Aged 15, my hobbies consisted of listening to punk rock, falling off skateboards, and smoking pot with my friends. If you’d asked my teachers to pick the child most likely to get degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, and then spend a lifetime in education, I would have been quite far down the list. But in the year of my GCSEs, I had a revelation. If I wanted to get out of Southport (and I very much did) I might have to reconsider my plans. Maybe I should stop being the class clown, and actually do some work; see what happened if I tried, rather than coasted? Turns out, I wasn’t just good at schoolwork, I enjoyed it. (OK not you, math). By the time my A levels rolled around, I never looked back.

Except this story isn’t quite right. It makes me the main character in a way I don’t deserve. The truth is, I could never have made that step if I hadn’t come from a family filled with books. Pretty much every room in my parents’ house has books in it, thousands of them in total. Both my parents read to me from a young age, my French mother gritting her teeth and slogging through all the Chronicles of Narnia, and much else besides. I lived around the corner from the library. I had friends who read, too.

So as much as I messed around in high school, I had a solid foundation in reading. In the end, I didn’t need a fancy private education or personal tutors to luck my way into Oxford and then a career in academia. I made it without those. But I would never have made it without books.

All of which makes James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages a distressing read. Although he grew up in Tyneside rather than Merseyside, like me Marriott is lower middle class, from a bookish family, and reading eventually propelled him to a position traditionally held by the children of elites. He’s a little younger than I am (I can remember the world without the internet; he can’t). But if he’s right, we are the last of a dying breed.

To some extent, The New Dark Ages is a beefed-up version of Marriott’s Substack post that went viral last year — and has prompted many similar articles since. The evidence is in: reading is collapsing. Though this started with the rise of TV, it exploded exponentially with the smartphone (the real villain in this historical story). And the consequences are likely to be dramatic. Before reading the book, you might think that it’s hysterical for an author to claim that the rise of screens at the expense of print heralds the end of Western democracy. By the end, while you may not agree with him, you will not be calling him hysterical.

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Let’s avoid one misunderstanding right away. Marriott is not claiming that in future people will be illiterate. They will still need to be able to read words to function in technologically advanced societies (text messages; emails; blindly obeying ChatGPT, etc). But what appears to be in mass decline is the reading of complex, long-form prose. This is particularly obvious when it comes to reading books, where the statistics are stark. In America, reading for pleasure has declined by 40% in the past 20 years. In the UK, The National Literacy Trust reports that the number of children saying they read for pleasure is the lowest on record. But it is also a story about the loss of widespread reading in the form of daily newspapers. As well as the disappearance of local journalism, national publications have seen circulation drop from the millions to the low hundreds of thousands. The very fact that you are reading this means that you are now firmly in a minority of the population.

What has increasingly replaced both books and newspapers is screens — and specifically the screens we carry around in our pockets, upon which we watch short-form videos. This is the dawn of the post-literate society. People can read; it’s just that most of them choose not to.

OK, so what’s the problem? Let’s start with the fact that it is only through the written word that human beings can engage in long, complex, critically verifiable chains of thought. An oral culture can bequeath a story, but it cannot become The Odyssey until somebody writes it down. Even more dramatically, imagine someone trying to dictate from memory (let alone listen to, understand, and analyze) something like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

More than that, however, reading literally rewires our brains. Marriott marshals the relevant neuroscientists, and they are clear: the kind of complex cognition that our civilization depends upon is possible only for humans who can read. Humans who can read more complex things are (on average) able to have more complex thoughts. Those who struggle to read complex things struggle to have complex thoughts.

This is why smartphones are nothing short of a civilization-threatening disaster. What a smartphone removes is the need for reading anything complex, let alone long-form. Indeed, they are designed to do the opposite. Thousands of very smart engineers devote their entire careers to diverting as much of your attention as possible to short form videos, the scrolliest of scrollbait. When watching short videos delivering the dopamine hits to which we are now addicted, our brains are rewiring. This time, to make us stupider.

What about podcasts? There is some evidence that the precipitous decline in the sales of non-fiction books is partially due to the fact that we’re listening to more podcasts — at least some of which are highly intelligent. The problem is that doing so returns us to something like an oral culture; the inadequacies of oral culture are most apparent when you transcribe the kinds of things that people say on podcasts. Marriott quotes a quack “historian” getting airtime on the Tucker Carlson Network (number of listeners per episode: 56.8 million), discussing Winston Churchill:

“He wanted redemption. He wanted to go out there and prove that he’s the warlord, that they can go out there and fight this big war. Probably. I think part of it… I read about Churchill and he strikes me as a psychopath, but he’s also a sort of… I mean, he was a drunk. He was very childish in strange ways. People would talk about how as an adult, as prime minister, they’d find him in his room and he’s playing with action figures like war toys and army men and stuff, would get mad when people would interrupt him when he was doing this. This is a strange fellow.”

Aside from this all being factually false, the most striking thing when it’s written down is how obviously unpersuasive it is. If you write like that, it’s clear to everybody that you’re an idiot to be ignored. But because our ears work differently from our eyes, we find oral testimony persuasive even when it is filled with glaring errors, inconsistencies, and even a basic lack of coherence. The collapse of reading correlates with the rise of conspiracy theories, flat-earthers, false beliefs about vaccines, and all the rest of the internet-enabled bullshit. What they both have in common is 2007: the launch of the iPhone.

All of this would be bad enough — but it gets considerably worse when you factor in the political implications. (Which prominent politician does the above transcript remind you of?) As Marriott is keen to emphasize, mass literacy is a recent phenomenon, and by no means the historical norm. It only really got going in Western countries around the 18th century, and he persuasively makes the case that it is no accident that democracy arose in the 19th. It first required a print culture where everybody read a lot — and what they read was more cognitively demanding than what is more readily on offer today. We have reliable records of working-class children choosing to read Dickens, Defoe and Shakespeare in the Forties: in other words before television became ubiquitous.

Marriott is of course aware that many interconnected issues are buffering Western democracies: inequality, economic stagnation, rising immigration as a flashpoint for democratic discontent. But what makes the book persuasive is that he puts forward a plausible underlying explanation of what has driven, or at least exacerbated, so many of the problems we now face: “the literate foundations on which liberal democracy rests are crumbling beneath our feet”. The fact that he must make this case in a book is a vicious, if fitting, irony.

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Throughout human history, whenever underlying technologies have changed, the politics have changed. Reading is a case in point. The invention of the Gutenberg press eventually made Western democracy possible through the rise of literate populations. Along the way, it also helped undermine absolute monarchies, as well as unleashing the European wars of religion, resulting in millions of deaths. History is rarely a simple story of upward progress. Marriott ends with some valiant attempts to be optimistic about the future. You can tell his heart isn’t really in it; the man understands his own evidence. (One suspects the publishers told him that he had to end on an upbeat note, because publishers have this bizarre belief that only positivity shifts units.) I came away not optimistic, but convinced that we are now hurtling firmly downwards.

I recently spent a Saturday afternoon compiling reports on the students who seem to have submitted pure AI copy-and-paste for their resits. The resits they are taking because I already caught them doing this in April. And herein lies the problem of academia. I’m doing this because I’m mad and actually think that education and scholarship matter. The incentives strongly suggest to me that I should just pretend I haven’t noticed, and enjoy my Saturday. (The students are also under perverse incentives; if you don’t cheat but the others do, aren’t you just the mug?) Most academics are not as mad as me, at least in this specific regard, and they respond to incentives rationally. But until we find a way to sort this out, university degrees really are going to be pretty much worthless.

If you stand at the back of a lecture hall these days, you see a sea of screens, students flicking through their dopamine suppliers. At the front, some relic from a previous generation drones on. A couple of times a week, the relic is me. Still, it’s not all bad news. After years commanding us that we had to allow students to use their laptops in class (disability accommodation, apparently), King’s College London has finally given my department permission to ban them at teacher discretion. It’s too little, too late — but I suppose it’s something.

The world Marriott and I were born into is already dead. A new one has taken its place. Insofar as I have a role left in it, it will be as a sort of citizen-gamekeeper for those peculiar creatures strange enough to still want to read books in a world where the dopamine hits of TikTok and the shortcuts of AI compete for every second of waking attention.

The university as safari park. It sounds almost cute — until I remember that nobody feeds the animals for free.

With every new innovation, the digital universe continues its conquest of the social world, assimilating everything from high politics to the most personal and intimate aspects of our lives. And there is one consequence that seems to correlate perfectly with this trend: the steady contraction of the real world itself. The relationship between the stagnation of our natural and built environments and the growth of the “bits economy” has been noted before. But what we are now only beginning to understand in depth is how decades of offloading our daily interactions to online spaces has made a desert out of the in-person environments where human beings congregated and conducted the customs, norms, and rituals of shared existence. 

The term “third space” was coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg to refer to these sites where people meet to socialize beyond where they live and work. Such places have been in decline for years before Covid, work-from-home, and delivery apps supercharged the trend. Now, food inflation is accelerating the pace of collapse and changing generational preferences around diet and drink are entrenching it. 

The statistics confirm a bleak outlook for the service industry: “nearly 40% of Americans are dining out less frequently,” reports YouGov, while Gallup finds that “the percentage of US adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend.” Momofuku chef David Chang calls the situation an “existential threat” to his profession. Fast-food chains like Subway and Wendy’s are closing hundreds of locations, and mid-tier and mom-and-pop restaurants are vanishing even faster. One may celebrate the broad turn away from intoxication and greasy food, but people, especially the young, aren’t replacing the bars and diners of old, and are instead forgoing the prosocial dimensions of classic third spaces. Putting on an old episode of Cheers, “where everyone knows your name,” or Friends, with its Central Perk coffeehouse, feels like watching footage from a lost civilization.

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Another set of figures completes the picture: crashing global fertility can be attributed to the introduction of smartphones in 2007, according to a new University of Cincinnati study. Time-use data shows that smartphones “halved face-to-face socialization” from 12 to six hours or fewer a week, with the result being that young adults fail to meet and hook up, never starting on the path to reproduction that once began at a bar, cafe or equivalent place for social interactions. What this suggests is that beneath the impacts of exogenous shocks like the pandemic or affordability crises, the antisocial pull is endogenous to the smartphone era. The hollowing out of third spaces, as it turns out, presages nothing less than the extinction of the species.

And thus, what passes for the “new normal” is, in fact, a mass screen-induced distortion of our basic human nature. The only alternative is to actively resist and fight back. But how can people be persuaded to do something? Just as Rachel Carson kickstarted the modern environmental movement with her haunting prediction of a “silent spring,” where birdsong ceased due to the mass die-off of birds from the (hitherto uncontroversial) use of toxic pesticides, so too should the public today be galvanized out of apathy by the image — already a stark reality — of a “silent society” characterized by a social die-off. For the silent society is one drained of organic life and human voices, populated by successive, shrinking generations of dead-eyed youths who no longer know how (nor even desire) to talk to each other, foster friendships, seek partners, or build families and communities beyond what exists as simulation on screens. It is, above all, silent quite literally because the everyday sounds of conversation, laughter, argument, romance, and spontaneity have been snuffed out and surrendered to total digital intermediation. 

