The answer to bad tech is better tech

A kinda, sorta review of life with a dumbphone

The beginning of the end? Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

After I wrote my article about killing my 10-hour-a-day¹ TikTok addiction, I found myself — a bit uncomfortably — among the growing chorus of writers, pundits, and journalists lamenting the smartphone.

I say “uncomfortably” because I worry that in the frenzy of trying to manage the negative side effects of social media, we’ll throw the tech-progress baby out with the short-form-video-slop bathwater.

I am perfectly situated to become an anti-tech Luddite: I’m a professional wordcel who loves to read, and from the moment I discovered TikTok, my concentration and willpower were comparable to a 2-year-old encountering a whipped cream can for the first time.

But I didn’t save my brain by eschewing technology or demonizing it. I switched to a different, better (sort of) tech. The only way out is through. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle; let’s just make some better wishes.

The smartphone is actually great

Smartphones are incredible tools that make most people’s lives better. In all the whinging about social media, it’s easy to forget that we’ve given most people a computer that lives in their pockets.

A 2022 Gallup survey found that far more U.S. adults with a smartphone thought it made their lives better than worse. Twenty-one percent said “a lot better” while just 2% said “a lot worse.”

Notably, when asked if they used their phones too much, 58% said yes, with concern concentrated among the young.

This isn’t a one-off. In a 2023 YouGov poll, 64% of U.S. adults said the internet was overall a good thing for humanity and 62% said the same about the smartphone. The numbers were lower for social media, but even there, 38% said it was a good thing and just 29% said it was an overall bad development for humanity.

Another YouGov poll, this time conducted in 2024, found that 36% of people said the smartphone had overall “very positive” effects on society, another 34% said “somewhat positive” and just 10% and 4% said “somewhat” and “very negative,” respectively. Internationally, surveys indicate that smartphone positivity is even more pronounced.

I don’t say all this to wave away the various problems with smartphones, but to point out just how out of whack the discourse has gotten with people’s own self-perceptions about the value of this technology.²

Understanding the smartphone as a mostly good thing with some serious problems is preferable to the alternative: understanding them as mostly bad things we’ve all been tricked into using by evil technology companies. That mindset is preferable because it leads to better policy outcomes and it’s more consistent with public opinion.

Now, public opinion isn’t infallible but whenever elite discourse strays so far away from public opinion, we should worry about whether we’re moralizing about preferences or actually diagnosing societal ills.

The best fix for bad tech is good tech

From coal to cars, humans alight upon a groundbreaking technology, realize there are some real problems with it, then invent newer, better technologies.

In 1709, a man named Abraham Darby figured out how to use a “purified form of coal that burns hotter and cleaner” to smelt iron ore. Without this discovery, the Industrial Revolution could not have taken off. But with it, “annual production in Britain [grew] from about 2,500 tonnes per annum in the 1700s to 28,000 tons per annum by the 1750s to 180,000 in 1800 and 2.5 million by 1850.”

There are, famously, some problems with burning so much coal. That doesn’t take away from the fact that burning coal was a necessary condition for the greatest economic miracle in human history; it just means we should switch to renewable energy sources as soon as possible. Thankfully, we’ve discovered a bunch of those as well.

Cars are amazing. Most of us, when we first got the chance to drive our own automobile, can remember the rush of freedom. I can go anywhere, do anything! The personal automobile didn’t just grant us the freedom to move around great distances, it “powered a century of economic prosperity.”

Cars are, of course, pretty dangerous — not to mention time-consuming and bad for the environment. Every year, roughly 1.2 million people die and between 20 million and 50 million people are injured due to traffic accidents.

People lose days of their lives to traffic every year. In Istanbul, drivers lost an average of 105 hours in 2024, and in New York and Chicago, drivers lost 102 hours. Overall, one report indicated that drivers were losing more than a workweek’s worth of time sitting in their cars.

Now, thankfully, we are developing solutions for these problems: autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles.

I took a Waymo for the first time last month and it was one of the coolest experiences of my life. I was nervous at first, but within a couple of minutes, it was obvious how much safer a driver my robot was than basically any driver I’d ever had.

I’m not just recounting my lived experience, as my colleague Kelsey Piper has explained, “Waymos are about 80% less likely to get into a serious crash than human drivers” and of the “30 to 40 crashes in each six-month period [researchers] examine, in only one or two was the Waymo at fault.”

Please let the robots have this one

What should all this tell us about the smartphone? Well, in general, I think people should be more bullish about new technology’s capacity to retain the benefits of smartphones while curbing the side effects. Specifically, more people should be talking about and trying the variety of dumbphones that have just started to enter the market.

For my part, I’ve made the switch to the Light Phone III, a device that kinda sucks, but that’s part of how it works.

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