I think I’d be just as informed in the ways that matter if I quit twitter, even if I did worse on a daily news quiz.
I wish someone would write a book about the universal pessimism in America (and I guess other English speaking countries). Some time in the last ten years it basically became taboo to say something good about the economy or politics, and I haven’t seen a comprehensive explanation for what specifically caused this to happen when it did.
It’s the phones! (Actually really it’s probably the algorithmic social media feeds that reward negative content)
this was my biggest reason for staying on twitter for so long. there are certainly things i have "missed" and a part of me feels bad about it but then i have to remember my life did not change at all by learning this information later than i would have before.
The "theories of everything" related to phones and social media fail to acknowledge what the issues and lawsuits are really about: social apps are explicitly marketed to children, which is what makes them more dangerous to people who grew up with the constant connection to social technology. That's why Meta and YouTube lost: they developed products that are safe for adults to use and choose but initially didn't think about how those design patterns would apply to children. When they realized that children made them more money because kids couldn't look away from the design patterns, they doubled down because the lifetime value of an addicted customer is much higher when their cognitive development is connected with that addiction.
We don't treat adults and kids the same when discussing either cigarettes or alcohol. They're more dangerous for people under 18, hands down. For adults who didn't grow up with smartphones, it's not that hard to turn off the digital brain.
Talking about "theories of everything" generally caters to my "adult americans who write online professionally seem to have failed to grow up" theory of everything. That the lawsuits and regulations are primarily spearheaded by parents is important: instagram is Joe Camel, and the individual choice of that elder millennials and gen X techies see in using a phone is irrelevant to the developing brain.
The meme about Instagram, body image, and teenage girls should never be referenced without this context: https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-instagrams-effect-on-teenage-girls/
Thank you for sharing this, I have never seen the og data
It seems clear to me that the problem isn't the smartphones themselves, but the business model that arose around social networks and news delivery. If the successful business model were building intellectually stimulating and positive social connections, (I have no idea how this business model would work, or if it could possibly be sustainable) then people would have a very different opinion of these devices. The smartphones are just physical manifestations of a business model that monetizes anxiety.
I like smart phones and am skeptical of the damage. But I will say - most people do not need national news at all. It just doesnt affect their lives. Especially if they are getting their news in the form of emotional short form video vs text.
It would be helpful if some of these studies measured whether smartphones are helping people stay informed about things that matter, or just things the smartphone set are discussing (which may have substantial overlap! but I worry that it will be hard to operationalize the distinction in a measurable way)
Given some of the ways you present things (which may be foreshadowing of future articles) I'm wondering whether a lot of the effects of smartphones involve access to the world of online content, and it's quite plausible that the international English world of online content is unique compared to the non-English localized worlds of online content, such that native speakers of English get different effects from people who primarily stay in their native language and only venture into the English world as a second language.
"The Jonathan Haidts of the world, who blame phones for basically every modern malady"
Haidt's view is much more complicated than that. While you somewhat allude to his real view in this sentence "My favorite Jonathan Haidt argument is that phones replace play-based adolescence with phone-based adolescence", even that falls far short of capturing Haidt's full argument.
I think the intro to this wonderful After Babel post (https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-upstream-cause-of-the-youth-mental) by Seth Kaplan on community does the best job of summarizing Haidt's argument. It's actually, a "three act story" and while phones are the third act, the first two acts are the loss of community and the loss of the play based childhood.
I thought the "opportunity cost" section was interesting here, and perhaps a decent explanatory mechanism for why negative effects seem to be localized to Anglosphere countries. We have lots of really good other things for our adolescents to be doing (being relatively wealthy, independent, and risky, compared to the rest of Europe, East Asia, and the developing world). So when that's replaced by phone use, primarily social media, that's costly, because it replaces things like family + peer relationship development, outdoor activities, experiential learning, etc. Whereas the median child in, say, Lagos or Mumbai might have been much more likely to replace less beneficial activities with phone use over the last decade. No idea how you could run this through a positivist approach to generate some sort of causal inference, but not sure that's the best way of thinking about this.
Hmm, I would have imagined the opposite! That in Seoul and Berlin and quaint Italian and Japanese villages there are far better offline spaces for children to interact than in the United States, where everything is mediated through parents with cars.
But we are comparing different contrast classes to the Anglosphere.
My "smartphone theory of everything" is that absorbing too much bad internet prose results in never learning the logic of building a sustained argument, via paragraphs. https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/for-the-love-of-god-learn-to-paragraph
Replace their social media time with a subscription to NYT or WSJ and some substacks
In America, I think if the Smartphone Theory of Everything folks link up with the Cars (or Housing) Theory of Everything people we will start to have a good time.