Of course, the firms of the attention economy have no problem with the silent society and are, in fact, responsible for it — the industry is built on encouraging addiction to its products. A world where people can’t communicate except through phones and AI assistants is one where the rule of the algorithm is absolute. When Mark Zuckerberg hinted at a future where personalized AI (to be made by Meta) fills the friendship gap, he is not previewing a distant dystopia but describing the trajectory we are already on.

Pushback is gaining momentum, but where the interests that prop up the attention economy are concentrated and overrepresented, the rebellion against it is diffuse. There have been promising but limited victories: high school cell phone bans; porn-gating legislation; sporadic subcultures by youths themselves to drop their phones and “touch the grass.” What has been missing so far is a unified countermovement and restoration of the vibrant third-space ecosystems that existed before the silent society. As Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch asked in a recent interview with UnHerd, “If [youths are] not going to be spending two hours a day on TikTok, what are we going to provide in place of that?”

The answer must come in the form of a vision to transcend the silent society and a push to build a coalition of countervailing interests to bring it about. The policy components to fill in such a vision are already hiding in plain sight. The idea of a “digital sabbath” has been floating around for some time. The old sabbaths were enforced by society to uphold the biblical command of rest and worship, and even as late as the mid-20th century, “blue laws” limited business hours and television broadcasts on Sundays. 

A new digital sabbath would have to go beyond being a personal wellness quirk and operate at the level of public policy, as a state-mandated two-day-long shutdown of all non-essential attention-economy applications. People would still be able to call or text, but feeds would be frozen. This would not be “censorship” as the law suspends the medium itself rather than any particular message within it; gaming and streaming servers could be curtailed. And yes, there will be outrage and meltdowns as digital addicts undergo withdrawal symptoms, but we’ve reached a point where the liberal axiom of absolute, unfettered personal choice can no longer be endlessly justified. 

A second step provides positive alternatives for people to turn to once their social media goes offline. In this scenario, the attention economy would still function five days a week and that activity would, at least for a time, still be lucrative; Big Tech would still rake in billions as it does now. But in this case, it would be taxed a certain percentage of its general income in a country: call it the “Social Reparations Tax,” premised on the idea that the attention-economy firms are directly liable for the social catastrophe wrought by the smartphone age. They should be made to pay for the costs of societal repair. This would come in the form of “third-space coupons” (or 3SCs) funded by the reparations tax, which would be distributed in the mail to ordinary citizens, but especially to the 16- to 34-year-old demographic, and which may be redeemed at any local establishment. In effect, it is a massive wealth transfer from the distraction merchants to the proprietors of displaced third spaces.

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But that’s beyond the pale — and has never been done! Yes, the specific redistribution mechanism is genuinely novel but the notion that governments might step in to prop up a struggling service sector is hardly untested. At the height of the pandemic, the British economy undertook an experiment known as “Eat Out to Help Out,” where the government subsidized meals and drinks. The difference would be that the 3SC system would have a stable funding pool, and it proposes to institutionalize over a period of years what has only been tried as a provisional measure. The second- and third-order effects of such a break with the status quo are worth mapping out. 

The learning curve for a cohort deprived of regular social contact would be steep as youths strive to rebuild interpersonal skills and habits. It would become an “Addison and Steele” moment, echoing the 18th century, when the arts of conversation and social grace were cultivated by a newly enlightened Europe — a whole new paradigm of sociability would have to be consciously constructed as if from scratch. 3SCs would radically raise demand for food and beverages, as well as in-person leisure services, and create new markets; non-alcoholic alternatives like milk bars could become popular once more. 

And just as important, within a few years, the attention economy could itself begin to be crowded out by the revived analog economy, which would no longer have to be subsidized as much, as demand stabilizes and food production gradually returns to equilibrium, easing inflation. In this case, attention-economy firms would have to find a business model that is more socially productive, perhaps diverting their AI compute power toward rebuilding our material, industrial capacities rather than virtual content; this would amount to a winding down of the attention economy and its replacement with something new. 

There is then the question of who or what coalition is supposed to drive such a revolutionary shift? In past essays, I’ve mapped out a stratum of local entrepreneurs known as “the gentry.” Among these are the franchisees, restaurateurs, agribusinesses, brewers, and recreation industry professionals who as a class played an essential but overlooked role in seeding the contemporary rise of populism in America. (Their ranks include Andrew Puzder, Dick Yuengling, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Lauren Boebert.) There are equivalents elsewhere, such as the British publican, the French boulangère, the Japanese teishu — precisely the local elites who’ve been battered by the rise of the silent society and whose fortunes would recover under this scheme. What they lack is a proper “class consciousness,” but an effort to raise them up as the vanguards of a prosocial, pro-human renaissance would align them with the very same youths who will fill the revitalized third spaces and — hopefully — revive family formation and social cohesion.

Finally, just as the attention economy took root with the help of leaders motivated by a quasi-religious ideology centered on the supplanting of humans with godlike technologies, this countermovement too should have its own vision of the divine. It could hold that what makes us human is holy, and that our social capacities are a sacred trust, meant to help us find happiness in each other’s presence and, ultimately, to “be fruitful and multiply.”

The case for a ban rests heavily on the argument, advanced most prominently by Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation, that social media is a primary driver of a worldwide deterioration in adolescent mental health. Haidt has met with leaders from the UK, France, Indonesia and the EU to discuss bans. The case rests on two core claims. First, that anxiety, depression and self-harm have risen among teenagers — particularly girls — across multiple countries and coinciding closely with the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media. Second, that even if much of the evidence tying social media to mental health is correlational, it is consistent enough to justify action now, rather than waiting for scientific consensus. It is a compelling story. But that doesn’t make it true.

The evidence that social media is a primary driver of declining adolescent mental health is weaker and more ambiguous than is often suggested, and in many cases difficult to interpret causally. At the same time, there are good reasons to think that the harms associated with smartphones operate less through social media itself than through the activities it displaces — sleep, in-person interaction, and sustained attention. To Haidt’s credit these are also central to his broader claim that adolescence and childhood have been “rewired”, with less time spent in independent real-world activity and more time mediated through screens. This distinction matters because it suggests that blanket bans risk targeting the wrong problem.

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There is still no robust evidence that social media, in itself, is a major driver of poor mental health among adolescents. Various researchers in the field have written damning reviews of Haidt, alarmed by the gap between the force of his argument and what the research actually shows, as well as his irresponsibility in whipping the public up into a frenzy that may prove difficult to correct.

One study of over 300,000 12- to 18-year-olds in the US and UK, for example, found that technology use had such a negligible association with wellbeing as to be “too small to warrant policy change”. To put this in perspective, the effect was roughly equivalent to wearing glasses. Other known risk factors, such as being bullied, had more than four times the association. Even umbrella reviews that summarize all the other reviews tend to conclude that the relationship between social media and mental health is “weak and inconsistent”.

Part of the reason for this ambiguity is that much of the evidence is vulnerable to basic problems of confounding. Teenagers who are already anxious or depressed may be more likely to spend large amounts of time on social media in the first place. Untangling cause from effect in this context is extremely difficult. The result is a literature that can just as easily be read as showing that unhappy teenagers use social media more, rather than that social media makes them unhappy.

Even longitudinal studies that follow the same individuals over time, examining whether changes in their usage makes their mental health worse, find mixed results. In one summary of 24 longitudinal studies, 38% found no overall relationship, 33% found that greater usage led to worse mental health, and 25% found effects only for specific subgroups such as girls or heavy users. One of the 24 studies even found the opposite relationship. Meta-analyses that pull together many longitudinal studies tend to find small negative associations, i.e. a higher social media use at one time point makes an individual’s mental health at a second time point very slightly worse — but nothing resembling a large or consistent effect. To be clear, none of this proves that social media has no impact. But it is far from the evidence base of a clear-cut case.

Even the headline claim of a global decline in mental health isn’t so clear. The latest World Happiness Report shows that under-25s in English-speaking countries have seen marked declines in wellbeing over the past decade. Elsewhere, including Asia and Europe however, trends are flat or even improving. It is not obvious why social media should be uniquely harmful in the Anglophone world. One suggestion is that smartphones interact with characteristics that are distinctly “Anglo”. In this reading, English-speaking people have a particular propensity for talking about mental health online which may explain why English-speaking people are particularly affected by smartphones. Another reading, of course, is that smartphones and social media are not related to these country differences at all. Perhaps it’s a result of particularly oppressive housing markets, as John Burn-Murdoch has proposed in the FT. In any case, if smartphones are the cause, their effects are far from uniform.

At the same time, our own experience and experimental evidence complicates the picture. Many of us report dissatisfaction with the amount of time we spend on our phones. And experiments that block smartphone use tend to find improvements in wellbeing. For example, one study blocked mobile internet access among a sample of Canadian and US adults for two weeks. They found that adults reported higher life satisfaction, lower levels of depressive symptoms, and greater ability to maintain attention. Further analyses indicate that these improvements were at least partly driven by changes to how individuals spent their time — replacing smartphone time with increases in offline activity (socializing in person, exercising, or reading a book), alternative types of media consumption (television and YouTube), and other digital communication (texting and video calls). Even participants who were not able to keep to the complete two week ban reported improvements to their wellbeing, indicating that a reduction in smartphone use can have a similar effect to a total ban.

Moreover, quite apart from their effects on mental health, social media or smartphones do appear to be damaging learning. In the 2022 PISA report (this is the international survey run by the OECD to measure 15-year-olds’ skills in reading, maths, and science across countries), researchers found an unprecedented drop in performance across all the OECD countries sampled — a drop equivalent to three-quarters of a year’s worth of learning. They highlight smartphone use as a key possible driver of this decline.

Backing this up, experiments that ban phones in schools find improved focus and boosted exam results. One study that followed 17,000 US students found smartphone bans improved exam results for low-achieving students (but not high), with students mostly supportive of the ban. In another study, students from Florida who were subject to a statewide ban had improved test scores of around 2-3% — not exactly a huge effect though.

However, there were short-term costs. In the first year of the ban disciplinary incidents and suspensions increased by 25-50%, but returned to pre-ban levels by the second year of the ban. How schools decide to implement bans and punish rule-breakers is likely to have a serious impact on whether such policies succeed in improving student outcomes.

The above results can look like a contradiction. Increasing social media use does not reliably worsen mental health, yet reducing phone use appears to improve well-being and student test results. But this makes more sense when viewed through the lens of displacement. Time spent scrolling is time not spent sleeping, socializing in person, studying, or exercising. The issue may not be social media itself, but what it replaces.

This is not a trivial distinction. The wider effects often attributed to social media may instead reflect the broader consequences of smartphones as multipurpose devices that restructure how time is spent.

