Blaming the phones is definitely starting to feel like confusing the symptom with the disease. Dawned on me about a year , around the time we began to allow our middle schooler to have a phone (with all kinds of safeguards and caveats), and it’s mostly been a net positive.
I’m not qualified to comment on all this, but it sounds much more serious than the “don’t sit so close to the tv, it’s bad for you” of my late boomer childhood.
All I know is that I’m naming my band Moral Panic.
I think this is spot on. And I’m sick of the generation that allowed Reagan to dismantle the Fairness Doctrine and Fox to turn their brains 🧠 into soup complaining about young people being brainwashed…pot, meet kettle. I have a Gen Z kiddo who is not a phone zombie and has nothing but eye rolls 🙄 for adults who won’t do a damn thing to stop school shootings but claim it’s “the phones” ruining kids’ lives.
Age verification is operationally almost impossible to enforce so it feels like a false boogeyman. If it’s up to the platform to do it they’re incentivized to comply in the most lax way possible to keep their active users - like the “check here if you’re 13+” pop up you see around a lot today. If they’re required to check IDs those are easy enough to fake in photoshop and then is it the parent that’s liable if their child creates a fake? If the government is going to do it…lol I would love to see that by the same congressmen who can’t figure out what email is.
You can't underestimate the intentionality here. It's useless to say "everything in moderation" because the phones have been explicitly engineered, at immense expense, to capture constant attention and destroy moderation. "Phones" are not some neutral or passive entity; they are the tool of a particularly rapacious branch of capital.
Phones have been designed to do no such thing. Phone apps and websites have. It’s a distinction with a difference: none of the apps which ship with my phone are dopamine treadmills, except of course the Web browser.
This matters because, as I see it, there is little to nothing which phone vendors can do about it. Unilaterally block Facebook products and go out of business? Put the blame where it belongs, at the feet of social media behemoths who have chosen to pursue ‘engagement’ at all costs, heedless of the human misery they’ve created in the process.
Well, them and certain of your erstwhile employers, who symbiotically degrade the social and political commons with ‘viral content’ used as a medium to deploy surveillance advertising. Not picking on you Freddie, I’m picking on them: it’s their shitty game, writers are just stuck playing it.
Yeah reading this back on my walk home I was alarmed by how much I wasn’t even thinking about other data collection practices - to give one low hanging fruit example - advertising
I think you’re right about the grift, but I mean everyone online is trying to make a buck. But even though, I support a social media ban for under-18 as well as a general porn ban (I was the guy who used to look up to Larry Flynt but now I don’t care if it’s free speech, there’s too many fucked up men.)
The thing is, when I grew up in the 80s, I could come home and I was safe, you could prank call me but I could just not pick up the phone. Now every kid is on the school bus (and at the mercy of bullies) all the time. Just turn off the smartphone? Tell that to the women who couldn’t just hang up on Louis CK… there’s a social cost to not being on social networks and a blanket ban would help that.
You’re the Tumblr anthropologist, do you think it was GOOD for human civilization? I unequivocally believe it was not.
Our brains our not evolved for social media and 24/7 access to other humans and especially Instagram and TikTok which seem to have some kind of kill switch on our subconscious.
The singularity has happened, the dystopia is here. The most prescient fiction from the 20th century ended up being Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future.
Also, at this point in our collective dystopia, does anyone take Taylor Lorenz seriously about anything? She is basically Alex Jones just w/o trying to sell shady supplements to her groundlings.
I'm one of those millennials (born in '88) who grew up with unfettered access to what I would call an "open" internet. My main avenue for accessing content was via peer to peer sharing networks. All of those networks are still there and I still use them. From my discussions with folks, boomers, gen-x and younger millennials don't seem to know too much about that space. Those spaces will be incredibly difficult to shut down (just look at Pirate Bay - it's still going strong). Even if gov't could shut it down, things would just revert to what they were like when I was in high school - content was moved around on USB sticks.
My hunch is that any age verification requirements applied to the large tech companies will be a good thing. Many (I'm not saying most) will forgo access to services that require age verification because the price (handing over your ID) will be too great. If I'm right, there will be a large "regulated" part of the internet (big tech) and an unregulated/open part of the internet that will grow over time (particularly if government/big tech cooperate and abuse their power, which is almost certain).
As for the phones, once you start poking around the neuroscience, it becomes obvious that these things are potentially the most powerful drug ever invented. The Las Vegas mob worked out that closing the blinds and putting on fluorescent lights would keep people at the tables - we're very susceptible to addiction when our neural pathways get hijacked. The TLDR on that front goes something like this: the retinal nerve in our eyes connect directly to what is called the " suprachiasmatic nucleus" (SCN) via the retinohypothalamic tract, which is buried deep in the hypothalamus (which regulates the autonomic nervous system - heart beat etc). The SCN is the master circadian regulator in the body. Disruption of that system via artificial light (e.g. phones, particularly at night time) is like putting the conductor of an orchestra on ketamine. The orchestra (i.e. your body) can't function properly. Although I agree that the phone debate is turning into a moral panic, I think the sense of worry is based on something very fundamental that very few people (even a lot of doctors) are aware of.
