Hear Me Out: the Anti-Smartphone Thing Is a Grift

+ romantasy disaster, thought digest, 08.21.2025

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Taylor Lorenz is butchering what should be a straightforward argument, so let me make it instead.

The classroom phone debate is a red herring.

Nobody actually thinks kids should be scrolling TikTok or worse—Pornhub during class. Nobody thinks poor black and brown kids are using their smartphones as “word processors” in class either. Be so fucking for real.

Phone bans in schools are good policy. Fuck, bring back computer labs and teach technology skills in contained environments. Personally, I didn’t learn jack shit in school because I was toggling between mobile games on my iPhone and MMORPGs. And while we’re banning phones in school? Let’s expand that ban to sidewalks and normalize desktop computers in computer rooms again.

But here’s Taylor’s real point, buried under her terrible messaging: the latest suite of “think of the children” policies create the infrastructure for much broader censorship. The problem isn’t the phone bans themselves—it’s how they’re being used as part of a larger authoritarian project that most people can’t see coming, in large part because of the media conversation.

The media environment around “it’s the phones” has created a false dichotomy: either you support phone bans, age verification, and authoritarian content restrictions, or you’re complicit in hardcore pornography being firehosed straight into toddlers’ eyes.

It’s an obscene grift that weaponizes a real social problem. We demonize the phones, something everyone can get on board with. Then lawmakers introduce age verification requirements supposedly targeting uncontroversially bad content like pornography and extreme violence as “harmful to minors.” But the legal language around “harmful to minors” is deliberately elastic, designed to expand over time. What starts as ID checks for explicit content becomes ID checks for any discussion deemed inappropriate for hypothetical children who might stumble across it. And what’s “harmful” will depend on who’s in office—furries, abortion resources, domestic violence hotlines, LGBTQ content, drug review sites, k-pop, plastic surgery.

It’s anybody’s guess.

The endgame has never been protecting kids—and that’s what Taylor is getting at. It’s creating a permission structure where adults need government approval to access legal information online. Once you’ve normalized showing papers to read certain websites, expanding that requirement is easy. Again, if history is any indication: today it’s porn, tomorrow it’s social media, and the day after, who knows. But what we’re opening ourselves up to is extensive digital tracking and surveillance systems like those used in China, or arrests for social media posts that are deemed threatening, harassing, or inciting violence, as has happened in the U.K.

Lubricating this conversation is a cottage industry of doom merchants who’ve built platforms turning “Zoomers are brainrotted idiots” into careers that appeal to anxious Boomer and Gen X subscribers.

Are these writers politically motivated themselves? I don’t know. I do know that they’re feeding older readers what they want to hear about modern life from someone young enough to have credibility. The “phones are destroying not only my life personally, but civilization” takes create mimetic cascades that escalate, too. Look at Substack: it’s flooded with these essays because they get rewarded with clicks and validation and “you’re so wise” comments.

That’s not to say none of these concerns are valid—many of them are—but scratch the surface and you find the same reductive thinking that plagued every other moral panic.

Everything wrong with society gets blamed on one technology, obscuring other problems. “It’s the phones!”¹ is infuriating because it’s simultaneously right and reductive.

Yes, phones are genuinely harmful and they’ve caused real problems. Yes, young people are struggling. But phones are a problem, not the problem.

A short list of things doom merchants blame on smartphones, to put this into perspective:

• falling birth rates

• people not having personalities (also, what???)

• atomization

• deterioration of the family

• falling literacy rates

• why people aren’t having sex

• why people are having too much sex

• the failures of American public schools

• radicalization

• anxiety

• depression

• suicide rates

Do they IMPROVE any of these things? Probably not. Did they CAUSE them?

…

But even more critically: these reductive narratives are manufacturing consent for a very attractive authoritarian trap. You might not see that as your subscriber count ticks up or your bias about young people is validated.

ROMANTASY FYRE FEST (OR DASH CON?)

A second romantasy convention disaster has hit the building. Apparently this is an epidemic. From a friend on the ground:

I looked into it and it’s real:

Quick question: WTF is going on with these failed book cons? Is it just that people don’t realize how difficult event planning is, or what? How are so many happening? I think this might be worthy of a full DF deep dive.

LINKS + THINGS

• The Narcissist, the Psychopath, the Lolcow by

  Gio's Content Corner.

• Digital reality as a Ponzi scheme: you benefit from replies of others by

  Andrey Mir

• The return of college Facebook groups, brought to you by TikTok in TechCrunch

ICYMI

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1. No hate to Playboy editor Magdalene Taylor who popularized this extremely useful phrase. While I disagree with her on the specifics, I do not think she is one of these “doom merchants.” It’s a slippery topic precisely because it’s so mixed up with legitimate complaints.