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At the same time, banning social media would remove genuine benefits. Vulnerable individuals, as well as children who are isolated or not fitting in, can find connections and like-minded peers online. Social media is also an increasingly important source of information. One experiment that asked adults to deactivate Facebook for 4 weeks prior to the 2018 mid-term election, found that participants were less able to correctly answer questions about current events. If results like these hold up, this is not a negligible cost, particularly as these platforms become the primary conduit for news. These two features — finding like-minded people and gaining access to information — were once seen as the two defining virtues of the internet.

Framed this way, the issue is not simply one of mental health, but of how smartphones are restructuring young people’s time and attention. This points toward a different set of interventions: not blanket social media bans, but removing phones from classrooms, and introducing regulation that changes how these technologies are used, such as limiting addictive design features like endless scrolling feeds.

If the concern is specifically adolescent mental health, however, the case for focusing on social media is weaker. Prioritizing an ambiguous risk factor may have the adverse effect of drawing attention away from more substantial ones. Bullying, family instability, and pre-existing mental health conditions have far larger and more consistent effects on well-being. The trials now underway in the UK, Australia and elsewhere should help clarify the impact of social media bans and digital curfews. But in the meantime, blanket bans risk chasing a compelling story, while distracting time and energy away from interventions likely to have the greatest impact.

“Wokeness is dead,” I typed out. This was a succinct way to express the idea that there was something subversive about a blonde female celebrity unapologetically appealing to the male gaze. It’s not too much to say that this launched the discourse around Sydney Sweeney as a Right-wing icon, prompting dozens of think pieces across the ideological spectrum and feeding into the debates generated by Sweeney’s controversial “good jeans” commercial for American Eagle.

The result: I’m mentioned on Sweeney’s Wikipedia page, one of my proudest accomplishments.

Yet by many people’s intuitions, when I sent that Sweeney post, I shouldn’t have been online at all — I should have been playing with my kids. My scrolling and posting at the moment were related to what you might call my “phone addiction,” though I don’t like the term; the vocabulary of mental health likely causes more problems than it solves. Better to say, simply, that over the years, I’ve looked at my phone too much.

But more recently, with the start of the new year, I’ve managed to keep the habit in check. This, without giving up technology or screens altogether, which would be impossible for me — that is, unless I were willing to give up on my information-based line of work. But as the Sweeney post showed, in this job, it pays to always be ready to blast out an inspired line or take at the right moment. The post did bring me a great deal of attention; punditry is, in part, a numbers game, especially in a digital age. Likely, online attention and interaction are beneficial for your work, too, even if your job is less public-facing than mine.

In my defense, moreover, when I’m on my phone, I’m mostly doing things that are squarely related to my job as a writer. I surf real news, cycling through the apps for Substack, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and other high-quality sources of information. The rest of the time is spent answering emails or direct messages, participating in group chats, and, above all, tweeting (or whatever it’s called nowadays). Practically all my book reading is now done through screens, too. Still, despite these practical uses, I have for years walked around with the nagging feeling that I should cut back. 

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And now I’ve managed it. How? I’ve made some rules that share three important qualities: they are strict, minor, and realistic. There’s no silver bullet. Rather, I’ve found that moderation is the best policy. And it has made a real difference in terms of improving my productivity and ability to focus. 

Absolute restrictions don’t work. In the past, I tried (or thought about trying) drastic rules, such as not using the phone during meals, when I’m with my kids, during an entire day of the week, or for four to eight hour periods. But I’ve concluded that such measures are too demanding. Maybe one day, I will be able to afford these more substantial breaks, but I’m not there yet. Nonetheless, while total abstinence over any substantial period of time is not a realistic option, there have been a few easy ways to cut my screen time, while helping, rather than hindering, my ability to communicate with a large audience.

It’s actually one, easy rule: I’ve eliminated device usage during what I call transition periods.

For example, take going to the gym. It used to be normal for me to look at my phone when I arrived, in periods between switching stations, and when walking from one part of the facility to another. I would thus end up spending too much time in the gym, when it would’ve been better for my state of mind, productivity, and physical health if I just simply put the phone away and listened to music without scrolling through apps and social media feeds. I’d certainly be able to do more sets in a shorter period of time. So now I have a new rule: no being on my phone while working out, except for choosing which songs to listen to.

Peeing had also come to take up too much of my time. Standing at a urinal is 10 seconds of my life where I have always found it more enjoyable to scroll X than stare at a tiled wall. But as with the gym, once you allow the phone to intrude on that, ahem, sacred space, everyday activities are drawn out. A quick glance might absorb me in a comments section or group chat. The 10-second urinal visit, in this way, ends up taking several minutes, by the end of which I forget the next thing I need to do. This adds up. Sometimes, it’s good to have 10 seconds just to think — or urinate — without any outside stimulation, freeing oneself to get back to work as soon as possible. 

The biggest change has been no longer looking at my phone while walking or driving. Yes, I was actually doing this. Now, if I’m walking and have the urge to read an article or respond to text, I will either put it off or stop in my tracks in order to scratch that itch. The most dangerous thing for productivity and the general flow of life isn’t when I’m focusing completely on a device. Rather, it’s been the in-between states, when I’m distracted by the screen in my hand while I am supposed to be working out, going to the bathroom, or just walking from Point A to Point B. In these intervals, I’m usually not handling the phone for its more productive uses, such as reading books or answering emails, so I’m just making every task take much longer than it otherwise would, for little benefit. 

And yes, in the past, I’ve sent texts and composed tweets while on the road. I once heard that John von Neumann read books while driving, and since I wanted to be a genius like him, I also took up the practice. It’s actually doable. Like von Neumann, though, I also have a habit of getting into car accidents and decided to no longer tempt fate. No more looking at my phone, even at a stoplight. The practice of scrolling for a short indeterminate amount of time has no real advantages, interrupts what could be fruitful trains of thought, and is difficult to prevent from snowballing into being online while the vehicle is moving — amid the unpredictable sea of other cars, pedestrians, garbage trucks, and so on.

That’s it. Walking, driving, working out, peeing. It doesn’t seem like much. But these things cumulatively make up a large part of my days — and those of many others. I have not adopted an antagonistic relationship with my phone. It is, after all, a library of books, a daily newsstand, a connection with friends, and even my job — the portal through which I influence the world. 

There would be no way to hate my phone without hating myself and everything I am doing in life. I am grateful to Big Tech for giving me a single device through which, within the span of a few minutes, I can look at pictures of my kids at school, post a comment on some contemporary controversy that might be seen by millions of people, and read a page or two from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial new book on the history of sex in Christianity. We shouldn’t forget that we are lucky to be alive in the time after Steve Jobs made his contribution to the world. 

Even with my more limited cutback, I’ve seen changes to the rhythm and flow of life. Now, much more often than before, I’ll notice some quirk of someone I come across whom I previously would have ignored, and I’ll strike up a conversation with them. Or my ear will catch the chatter of a married couple fighting, which will cause some reflection on the human condition. Sometimes, I just have a few extra seconds to ponder an important idea that I’ve read in a book, using brain space that would otherwise be occupied by intricate knowledge of some completely worthless social-media feud.

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Nonetheless, the nature of my work and my intellectual interests means that I have to practice moderation toward the real world as much as I do toward cyberspace. I’m not making any heroic attempts to be less online. It would be nice to say that I unplug and take entire afternoons off to play with my children. But here’s a secret about kids: they’re kind of boring in large doses. You can make a silly face, throw them up in the air and catch them, buy them a toy, and so on. But after a while, you find yourself looking for something more stimulating. I don’t feel bad about allowing them to run off and play while I look at my phone, and then turning my attention back to them while chuckling over a very funny tweet I just sent. 

In addition to letting go of the belief that my family needs my full attention, I’ve also given up on the romantic dream of a simpler life, in which work and recreation are kept separate, or in which “meatspace” is the default and the digital realm is the exception. When I’m tweeting, I’m working, being entertained, engaging in self-expression, and keeping up with friends at the same time. 

Like every other intellectual, I have moments in which I envy those who work “normal,” tangible jobs and are supposedly doing something much more real and in tune with human nature than I am. But I quickly snap out of it, understanding that, for better or worse, I’ve chosen the kind of life in which someone with my peculiar combination of strengths and weaknesses is most likely to flourish. Appreciating the phone without letting it control my life is in part a story about self-acceptance and growing increasingly confident in my place in the universe. 

One day, I would like to step away. Perhaps not permanently, or even for a multiyear period, but just long enough to get a true feeling of what it is like to live without a constant sense of connection to the outside world as mediated through pixels on a six-inch screen. I’m just old enough to remember being an adult without the iPhone, but it’s been so long that there is no way to trust that my memories are accurate, and haven’t been radically distorted by the conversation around what phones are doing to our national politics and the mental health of young people.

There is a balance we must all live with. For some, going cold turkey, or taking prolonged breaks, might make sense. If writing essays like this one weren’t my job, circumstances would probably push me more in that direction. Many years down the line I might be satisfied enough with my accomplishments, influence upon the world, and level of wisdom attained to put the phone down completely. Until then, I’ll see you on Substack, X, and the UnHerd app. 

Picture them as corrupted versions of Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee: bewitched by mischievous supernatural forces and on a quest to massacre an Ent. Arriving at the ancient place, Carruthers wields the chainsaw while Graham holds the camera. Around them Storm Agnes shrieks her protests, while the ghosts of Roman centurions gaze impassively on. Jagged steel bites deep into sycamore sap. The canopy teeters, then falls ignominiously to earth. Afterwards, Carruthers takes his wedge back to the baby’s cradle. The child wakes, crying — as does the horrified world. The spell is broken. Gamgee betrays Frodo to the police, and they both get banged up for four years apiece.

This, minus a few flourishes, is the morality tale offered by Channel 4’s new two-part documentary about Sycamore Gap, though it is disguised as a quaintly rural police procedural. Northumbrian pipes drone in the background as a section of the trunk is uncovered on a slab, as if for an autopsy. A commenting detective seems embarrassed to spell things out: “In this case, the victim is … for want of a better word … the tree, really.” The camera lingers over the wounds, unfettered by the usual concern for respecting the decency of the dead.

In happier times, the sycamore had been visually compelling to visitors, partly because it was so solitary. The barren landscape enhanced its numinous dignity, as did the near-symmetry of the steep banks on either side. For years people had made pilgrimages, asked for engagement blessings, fertilized its roots with the ashes of their loved ones. The tree had seemed resilient ­— even invincible — much older than its 130 years. Back in 2003, it had survived a near-extinction event, narrowly avoiding a collision with a BBC helicopter carrying Alan Titchmarsh.

Slumped and surly on hard plastic chairs at the police station, Carruthers and Graham each tried to deny the crime, but the evidence was all there on their phones. There were voice recordings suggesting they reveled in the public attention. There was a wedge of greenwood, photographed in the boot of Graham’s car. There were even what police called “the owl photographs”: pictures of Carruthers grinning idiotically in his workshop, inexplicably holding some baby owls. Behind him were 11 chainsaws. He had told the police he had none.