For anyone who is interested in the phone debate, I strongly suggest you have a look at how disruption of the SCN affects the functioning of the brain and body.
Thanks for this reality check. I think you might be right. I briefly worked at repl.it, and this was a topic in our community spaces-- that there's this whole other part of the Internet that people just don't know exists, don't know how to access, and they don't care to learn.
Also, as I was walking home today, I also realized that I get so bent out of shape about this I forget about other, more fundamental types of surveillance.
I think you are right to be worried about the surveillance risks associated with ID verification laws. I'm in Australia, which is the tip of the spear in terms of internet regulation/surveillance.
IMO the biggest surveillance risk is already so well entrenched into the tech landscape, and I don't see a lot of talk about it: Face ID. Folks send a picture of their face to a server every time they open their phones. With the emergence of sophisticated AI image/video generation tools, that leaves them exposed to fraud/manipulation. I'm deeply concerned by how prevalent Face ID is and the naivety of people who sign up to that. Even though I don't use Face ID, my primary concern is not so much that I may be directly manipulated, but rather (as we saw during COVID) that manipulation of the mob can then be used to limit the freedom of everyone else.
BTW - big fan of your work. I have a habit of only commenting when I have an alternative point of view.
That isn’t how Face ID (TM) works. The biometric scan is completely local to the device, it unlocks a cryptographic key which is used for the challenge response. No one, including the police (including the user) is able to retrieve the biometric data from the device, it’s erased when the phone is wiped, and so on. This was actually incredibly difficult to pull off, it’s impressive technology which makes users safer overall.
Now I could give you the bad news about facial recognition based on photos we’ve all chosen to publicly share, but let’s end on an up note, yeah?
'age verification' is an attempt to gather data on 'who does what'. Or gather a database of faces to match with names. Every problem becomes an opportunity for people to gather data, or pursue their agenda, or spin it to support their opinions. And 'safety' or 'child safety' is a Very common excuse for removing freedoms.
I don't think (most of the generic blame phones for brain rot etc) is a coordinated attempt to install authoritarian controls on adult habit and political activity, even if that is certainly the aim of things like the Online Safety Bill. As you seem to suggest it's almost more scapegoating by political and social leaders who want or are groping for a "one weird trick" or band-aid solution to longtime social problems most of which are unfolding parts of modern capitalism, and within that some directly caused by policies of previous or current generations of authorities. Note that the general issue of lack of friction as a cybernetic phenomenon beyond a single piece of tech or a few social media sites is avoided by many of these people. The fact that it is so easy for an American to become addicted to credit card consumer spending, the general terms and services handwaving with all sorts of scam products and services, the lack of structure in people's days, and 24/7 disaggregation of life are deeply rooted in everything from the irreversible and inevitable shift to a services economy and technology just making things easier in general. Seeing this only in the form of the final interface ie the phone which is increasingly used to facilitate these things is like blaming a frontline doctor for the state of the entire medical system
Also, the extent to which the subject-position of journalists and academics is driving much of this is underrated probably out of shame. Personal distraction by the author ("phone is ruining MY life") can be sublimated all too easily into "the phones are ruining society," whereas blue-collar employees, medical workers, tech developers, even many finance bros don't have this consume/create bifurcation with the "content industry;" and are read by audiences of retirees (themselves addicted maybe to iPad games and the like or TV) or fellow word people. It's I suspect a displacement activity out of self-loathing.
As an example of scapegoating just today, phones probably being blamed for coronavirus lockdown-long tail declines of IRL activity and learning loss (the actual cost of the lockdowns to civilisation as a debarbarisation process will never be accounted for)
Re: romantasycon fails. Note both are Maryland/DMV region. Might be related.
As a boxing hardcore, one thing I have noticed about is that hardcores (and I suspect anyone willing to go to a Romantasy convention is the equivalent of a boxing hardcore) is that they tend to conflate their own personal zealousness for the pursuit with their being some large fanbase of casuals to support it. No, it's basically just you guys. Plan accordingly. I'm assuming they made the same mistake, and thought there was a massive fanbase to support a small niche community (that nonetheless massively consumes a lot of a specific kind of content).
Also, being unkind, I strongly suspect the people who are into romantasy this much weren't the kind of people planning the prom or in sorority social committees where planning these things out would have been a key skill.
A given bit of tech is the physical and effective sign of a social relationship. Its easy to point to the artifact itself as the problem, real hard to describe the elusive, but more real social structures that the tech is an expression of.
Such analysis doesn't fit on headlines particularly well either.
I follow your broader point about how “protect the children” rhetoric can be leveraged into wider censorship, but I’m not sure I see how school phone bans fit into that. Isn’t banning phones in classrooms mostly about removing the distraction of the phone while learning, since kids can still use them freely outside of school? Could you clarify the connection you’re drawing between local school policies and the larger authoritarian trend?
Banning phones so people can focus on lectures or reading makes sense. Phones are very distracting and interrupt a lot. Phones are also easy cheating tools, and distract from face-to-face, actual, social contract. And people need to learn that face-to-face social interaction.