And of course, there was the video of the act itself. Documentary viewers see it in the second episode. Filmed in the dark, the blurry footage and eerie noises have something of a horror movie. I had to suppress my urge to look away. Afterwards, various locals reflect on camera about how stupid the defendants were to leave a visual record of their crime. They don’t seem to realize that this was surely part of the point.

When the story first hit the national news, Carruthers texted Graham “Here we go”. A detective recalls on camera how she started to wonder: “Is this why they’ve done it? Are they doing this because they want to be famous?” Carruthers seemed much more interested in his nocturnal escapade than in his newborn, despite a tribute to her being the pretext. On the night itself, his partner sent him a film of their daughter feeding. Came the text back: “I’ve got a better video than that.”

Perhaps, then, there was a spell cast upon the pair after all: not so much by Cumbrian boggarts or Northumbrian fairies, ­but rather by the little folk in their phones. Thousands of visual representations of the tree were already in the public domain. It had featured in films, television programs, pop videos, endless Facebook posts and Instagram reels. In making their mark on this icon, did an envious Carruthers and Graham imagine they were stealing some of the magical aura for themselves? At the trial, Carruthers claimed incomprehension at all the fuss: “It was just a tree.” Still, it was a special enough tree that he felt moved to drive 36 miles in a storm to chop it down.

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Apparently, most locals didn’t realize that the sycamore was special either, until, in 1991, it appeared in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. As an elderly resident from the nearby town of Haltwhistle said: “Sycamore Gap was just a tree on Hadrian’s Wall, nobody ever thought about it, talked about it, or nothing, until Kevin Costner came to do the film there … The tree looked absolutely fantastic.” A market developed for mementos in its image: paintings, jewelry, even tattoos. Said a local publican: “People come into the pub at least a dozen times a day, and they say ‘can you tell me where the tree is, the one that used to be in Robin Hood?’”

Also in the documentary, there are expressions of fury and grief from longstanding and particularly ardent Sycamore Gap-lovers. Many of them seem equally unable to separate the real tree from images of the tree. “I was 100% in mourning” said one man, moved to tears by the loss. Before its demise, he wistfully recalled, “I would post on social media ‘Hey the tree’s looking good today!’ … it would get thousands of reactions.”

In the aftermath of the crime, academics rushed to analyze what precisely had been taken. Why was there quite so much public grief? Some thought it was a violation of a sense of the natural world as “home”. Others concluded that our “need for trees might run deeper than we think”. But I’m afraid this is all too politically convenient. I don’t think the furor was really about the natural world at all, nor even about trees in general. The whole episode can tell you practically nothing about the gorgeous sycamore growing anonymously in the corner of a wood near your house.

The tree in its historic setting of Hadrian’s Wall was certainly a lovely and resonant object. But it was surely its fame in the eyes of others that imbued it with most of the prestige. The more that people made films about it, or took selfies in front of it, the more prestigious and alluring it got. In this sense, the tree was like any sacred object, manmade or natural. New visitors found it particularly meaningful, knowing that lots of other people had previously found it meaningful too.

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But equally, the meaning was more profane than this reference to the sacred suggests; for it was mostly tied to imagined admiring gazes from other people. A lot of enjoyment of the tree came from thinking of exotic others — film stars, pop stars, influencers — enjoying it first. In a sense, then, actual deep connection in the here and now was deferred.

It’s hard to get people to care about nature: to turn it from background to foreground. The consensus among relevant English heritage organizations seems to be to lean into social media as a tool for sparking engagement, but I wonder if it doesn’t defeat its own purpose. Not far from me is Birling Gap and the Seven Sisters, where a steady stream of tourists also traipse, bathing in the glow reflected by thousands of previous representations. They take their selfies, eat their picnics, and have a lovely time. But I’m not entirely sure they really look at the cliffs.

Viewed in this light, both the outraged public response and the draconian prison sentence that followed the crime invite a new interpretation. There was criminal damage not only to a living tree, but also to a fantasy object that made people feel specially connected to glamorous others elsewhere. Carruthers and Graham didn’t just chop down a sycamore — they destroyed an infinite number of future selfies. “For me, it’s an attack on the way people live”, reflected the chief police investigator in the documentary. In a sense, he was probably right.

But let us not be too bleak. In an instructive folk tale, there is often a hopeful ending. The hapless woodcutters still languish in prison, thankfully beyond the reach of any early release scheme from the Home Secretary. Twelve green shoots are now reported to be sprouting from the remains of the Sycamore Gap trunk. And most important of all, visitors have started taking dramatic pictures of the stump.

The speech, delivered “on the frontier of the new Millennium”, is one of the purest expressions of the Blairite creed you could hope to find. Politics was no longer about class struggle, Blair explained — the exploiters vs the exploited. It was a battle between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction — a question of orientation. Are you for the future or the past? As for the substance of this future, Blair is weirdly uninterested. He’s just all for it. And so, like the Communist Manifesto — with its eerie talk of spells and spectres and sorcerers — the speech has its own touch of mysticism. “These forces of change driving the future don’t stop at national boundaries,” he continued. “[They] don’t respect tradition. They wait for no one and no nation. They are universal.”

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Blair’s delight in our silicon future might be dismissed as ancient history, were it not for his renewed influence on British governance thanks to the Tony Blair Global Institute for Change (TBI), the multinational thinktank fronted by Blair and underwritten by the Oracle billionaire, Larry Ellison to the tune of over $200 million. The TBI’s position on tech is basically that it’s amazing. “Accelerating AI adoption is… not only a matter of boosting economic growth but also of improving social outcomes,” reads one report about how we need to “reboot copyright” and to ensure that the fruits of Britain’s creative sector can be fed into Silicon Valley’s shiny new machines.

Keir Starmer has reportedly outsourced much of his policy detail to the TBI’s gleaming legions of researchers and has delivered numerous iterations of Blair’s old speech: “There is no route to growth without embracing the transformative potential of AI,” he was promising back in January. We’ll doubtless hear more of the same during the Government’s forthcoming “London Tech Week” — perhaps even a little more detail on the $330 million that Peter Thiel has signed in order to gain access to seven year’s worth of NHS data. Remember: according to Blair’s oracular vision, the likes of Thiel and Ellison are emissaries of the future, so we just have to do what these guys say, right?

So when we learn that the TBI-stamped technology minister Peter Kyle has met lobbyists from Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta, on 28 separate occasions; or that the Government is minded not to ban smartphones in schools due to a “lack of evidence”; or that campaigners are “dismayed by the lack of ambition” in the new Online Safety Act; I think we are supposed to put away any cynical thoughts. The Government is on the side of progress after all.

The trouble is, the Blairites only seem to be able to see progress in terms of whatever the tech firms tell them is progress. This might have been a mildly credible position in 1999. It’s nothing short of idiotic in the enshittified techscape of 2025. Replace “universal” with “totalizing” in Blair’s little paean and you have a fairly accurate picture of where digital technology under the current oligopoly has actually led us. A handful of firms, none of them British, actively harming children in pursuit of profit.

We can argue whether successive British Governments’ failure to regulate tech in any meaningful way has benefited the nation in the grand scheme of things — but the evidence of its dire effects on children in particular is hard to ignore. According to ONS data, between 2010 and 2014, suicide rates among British 10 to 14-year-old girls and boys increased by 167% and 92% respectively. Self-harm rates among girls rose by 78%. Anxiety diagnoses for 18 to 25-year-olds jumped by 92%. Similar patterns have emerged in just about every developed country since around 2010. Rates of adolescent depression and anxiety nearly doubled in the US between 2010 and 2019. Emergency room visits for self-harm among 10-14-year-old girls rose by 188%. This was before Covid struck and added accelerant.

Correlation is not causation, but as Jonathan Haidt demonstrated in his book, The Anxious Generation, there is no other social change as sudden, universal, or as intimately connected to the lives of teenagers as the introduction of smartphones. In 2010 smartphones barely existed; by 2024, 96% of British teenagers had one according to Ofcom. The teenage mental health crisis exploded around 2010.

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It wasn’t Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or Reddit that invented self-harm, revenge porn, anorexia, gender dysmorphia, misogyny, extremism, incel culture, or any of the myriad ways that teen misery can mutate online. But teenage life still largely takes place amid a hostile online ecosystem in which social media companies mine their attention for profit. Whatever you’re worried about in the depths of your teenager’s soul, whatever particular sadness they harbor, it’s fairly likely the algorithm has spotted it first and tried to exploit it.

It certainly spotted Molly Russell. In 2023, Senior Coroner Andrew Walker determined that the 14-year-old British school girl had died from an act of self-harm after Instagram’s algorithms pushed her image after image inducing her to kill herself. It was the first court case that directly named one of the tech firms as a cause of harm. Her father, Ian Russell, has been clear: “It’s time to protect innocent young people, instead of allowing platforms to monetize their misery.”

Meta responded with platitudes (including some from Nick Clegg, no less), meaningless verifications and assurances that the content was indeed “safe” (in fact, Instagram continued to push inducements to self-harm even after her death). But it wasn’t a design flaw; it was the business model. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg came close to admitting as much in the recent Meta antitrust trial in the US. He testified that only about 20% of content consumed on Facebook and 10% on Instagram actually comes from a user’s friends and family. “The vast majority of the experience is more around exploring your interests, entertainment…” Whatever keeps you glued to the screen, in other words, which just happens to be the most inane, harmful, enraging, depressing, divisive content. Content which, as a recent British Standards Institution survey found, resulted in 72% of 16-21 year olds feeling worse after spending time online. Fully 46% of them wish the internet had never been invented.

The backlash against smartphones — essentially a backlash against the totalizing tech monopolies — is finally strong enough that Labour cannot afford to ignore it. There are Smartphone Free Childhood chapters in just about every community. Parents talk of little else. Even Tony Blair has now been heard saying that tech is “messing with kids minds” — though he’s not sure what to do about it.

The Government’s own position is similarly confused. Starmer would like it to be known that he has watched Adolescence with his teenage son. Gillian Keegan has limply promised to “crack down” on smartphone use in schools. Political will seems absent. As one charity worker, whose work centers on vulnerable boys online, put it to me recently: “I keep telling the Home Office, ‘Why are we not doing more to tackle these big tech companies?’ And they basically said: ‘There’s no political appetite. Big Tech is too powerful to take on’.” As politicians are lobbied here, Zuckerberg has already managed to torpedo protections for young people in America — and we can only speculate what cases his representatives made to Kyle across nine separate meetings. I wonder if Molly Russell’s name came up.

Actual policy is limp. The new Online Safety Bill continues to welcome measures such as age verification (we’ll see how the kids get round that one) and potential fines on social media companies (with no risk of prosecution), but it has clearly been watered down, with no onus to remove “harmful but legal” content. There is nothing remotely as ambitious as Australia’s ban on smartphones for under-16s.

It is an exercise in Blairite governance: if you can’t beat them, invite them to write your policy. Hence the current position regarding a total ban on smartphones in schools comes down to “more research”. Tobacco firms once wanted more research. Betting firms want more research. The fast food lobby hungers for more research. We have the research. The research shows us that smartphones in schools have been a disaster.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Republicans have joined the battle. The broligarcy are openly attacking nations like Canada, Australia and the EU for their attempts to rein in their tech monopolies. JD Vance has reserved particular fury for the UK with the implication that we should fall into line with our Imperial masters on issues such as “free speech” or risk losing favor. The cost of Silicon Valley’s favor is clear: access to data, to infrastructure and to the inner lives of British teenagers.

We have started into this moral vortex before, the strange combination of naivety, cynicism and evangelical uplift that characterized much of the Blair project. Perhaps it is the fate of apparently liberal, progressive governments to be easy on capital and vicious to the vulnerable — an inverted version of the Nixon Paradox. Yet to argue for more leniency for these companies is not to argue for change, but a still more enshittified version of the present. And this is what makes Starmer’s subservience to the exploiters so depressing. As the public begins to get the measure of these companies, the Government and its Blairite allies are opening the door wider.

Among the calculus of costs that governments are being asked to weigh in the face of the pandemic is the impact of social distancing measures on mental health. YouGov data show that almost a quarter of adults in the UK have felt lonely as a result of the coronavirus, and that feelings of loneliness have more than doubled during lockdown. Interestingly, despite their predilection for digital communication, the group most affected has been the young, with 44% of those surveyed aged 18-24 reporting having felt lonely.

Two recent books consider this timely topic from different angles. In Together: Loneliness, Health & What Happens When We Find Connection, Vivek Murthy, a US Surgeon General during the Obama administration, is the latest to label loneliness an ‘epidemic’. Weak social ties increase the risk of a host of health problems: addiction and anxiety, dementia and depression, heart disease and premature death.

These effects, explains Murthy, are an evolutionary adaptation: a fight-or-flight response to being alone warned our forebears not to wander too far from the tribe. When loneliness persists, however, high cortisol levels can cause damage by increasing cardiovascular stress and inflammation. Murthy cites a 2010 meta-analysis in which the effects of loneliness were found to be as detrimental to life span as smoking 15 cigarettes per day—greater than the risk associated with obesity, excess drinking and lack of exercise.

Not so fast, says the social historian David Vincent in A History of Solitude. Unlike packs of cigarettes or pounds on a scale, measures of loneliness are subjective and difficult to compare over time. The UCLA loneliness scale — the basis of most of the research in the US since the late 1970s — relies on self-analysis of ‘never’, ‘rarely’, ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ in response to questions like “I feel as if nobody really understands me”.

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Vincent challenges the causality of the litany of medical conditions associated with loneliness, as well as the idea put forth by the late social neuroscientist John Cacioppo that it can be ‘contagious’. As Tom Chivers has noted, there is little evidence that loneliness is on the rise; it may be endemic but not an epidemic.

Loneliness should be considered in the broader context of shifts in demography and household structures, writes Vincent. In the early 20th century, only 1% of the UK population lived alone. By 2011 this figure had grown to 31%, due to urbanisation and a declining birth rate, as well as increases in longevity and divorce rates. Living alone doesn’t necessarily lead to loneliness, however; it’s often a choice, made possible by economic prosperity, as sociologist Eric Klinenberg argued in Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

The elderly are the fastest-growing demographic of single-person households, but even the recently-bereaved don’t have to suffer a life sentence of sadness: Murthy cites an American study showing that widows who volunteered two or more hours per week were no lonelier than their coupled counterparts.

Vincent distinguishes between three kinds of solitude: physical, ‘abstracted’ and ‘networked’. Abstracted solitude allows one to be immersed in an activity while sharing space with others. While not all of the historical pastimes Vincent mentions have enjoyed an uptick in interest during lockdown — there’s been no renaissance in angling or philately — hobbies like jigsaw puzzles, gardening and cookery have seen a surge. “Holy mother,” one puzzle manufacturer told Vanity Fair. “[The demand] does not stop.” In her memoir about jigsaws, Margaret Drabble described it as “a pursuit that lay somewhere between creation and imitation and discovery and reverie”.

According to Vincent, smartphones are the apotheosis of abstracted solitude: today’s Candy Crush junkies are no different from their grandparents playing Patience. And texting is just the latest iteration of ‘networked solitude’ — a modern version of the Penny Post. What he does not address however, is how knitting is put-downable in a way that apps are expressly designed not to be, as Nir Eyal argued in Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Or how by facilitating what cyber-psychologists call ‘ambient intimacy’ — the ability to be in touch with anyone, anywhere — smartphones detract from the IRL variety with the people present.

The MIT professor Sherry Turkle has been studying the effects of life on the screen for nearly four decades. While she commends the creative ways in which technology is being used during lockdown, “people are also yearning for each other physically,” she said in a recent radio interview. “We’re brushing against the limitations of not being there with each other.” She laments, for example, the silences possible in co-presence. While video chats may be better than nothing, they invariably fall short of in-person interactions. “You don’t see as much body language, people tend to multi-task, and relationship-building doesn’t feel as solid,” she explained.

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Zoom has taken over the lives of the professional classes — a friend calls it ‘the kale of communications’ — used to host everything from meetings to orgies. As the weeks wear on, the novelty of attending either without trousers has worn off. Zoom fatigue is caused by the dissonance when “our minds are together when our bodies feel we’re not,” Gianpiero Petriglieri, of INSEAD, told the BBC.

Non-verbal communication makes up the vast majority of what we convey to one another, through kinesics (body language), proxemics (distance), haptics (touch) and paralanguage (hand gestures and facial expressions). Video distorts these cues and trying to read them on a screen takes a lot more energy. The problem is exacerbated in Zoom calls with a Muppet-gallery of participants, as the brain scrambles to take in cues from multiple parties without the benefit of peripheral vision.

Given the position of the camera, genuine eye contact is impossible via video. “If you want the other person to feel like you’re looking them in the eyes, then you have to look into the camera, not their eyes,” Howard Gardner and Katie Davis explained in The App Generation. “In other words, to create the illusion of eye contact one must actively avoid it.” The eyes are a rich source of affective and social information.

Our pupils automatically dilate when we’re interested in something or someone, Mariska Kret, a cognitive psychologist at Leiden University, told me. Humans synchronize their pupil size — a behaviour over which we have no voluntary control — and once synchronized, their brains unconsciously built trust bonds. One of Kret’s studies found that if two strangers stared into each other’s eyes as they dilated in a trust game, they were ready to invest triple the amount of money compared to eyes that didn’t dilate.

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The other casualty of social distancing, of course, is touch. The Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has dedicated his career to studying groups of primates. He believes humans are not dissimilar to gelada baboons, who spend up to 20 percent of their waking hours grooming one another for social, rather than dermatological, reasons.

As grooming was an inefficient way to connect growing communities, group activities — like singing, dancing and sport — evolved as endorphin-emitting strategies to create a sense of belonging. In a study conducted on an Oxford rowing team, the endorphin release when rowing as a group was found to be double that of rowing alone. That’s why the Peloton can’t really replicate a spin class and why the ‘virtual multiverse’ of an online Burning Man this year is unlikely to spark the same high.

While social distancing measures are in place, ‘the new normal’ won’t feel normal at all. As Murthy writes, “the Covid-19 pandemic turned physical human contact into a potentially mortal threat”. It’s not the first time in history that physical contact has been limited — continental kissing was paused in France for swine flu fears in 2009 — but this time, if Anthony Fauci has his way, touchy greetings may be gone for good.

The flaccid wave that has come to replace the handshake is reversing a gesture thought to indicate “I come in peace” since time immemorial. Needs must if our hands have become biological weapons, but it may be hard not to subconsciously perceive physical distance as rejection, at least during a transition phase.

The last person I hugged in greeting was a friend with whom I saw Sebastian Barry’s On Blueberry Hill, just before the West End was shut down. The audience was palpably jumpy at every cough, but the house was packed. The play is set in a prison cell. At one point, one of the two characters, played by the wonderful Niall Buggy, reminisces about life on the outside:

“Ordinary life, you could call it… better than any fucking thing you can think of, ordinary fucking life, and when I am talking about it now, I am yearning for it, I am yearning for it.” Who could have imagined in such a short time just how much we would come to relate?

Sound too good to be true?

Other countries are already using contact-tracing apps. Contact-tracing is also used in sexually transmitted infections, where previous partners may be contacted with advice to get themselves a test. But whereas we tend to remember our sexual partners, we tend not to remember everyone who shared our train carriage or served us in a shop several days before we had symptoms. That’s where technology could help.

I write constantly about the threat to privacy of letting our smartphones share data that reveals where we go, what we do, and who shares our personal space. And although these are exceptional circumstances, we should not stop valuing our privacy. Emergency measures have a habit of becoming the new normal. And information about who we’ve been close to could be of interest to all sorts of people, from blackmailers to over-enthusiastic police officers enforcing their own interpretation of “necessary activities”.

Let’s compare some of the contact-tracing technology already in use, to see how the UK could avoid the pitfalls while harnessing our phones to battle the virus.

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The Chinese app, AliPay HealthCode, raises some red flags. It assigns users a unique QR code which displays red, yellow or green, indicating your health status, and which determines how much freedom of movement you’re permitted. How that risk category is calculated remains opaque, though it uses proximity to known infected individuals or hotspot locations in that calculation. It sends your identity and location directly to a server accessible by the police, who can use it to enforce the quarantine demanded by your colour status. Use of the app is not compulsory, but even local movement may be impossible without it.

South Korea uses existing sources of data when tracing contacts, rather than a specific app (though they do have an optional app to monitor infected people in mandatory quarantine). They use interviews, supplemented with CCTV footage, smartphone location data, and even credit card records, to reconstruct an individual’s pre-diagnosis activities. They have been criticised for making public the locations and activities where others may have been infected, which has led to individuals being publicly identified, and deterred others from getting tested.

Israel has already allowed its internal security agency, Shin Bet, to access cellphone geolocation data, and that can now be used for coronavirus tracking. Cellphone users who have been close to known infected individuals may receive text messages telling them to self-isolate. However, Israel’s Association of Public Health Physicians criticised the project, asking why no health professionals were involved in designing it. The Ministry of Health then launched a location-based app, Hamagen, on an opt-in basis, also using GPS data.

Singapore’s TraceTogether app supplements interview-based contact-tracing in a similar way to South Korea’s. TraceTogether doesn’t collect data on where you have been, because it only wants to identify who has been within infectible range. To do this, it uses Bluetooth.

Where geolocation-based apps use the cellphone’s GPS function, and its connections to the nearest cellphone towers, Bluetooth exchanges signals, not with a cellphone network, via a tower, but with other Bluetooth-enabled devices within a few metres.

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Good news if you want to identify people at risk from the cellphone’s infectious owner, without handing over to a central database lots of personal data about where you were. All the app needs is Bluetooth’s Relative Signal Strength Indicator readings to approximate how close you were to another device, and for how long.

As the app’s ‘How Does TraceTogether Work?’ page puts it: “This proximity and duration information is stored on one’s phone for 21 days on a rolling basis – anything beyond that would be deleted. No location data is collected.” The data stays on each person’s phone unless they test positive for Covid-19, in which case they’re asked to hand it over to Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH).

The MOH works with them to trace their contacts for the previous 14 days. There’s a legal requirement to help MOH map recent activities if requested, including producing other data held on your phone in other apps. But it’s not compulsory to use TraceTogether at all.

Several other countries are introducing apps modelled on this app: the pandemic has spurred a worldwide rush of innovation and technical experimentation.

Most of us would welcome the chance to contain the spread of the virus without having to stay locked down until a vaccine arrives. But do we have to trade our privacy by turning everyone’s phone into a tracking device? Perhaps not.

More than 25 scientists across eight European universities decided that, rather than wait for others to produce bad apps, they would write their own. Or at least, write the basic code that others could use, and make it freely available. And the result was DP-3T.

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Like Singapore’s TraceTogether, DP-3T is designed around Bluetooth’s capacity for device-to-device communication. Like TraceTogether, it transmits and receives ID codes that can later be used to reconstruct whether a sick person has been close enough to infect you. But it has some important refinements that mean no centralised body ever needs to know who has been close to whom.

Instead of transmitting codes that can be linked back to the person using the app, a DP-3T app transmits a random jumble of letters and numbers that changes regularly. Other devices receiving the codes won’t even know if this is the same device as yesterday, which is an important layer of protection for anonymity. Each device running the app will store all the codes sent and received.

If one person does get a diagnosis of Covid-19, they get a passcode from the healthcare professional making the diagnosis, which allows them (just once) to upload their “sent” codes from the pre-symptomatic contagious period to a database. This gives the database no information about the patient’s identity, location, or anything else, just the codes transmitted during the relevant period.

All the other phones running the app have access to the database of codes, but only to cross check against the codes in their own “received” file. The app can do this regularly and automatically, and alert the user if the level of exposure means they should self-quarantine, or get tested.

Everyone keeps control of their own data, the centralised database contains only anonymous codes from infected people, and nobody has the whole picture. It is possible to have both contact tracing and privacy.

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Is this the basis for the NHSX app being developed, which is also designed to use Bluetooth to track proximity?

Probably not.

“All data will be handled according to the highest ethical and security standards, and would only be used for NHS care and research,” according to Hancock’s announcement, “and we won’t hold it any longer than is needed.” But this implies that data from the app will be uploaded to a central database, where it can be used for other purposes. The fact the government felt the need to say that the police would not have access to the data suggests that it won’t be anonymous.

The public’s appetite to put the app on their phones will be reduced even further by the revelation that NHSX has teamed up with Palantir, a data-processing giant that works with the CIA (which part funds it). Palantir will be processing, not controlling the data, but our government has a patchy record on transparency over data retention and use.

However, a few developments over Easter weekend could force NHSX to radically rethink their project.

On Good Friday, Apple and Google released a joint statement, in itself a sign of the unprecedented times we are living in. They plan to design contact-tracing technology, either apps or the digital infrastructure on which apps can be built, which looks very like the DP-3T model. The two tech giants also announced another change that sounds like a minor technical detail, but could be more significant for the NHSX app. It concerns the way Bluetooth runs on Apple, and newer Android, devices.

When I asked a Singaporean friend about the TraceTogether App, he told me, “It’s a pain to use,” because it needs Bluetooth to be running all the time. But because Bluetooth is a digital blabbermouth, dishing out your data to any local device that wants to know, Apple devices don’t allow it to run in the background while you’re doing anything else, or while your phone is locked. Google’s newer Android systems run along the same lines.

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This means that if you want the TraceTogether app to work “you have to leave it on and … ‘upside down’ in your pocket to go into Low Power mode,” says my Singaporean app user,  “but of course everything’s haywire if you leave your phone unlocked in your pocket as you walk around!” At best, you pocket-dial your ex. At worst, a pickpocket has access to your entire life.

Dilemma for Google, and especially for Apple. It makes a big point of privacy, and of keeping your data on your device instead of on somebody else’s database. Could it allow Bluetooth to run when the app is not active, but for approved Covid-19 apps only?

This in effect, is what it has said it will do. But its definition of approved Covid-19 apps is drawn more narrowly than many expected. In fact, Apple devices will only allow Bluetooth to run in the background for more privacy-friendly, decentralised contact tracing systems, like DP-3T.

The solution to the Bluetooth privacy problem is that the exchanging and storing of randomly generated codes will happen, not in an app, but securely within the operating system. Data will leave the device only for explicitly authorised uploading to an approved database. The only other interactions possible with external databases will be queries about matching numbers. The app could potentially export any risk scores it has calculated for you, but not the codes sent and received by Bluetooth.

It sounds like a minor detail. But it could be a big spanner in the works for the NHSX app, if it doesn’t conform to that decentralised model. The app wouldn’t work with the phone locked or while you are using it for anything else. This inconvenience has been a big barrier to uptake in Singapore, where few people are using it, certainly fewer than the 60% of the population that public health experts have estimated as the minimum needed to make it work.

All these developments will have taken the NHSX project by surprise. It now faces a choice between carrying on with an app that’s less convenient to use, and that fewer people will trust, or starting again with a different model, delaying rollout, and denying them access to data that could be useful for research and for planning.

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In the long run, however, adopting the DP-3T model has huge advantages. It makes it easier for lots of us to download and run an app, without worrying about whether we’re releasing data to big corporations and government bodies to use for other purposes. It avoids setting precedents for centralised databases of who we spend time with. And it’s the foundation for internationally-compatible anti-Covid-19 digital solutions, which we may need for some time to come.

So, quick redesign, and Matt Hancock can roll out the app and get the UK back to normal life in a couple of weeks?

Sadly, it’s not quite that simple.

Allowing app users to self-diagnose opens the door to false alarms by hypochondriacs (or schoolkids who aren’t happy their school reopened). Medical validation needs readily available Covid-19 tests, so that professionals can authorise uploading the codes. Society needs to facilitate people going into self-quarantine, getting tested themselves, and locking themselves away for weeks, without delays. And a majority of the population needs to be using the app, but not everyone has a smartphone equipped with low-energy Bluetooth.

Automated alerts can’t replace detailed contact tracing, as practised in South Korea and Singapore. But interview based contact-tracing is labour intensive. Contact-tracing tens of thousands of cases individually would be an immense task for a health service that can’t even pick up every 111 call.

However, a widely used app in conjunction with testing could be a workable compromise, reducing the transmission rate to a scale that the NHS can handle, while allowing people for whom the risk is acceptably low to return to work, and to a more normal life.

How low a risk is acceptable, and how normal life should be, are political questions. No app can answer those.

In another sense, though, they do. Banks died in 2013 – tragically young, at just 59. But he lived to see a technological world that was wildly different from that of the mid-1980s, when the Culture was first set down on paper (and wildly different from that of the 1960s, when he first had the idea). Most sci-fi, a few decades after it’s released, starts to look distinctly ropy. The 1983 vision of a super-hi-tech computer with green text on a screen and a blinking cursor would have been laughably dated by 2005. Watch any old Star Trek episode and you’ll see.

But Banks’s science fiction – even his earliest – rarely falls into this trap. Read the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, back to back with the most recent, and you’ll notice how little the technology has changed. In Phlebas, Banks is a bit more willing to use the word “computer” – it probably seemed quite futuristic, back in 1987 – but even in The Player of Games (published the following year), the word seems passé. An intelligent drone wails that the primitive aliens they’re visiting are “calling me a computer!” (The AI and drones are always characters in Banks’s fiction, never objects or tools.)

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In some specific ways, too, Banks foresaw the changes that technology would bring. In Player, Banks says in an aside that when Culture citizens tell stories “in which Things Went Wrong” (the standard opening), “the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another”, was humans “losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal”.

A terminal – usually a ring, button, pen or similar small jewellery-like item – is a person’s link to the super-powerful AI “Mind” that runs each artificial Culture world (and to everybody else in the Culture.) It’s a communication tool, an information source, a personal organiser; it can form a screen when required and answer any question. It’s always passively listening and a shout or a word can activate it. The titular character in Player uses his to take photographs. Imagine getting used to having all that to hand! No wonder it’s Culture citizens’ worst nightmare to lose it.

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Player was published in 1988, when mobile phones were brick-sized things employed solely by awful City traders in those stupid blue shirts with white collars. But by the early 2000s, when my Nokia phone started to gain a few extra functionalities – a colour screen and the capacity to play music; then a camera; and at last a link, of sorts, to the internet – I remember having a conversation with a friend. “They’re becoming terminals,” I said. “They’re becoming the one thing you use for everything.” I used the Banks term because it seemed so clearly to be the Banks concept.

The iPhone wasn’t released until 2007, and smartphones didn’t become widespread until a few years later. But to a Banks fan like me they very obviously fit the framework of the terminal: small, jewel-beautiful objects that could be your communicator, your computer, your link to a global datasphere containing the majority of human knowledge. They could play videos or music, be a book or magazine.

As Siri and Alexa came into being a few years later, the parallels became ever more stark. I could say “Hey Siri” right now and, in my pocket, my phone would do whatever I wanted it to. (Or, more likely, because it’s in my pocket and my voice would be muffled and anyway they’re not quite perfect yet, it would phone my mum and I’d have to scramble to switch it off. But it’s getting there.)

The only functional difference between a smartphone and a terminal is that the latter links you to a godlike Mind that controls the entire world as though it were a theme park. And that, of course, is only because there is no such Mind in our world.

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We may build one though, in the not too distant future. Most AI researchers think that a superintelligent machine will be built in the lifetimes of children alive today. And Banks, unlike many science fiction writers, understood just how transformative that will be. The humans in the Culture have rich lives, full of adventure and sex and drugs, but they are bit-players. The civilisation is run by the Minds, because they are vastly more intelligent than the citizens.

Citizens’ lives are protected by the Minds, while the economy is entirely run by them; most humans just live lives of uninterrupted leisure. Whether that’s a utopia or a dystopia is a question of perspective.

The superintelligent machines will not, Banks saw, be like computers that we use. If they come to exist, they will be sovereign. We need to ensure that they, like the Minds, are on our side. After all, they’re quite likely to connect to us all via the possession most of us have to hand at this very moment: our terminals – I mean – smartphones.

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Where might this new direction come from? Batteries that charge instantly and last ten times longer would be nice, but then so would teleportation – and that’s not happening anytime soon either. When trying to spot the next big thing, we should focus on tech that already exists, but isn’t quite ready for mass market take up. Last year, I took a look at the potential of augmented reality (AR) – which might just fit the bill.

However, what the example of the smartphone teaches us is that game-changing IT products emerge from the coming together of several technologies not just one. The smartphone is the perfect combination of a high definition touchscreen interface; 3G/4G networks; social media and other mobile apps; plus the operating system and chip architecture to make it all work. The team matters as much as its members, indeed a smartphone is greater than the sum of its parts.

In a must read post on her blog, Sakunthula looks at what might be next constellation of star technologies:

“A few different technologies are finally starting to reach maturity for commercial use — HD sensors, predictive artificial intelligence, and 3D displays — and combined they can be used to reshape the way people interact with computers.

“This new way of putting together software and hardware can be called a ‘3D human-machine interface’.”

These 3D displays will include “haptic feedback” – the sense-of-touch equivalent to the visual feedback of a screen or the audio feedback of a speaker system. The vibration mode on your smartphone is a very simple haptic interface.)

What would be so revolutionary about this new human-machine interface? The author starts by explaining what’s so limited about our existing interfaces:

“Most computing, especially web and mobile, is mostly for consumption. The user provides very minimal input into the computer, but gets a lot of information out. With a few thumb swipes, the user can endlessly scroll through pages and pages of images, video and text.”

It’s true. When you think about the flow of information from machine to human, it is usually much richer, and certainly much faster, than anything the moves in the opposite direction. What we input via a keyboard, a mouse or a touchscreen is a mere dribble of data compared to the multimedia torrent we get in return.

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Sakunthula argues that the hi-def sensors, 3D displays and predictive AI software making up the human-machine interfaces of the near future could greatly speed up our interactions with computers. She gives the example of a system capable of displaying a 3D object and tracking the eye movements of someone designing or modifying it:

“It can tell which part of the 3D model you’re focusing on, and maybe automatically zoom in. It might use an trained AI to guess from your eye fixation behavior to guess what menu you want to open, and automatically click through the menus to get to the action you want.”

For an architect, an engineer or an artist this could supercharge the creative process. However, I think that most people would use the next generation of human-machine interfaces to work on themselves. A system capable of Watching what we do and providing appropriate feedback (both audio-visual and haptic) sounds a lot like a personal trainer to me – but much cheaper and infinitely patient. Imagine a world full of people learning how to paint, play musical instruments or deadlift without putting their backs out.

But perhaps we’d be more interested in convenience than creativity. A human-machine interface capable of anticipating our needs and organising our lives for us would be very convenient indeed.

In fact, the first such systems already exist. Take the example of Amazon Go – Amazon’s fully automated, real world retail outlet. Using a panoply of sensors, it allows shoppers to take what they want from the shelves and, er, go. The store’s technology identifies you, records what you take, works out your bill and deducts the payment from your account. Shop-and-go systems could be commonplace within a decade (assuming they can deal with the problem of shoplift-and-go).

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Would we want to have similar technology in our homes? A system that observes our movements and organises our lives might strike many of us as creepy. But if it’s useful, I suspect that we’ll get used to the idea. However, I wonder if we can be persuaded to deal with the fiddliness of filling our homes and augmenting our bodies with the various sensors, displays and feedback systems that these human-machine interfaces are physically made out of.

Amazon Go works because the company sorts out the tech and customers just have to shop. But if we’re talking about the next revolution in personal IT, then the hardware needs to be as simple (from the user point of view) as a smartphone.

It also has to be intuitive. We took to smartphones so quickly because they looked like the mobile phones we had before, which were themselves modelled on fixed-line telephones. Similarly, desktop and laptop computers weren’t so different from the typewriters and television screens we were already familiar with.

But perhaps, in preparing us for the next tech revolution, the tech companies are using stealth tactics. After all, one by one, they’re persuading us to put their sensors into our homes (e.g. smart speakers) and onto our bodies (e.g. fitness monitors) – and, linking these up via increasingly intelligent networks.

If the process continues there must come a stage at which the emerging interface between machine and human encompasses the latter – at which point the most important thing inside the machines we use will be us.

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I’ve counted down the top 50 UnPacked highlights from 2018 – the facts, figures, ideas and events that may not have made the headlines, but which provide a more reliable insight into the forces shaping the future.

Today, numbers 40 to 31:

#40

America’s Amish future

“Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms” – that was the motto of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago and arguably we’ve been conforming ever since.

But not the Amish. What they do is get together as communities and decide whether particular technologies suit their chosen way of life or not. According to Michael J Coren’s interview with Jameson Wetmore for Quartz, different Amish communities come to different conclusions – but there is a common thread:

“It’s interesting that the Amish have different districts, and each district has different rules about what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. Yet it’s very clear there are two technologies that, as soon as the community accepts them, they are no longer Amish. Those technologies are the television and the automobile.”

By the way, the Amish are thriving. Their numbers double every generation and of the 500 or so Amish settlements, about half were founded in the 21st century.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Religion

#39

The Internet of Bodies

I’d imagine the Amish would take a dim view of the notion that people should be microchipped like dogs. In a story for the Guardian, Julia Kollewe reports that microchipping is on the brink of going mainstream:

‘The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data.”

Kollewe adds that one microchipping provider “is in discussions with several British legal and financial firms about fitting their employees with microchips.”

With these implants we wouldn’t have to bother with security passes and passwords anymore. In theory, we’d be automatically, perhaps permanently, interfaced with the corresponding digital networks – creating a so-called Internet of Bodies.

It would be quick, convenient and deeply, deeply sinister.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Technology

#38

Your local branch of the Chinese Communist Party

Did you know that the Communist Party is setting up branches in the West? I didn’t until I happened across Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian’s report for Foreign Policy:

“Party cells have appeared in California, Ohio, New York, Connecticut, North Dakota, and West Virginia. The cells appear to be part of a strategy, now expanded under Chinese President Xi Jinping, to extend direct party control globally and to insulate students and scholars abroad from the influence of ‘harmful ideology’, sometimes by asking members to report on each other’s behaviors and beliefs.”

And it’s not just America where the CPC is organising. Other countries mentioned by Allen-Ebrahimian include France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

These cells appear to be for Chinese ex-pats only. But perhaps they should be open to the local population too and even put up candidates in elections. The CPC doesn’t have much experience with democracy I know, but a platform combining rapid economic growth with a strict approach to law-and-order would definitely find support.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Global Affairs

#37

The big problem with tall buildings

With sky-high property prices in global city centres, developers can only make a profit by building sky-high. But as Travis Barrington argues in a piece for Propmodo ageing skyscrapers can be very expensive to maintain, while being impossible to upgrade:

“Built in an era of cheap energy, many post-war Manhattan towers have facades of single-glazed glass, and structures that can’t support the weight of additional insulating glass. Many have low ceilings, tight column spacing, and inefficient heating and cooling systems. Often these have become even more cramped by having to accommodate the infrastructure of modern information technology.”

We could tear them down and start again, but that isn’t easy either. The tallest building ever (peacefully) demolished was the 41 storey Singer Building in 1968. With towers going up that are twice as tall or more, we’re bequeathing yet another head-scratching problem to posterity.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Capitalism

#36

The eugenicist at the royal wedding

The wedding of the year was, of course, that of Harry and Meghan. For many people, Bishop Michael Curry’s passionate sermon was a particular highlight. However, it did feature a quote from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the philosopher and Jesuit priest whose unorthodox ideas made him a favourite with liberal Christians and those in the ever-expanding ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ category.

What they might find rather more disturbing, however, is the evidence presented in a jaw-dropping article by John P Slattery for Religion Dispatches. Quote after quote shows that Teilhard was a racist who believed that some ethnic groups are more advanced than others.

Furthermore, he was a raving eugenicist who argued that what he called the “advancing wing of humanity” should use scientific methods to further its biological evolution.

Teilhard rejected the idea that we’re all inherently imperfect (i.e. the doctrine of Original Sin) in favour of that old lie: that at least some of us can perfect ourselves.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Religion

#35

The infinite screen

In 2018, we found out that smartphone sales for 2017 were down on 2016 – the first year-on-year decline. Is this the beginning of the end of the smartphone and, if so, what might replace it as the core technology of the digital age?

Benedict Evans makes a strong case for AR (augmented reality) – a wearable device that allows you to see what you want to see – not as a distracting image hovering in your face, but as an apparently real object at an appropriate depth and location within your field of vision:

“Your glasses can show you the things that you might look at on a smartphone or a 2000 inch screen, but they can also unbundle that screen into the real world, and change it.”

Evans calls this the “infinite screen” and it would replace all the finite screens that we currently use.

He compares the development of AR to that of the multitouch smartphone, and suggests that the stage at which AR is now is equivalent to where multitouch was in the run-up to the 2007 launch of its breakthrough commercial product – the Apple iPhone.

We’ll see.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Technology

#34

Pub culture versus cafe culture

According to John Harris in the Guardian, British pubs are closing down at a rate of 18 every week.

But for every pub that closes down, a coffee shop seems to open. But for Harris these are no substitute for the loss true community institutions:

“If our era has a pre-eminent gathering space, in both its chain and independent forms, it is surely the modern cafe – where most people seem to be hunched over their laptops, transfixed by their phones, or huddled with friends and oblivious to everyone else. This is the opposite of the places where the best kind of chaotic, unexpected experiences can happen and you might end up falling into conversations with complete strangers.”

Pubs and churches may seem poles apart in purpose and atmosphere, but both are shared spaces that aim to appeal across the community. They have much more in common with each other than what Harris sees as the 21st century culture of “ever smaller social niches.”

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Flyover Country

#33

The end of reading

In an article for The Conversation, Jean Twenge has bad news for booksellers:

“…In 1980, 60 percent of 12th graders said they read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school… By 2016, only 16 percent did.”

One doesn’t have to look far too find the culprit:

“By 2016, the average 12th grader said they spent a staggering six hours a day texting, on social media, and online during their free time. And that’s just three activities; if other digital media activities were included, that estimate would surely rise.”

When you hear that ‘young people these days’ are doing less of X, Y or Z it’s because they don’t have the time.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Technology

#32

The great scientific slowdown 

How many discoveries made since 1990 have been honoured with a Nobel Prize in Physics? The answer, according to Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen in a fascinating essay for the Atlantic, is just three.

It’s not like we’re starving science of funding. Quite the opposite, in fact – there’s been a ramp-up in resources since the 1960s. Even if scientific progress isn’t slowing down, it’s not keeping up with what we’re investing in it:

“When Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom in 1911, he published it in a paper with just a single author: himself. By contrast, the two 2012 papers announcing the discovery of the Higgs particle had roughly a thousand authors each. On average, research teams nearly quadrupled in size over the 20th century, and that increase continues today.”

Even if science isn’t slowing down, it is having a productivity crisis. The big question is whether that’s because we’ve discovered all the easy stuff or whether we’re looking in the wrong places.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 40 to 31

Technology

#31

How to build more houses in global cities

Why don’t global cities build more homes? Clearly there’s the demand, otherwise they wouldn’t be so expensive.

Is it just too difficult? No, Because as James Gleeson explains on his blog, there’s one global city that’s getting on with it:

“Tokyo’s housing stock is growing very fast – roughly 2% a year, about twice as fast as that of Paris, London or New York…”

What’s more they’re not doing it through sprawl or by packing ever more people into each dwelling. Indeed, Tokyo is getting denser in terms of dwellings per hectare, while providing more living space per person.

The secret of their success is demolition: It’s much easier in Japan to knock-down old development and start again. That doesn’t mean that London and New York have to bulldoze their most beautiful neighbourhoods. There’s plenty of post-war rubbish to get started on first.

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Now read The Year UnPacked 30-21

She used to purchase her items on Amazon but “that took loooong, like 24 hours to be delivered”, so she’s started going to her local library: “It’s great, the books are just there waiting for you.” Uploading a ‘shelfie’ of current reading material has become a popular status update amongst her friends.

Zoe’s generation is rediscovering books in the same way that Millennials discovered vinyl; the difference is that the former are increasingly doing it as a way of logging off from their smartphones. Last year, the psychologist Jean Twenge persuasively argued in The Atlantic that the device had destroyed a generation – but was Twenge too hasty in that conclusion?

Suggested reading

Test article

By Tom Chivers

Zoe is a member of Generation Z (those born between 1997-2010), who are very different from their Millennial predecessors (those born between 1981-1996). It is often remarked that whereas Millennials came of age in the smartphone era, Generation Z are the social media generation. But the real distinction is that Gen Z are the ones who can’t remember Myspace, think Facebook is for their parents and see the internet primarily as a video medium (using YouTube rather than Google to find something out).

If Facebook and Twitter turned Millennials into commentators, then Snapchat and Instagram have turned Gen Z into broadcasters and storytellers. The average Gen Z’ers have had a smartphone since they were 13, which means they have had the misfortune of living most of their adolescence on-line.

Babyboomers are actually the fastest growing demographic on social media, revelling in the sensation of greater connectivity, but Gen Z – who have lived its realities and its damaging impact on their time and mental health – are the ones questioning the point of it all. In the US, researchers at the University of Chicago found that 58% of teens said that they had voluntarily taken a break from social platforms in the last year.

Further reading

Why it's time to panic about kids and smartphones

By Peter Franklin

In the same way that those who grew up with multiple TV channels now find the unlimited choice rather mundane, many teenagers feel they’ve reached iPhone saturation point. They speak of being “phone-bored”; the feeling you get when you find yourself endlessly and aimlessly scrolling through your apps. Social media, as one 16-year-old boy put it to me, “cannot make dull people interesting, plus there’s only so many funny cat videos you can watch”. If such platforms thrive on keeping your attention, are they losing the attention of the young?

Some teenagers are logging off, others are embracing the novelty and freedom of “dumb phones”, such as the deliberately basic Nokia 3310, but it would be wrong to describe Gen Z as neo-luddites. They are, however, developing a very sophisticated and obsessional interest in their data and privacy. Gen Z did not need the Cambridge Analytica revelations to open their eyes to the fact that ‘if the service is free, you are the product’. Unlike their elders, they have been aware of it since their tweens. They have been curating, collating and uploading material for their on-line brand and filtering and ‘spinning’ their personal narratives for at least half of their life.

Snapchat is their favoured app precisely because the content disappears after 10 seconds, although many find the Snapmap feature (locating the live whereabouts of their friends) a bit creepy. Many have both private and a public Instagram, and some have multiple profiles to reflect their many passions, fantasties and, increasingly, identities. Many opt not to use their real name or email addresses to access their platforms.

Further reading

On Twitter, I too become an arse

By Giles Fraser

Gen Z are also using social media in more proactive, communitarian ways. While we can easily dismiss the virtue-signalling ‘clicktivism’ of Millennials (hashtags are the modern-day equivalent of pin badges), Gen Z, instinctively netcitizens, are going beyond this. Take, or example, the survivors and campaigners that emerged out of the Parkland shooting tragedy in the US.

Though themselves too young to vote, their on-line campaign, which began as #neveragain, spiralled into a GoFundMe that raised four million dollars, a national school walkout and companies from Delta to Hertz cutting ties with the NRA. It was remarkable in its speed, penetration and tactics – not to mention far more effective in pressing for change in gun controls than years of conventional consciousness-raising.

Online campaigning for communitarian interests may be a minority sport, but commercial transactions for private gain are where Gen Z is really showing tech intiative. It is estimated that over 70% of today’s teenagers are making their own pocket-money. And they are not doing a paper round or waitressing like previous generations, but selling goods, clothes or organising networks and events on social media. Depop, which has over eight million users, offers their mostly young subscribers a cross between Ebay and Instagram, enabling members to ‘flip’ secondhand clothes and trainers.

Many make a tidy profit and many more are learning a great deal about accountancy, photo-editing and marketing in the process. Scroll through the Depop markeplace and you will find teenagers exhibiting their items as if they were a fashion feature in Vogue. Depop now offers mentoring and support to would-be sellers, helping them to maxmise their market’s potential.

Companies have realised that the only way to reach this adblocker generation – one that is unmoved by traditional airbrushed celebrity-endorsed advertising – is to sell their products via ‘influencers’ on social media. But more than this, companies are seeing the value of ‘micro-influencers’; those with tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of followers. These are increasingly likely to get traction with a generation that prizes intimacy and authenticity.

Further reading

How technology sidelines the citizen

By Carl Miller

This generation watches less than an hour of television a day, but four hours of YouTube. The popularity of vloggers lies not in their offer of escapism but their promise of an education (in whatever you are interested in, from how to code to how to apply eyeliner). YouTubers may be the new celebrity class to their millions of followers, but the truth is that all members of Generation Z consider themselves ‘influencers’. That is the agency and perspective that the smartphone has given them.

But could it be that the touch-screen is destroying their sense of touch? A recent survey found that 16-18 year olds prefer sexting to actual sex, with 84% admitting to flirting and over a third confessing they had sent a sexual or nude image on their phones.

It appears that this generation is on a continual loop of digital foreplay, preferring virtual to real interaction. They are also less likely to indulge in the traditional means of social lubrication that often underpin such trysts. In a survey done by the Office of National Statistics, less than half of UK 18-24 year olds had consumed alcohol in the last week, compared with 66% amongst the same age group in 2005.

‘Sober socials’ are now mainstream on university campuses and teenage pregnancy is now at its lowest rates for decades, but should we really be surprised, given that every bar a teenager walks into and every bed that they consider lying in now has a surveillance and recording device nearby? The potential for social shaming through video (not just photos) is so pervasive that it’s no wonder that this generation are sensible and unrebellious.

The iPhone camera has achieved what years of sexual and drug education failed to do; prevented deviancy where public shaming is the ultimate deterrent. Teenagers live in fear of their misdemeanours being broadcast and will therefore do anything to maintain their brand. It is, however, this pressure to control other people’s perception of them which is also leading to record levels of depression and anxiety.

From the same author

The glitches in the UberCon ambition for a smartphone state

By Eliza Filby

Kids already groan about online ‘sharenting’. An average child in the UK has over 1,500 images of themselves shared on social media before they are five years old. How long will it be before before they start to use GDPR to remove the material?

“My mum needs to learn how to use social media properly,” said one 15-year-old girl I interviewed, “she doesn’t understand that what she posts about me I’m stuck with forever.”

There is a new slang word doing the rounds in the primary playground lately; Tapass. It is what the kids call adults who are on their phone too much. If you think your child spends too much time on their phone, chances are they think the same about you.

Far from destroying a generation, the smartphone has conditioned them in sophisticated, surprising and exciting ways the older ones are only really beginning to understand. And what they learn now will shape them in the future – whether as consumers, activists, voters or entrepreneurs.

Further reading

Test article

By Nigel Cameron

There’ve been other transformations. For instance, commuters now talk to one another… only joking! This is southern England, some things never change.

What has changed, however, is what people do on trains while politely ignoring their fellow passengers. Twenty years ago a lot of people read, by which I mean proper reading of actual books.

Of course, some commuters still read books, but in far smaller numbers than used to be the case. I realise that these are subjective impressions and that ‘data’ isn’t the plural of ‘anecdote’, but if you’re on a train just look around you and try calculating the book-to-smartphone ratio (bearing in mind that a modest few might be reading e-books or listening to audiobooks on their smartphones).

More from this author

Screen addiction has killed the bookworm

By Peter Franklin

Jean Twenge is someone who does have hard data on smartphone use – especially on the part of the ‘post-millennial’ generation (i.e. the young people now in their teens and early twenties, with no memory of a world without smartphones).

In an article for The Conversation, she hits us with a sequence of jaw-dropping statistics:

“By 2016, the average 12th grader said they spent a staggering six hours a day texting, on social media, and online during their free time. And that’s just three activities; if other digital media activities were included, that estimate would surely rise.

“Teens didn’t always spend that much time with digital media. Online time has doubled since 2006…”

Twenge is a high-profile scholar of the smartphone revolution. She’s best known for her work on the impact of smartphone use on young people’s behaviour and mental health (which I’ve written about here and here).

As often happens to those who warn about the effects of liquid modernity on young minds, she has her critics. For instance, one could dismiss the doubling of time spent online as a mere by-product of the increased availability of broadband, Wifi etc. (Just because we’re now usually connected while using our electronic devices, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re spending more time on with them.)

One might also argue that online activities, such as gaming, have a social element that offline equivalents lack and are therefore less isolating in their effects. The trouble with that theory, however, is the evidence that young people are spending substantially more time playing computer games:

“…time spent playing video games rose from under an hour a day to an hour and a half on average. One out of 10 8th graders in 2016 spent 40 hours a week or more gaming – the time commitment of a full-time job.”

Furthermore, time spent online is displacing time spent on activities in the real world with real people. Indeed, online technologies appear to exert a much more powerful displacement effect than older electronic media:

“While 70 percent of 8th and 10th graders once went to the movies once a month or more, now only about half do. Going to the movies was equally popular from the late 1970s to the mid-2000s, suggesting that Blockbuster video and VCRs didn’t kill going to the movies.”

Returning to my opening theme, it’s bad news for books too:

“…the trends in moviegoing pale in comparison to the largest change we found: An enormous decline in reading. In 1980, 60 percent of 12th graders said they read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school… By 2016, only 16 percent did.”

Suggested reading

Test article

By Tom Chivers

Should we care that young people aren’t reading books anymore? After all, the internet gives them instant access to more information than any new generation in human history. This trouble is when it does so in the form of bite-sized fragments designed to exploit rather than develop youthful attention spans. As Twenge points out, “It doesn’t bode well for their transition to college… Imagine going from reading two-sentence captions to trying to read even five pages of an 800-page college textbook.”

Twenge is not a reactionary, she’s not advocating a ‘Butlerian Jihad‘ against the smartphone. But she does implore parents to carve out some screen-free time in their children’s lives – space in which they can engage with the real world more closely and human knowledge more deeply.

And that brings me to what I really resent about the tech-liberals who signal their sophistication by making snarky remarks about tech-related ‘moral panic’. However relaxed their public opinions, you can bet that in private they’ll be making some effort to curb their kids’ screentime. Not all children will be so lucky.