Banning phones in school is a very *good* policy and one I support -- but they're happening in a broader context of anti-tech moral panic. It starts with "phones harmed me personally," and balloons. This isn't speculation, it's something we're already seeing happen domestically & abroad
I'm sorry I don't understand, if we agree that phones in schools are harmful, what is the issue? That the phone bans condition children to accept authoritarianism? Or that they condition society as a whole?
What I’m pointing out is how these policies don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re part of a broader cultural moment where ‘tech is corrupting kids’ becomes the justification for *other* restrictions, and where policies that start local and limited can normalize more expansive controls. In other words, the bans themselves are both defensible and necessary, but the rhetorical frame & culture that justifies them is a grift. That's what makes this so complicated! It's hard to disentangle legitimate issues from their weaponization.
Wow,Kat that is a wonderful piece of writing. Are you picking up the mantle for Jell-O beer and the Dead Kennedys is Taylor Lorenz really The New, PMRC and Tipper, Gore ?. I love the call back to gnome Chomsky as well. Manufacturing consent was a phenomenal book that shows how well red and well educated you truly are. It is not the smart phone‘s fault. That’s like blaming guns for gun deaths, you cannot blame an anointed object for society’s woes. This truly lies in the hands of the parents stand up to your children and say no my parents and my grandparents told me no all the time and I turned out pretty darn good maybe the real problem is the parents not wanting to raise her children and wanting the phone and the state through school education raise their kids I made the responsible decision had an abortion. I did not burden society with a problem for those people who chose to have a child then chose to have someone else i.e. the state or the Internet raise your child you might’ve had a child for the wrong reasons maybe get a dog instead of making a child on GenX I was there to gain this technology and have a degree in it and for everyone else read this article cause it is well done and well thought out
Blaming the phones is definitely starting to feel like confusing the symptom with the disease. Dawned on me about a year , around the time we began to allow our middle schooler to have a phone (with all kinds of safeguards and caveats), and it’s mostly been a net positive.
I’m not qualified to comment on all this, but it sounds much more serious than the “don’t sit so close to the tv, it’s bad for you” of my late boomer childhood.
All I know is that I’m naming my band Moral Panic.
I think this is spot on. And I’m sick of the generation that allowed Reagan to dismantle the Fairness Doctrine and Fox to turn their brains 🧠 into soup complaining about young people being brainwashed…pot, meet kettle. I have a Gen Z kiddo who is not a phone zombie and has nothing but eye rolls 🙄 for adults who won’t do a damn thing to stop school shootings but claim it’s “the phones” ruining kids’ lives.
Age verification is operationally almost impossible to enforce so it feels like a false boogeyman. If it’s up to the platform to do it they’re incentivized to comply in the most lax way possible to keep their active users - like the “check here if you’re 13+” pop up you see around a lot today. If they’re required to check IDs those are easy enough to fake in photoshop and then is it the parent that’s liable if their child creates a fake? If the government is going to do it…lol I would love to see that by the same congressmen who can’t figure out what email is.
You can't underestimate the intentionality here. It's useless to say "everything in moderation" because the phones have been explicitly engineered, at immense expense, to capture constant attention and destroy moderation. "Phones" are not some neutral or passive entity; they are the tool of a particularly rapacious branch of capital.
Phones have been designed to do no such thing. Phone apps and websites have. It’s a distinction with a difference: none of the apps which ship with my phone are dopamine treadmills, except of course the Web browser.
This matters because, as I see it, there is little to nothing which phone vendors can do about it. Unilaterally block Facebook products and go out of business? Put the blame where it belongs, at the feet of social media behemoths who have chosen to pursue ‘engagement’ at all costs, heedless of the human misery they’ve created in the process.
Well, them and certain of your erstwhile employers, who symbiotically degrade the social and political commons with ‘viral content’ used as a medium to deploy surveillance advertising. Not picking on you Freddie, I’m picking on them: it’s their shitty game, writers are just stuck playing it.
Yeah reading this back on my walk home I was alarmed by how much I wasn’t even thinking about other data collection practices - to give one low hanging fruit example - advertising
The discourse really rubs me the wrong way and it has for years
I think you’re right about the grift, but I mean everyone online is trying to make a buck. But even though, I support a social media ban for under-18 as well as a general porn ban (I was the guy who used to look up to Larry Flynt but now I don’t care if it’s free speech, there’s too many fucked up men.)
The thing is, when I grew up in the 80s, I could come home and I was safe, you could prank call me but I could just not pick up the phone. Now every kid is on the school bus (and at the mercy of bullies) all the time. Just turn off the smartphone? Tell that to the women who couldn’t just hang up on Louis CK… there’s a social cost to not being on social networks and a blanket ban would help that.
You’re the Tumblr anthropologist, do you think it was GOOD for human civilization? I unequivocally believe it was not.
Our brains our not evolved for social media and 24/7 access to other humans and especially Instagram and TikTok which seem to have some kind of kill switch on our subconscious.
The singularity has happened, the dystopia is here. The most prescient fiction from the 20th century ended up being Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future.
Also, at this point in our collective dystopia, does anyone take Taylor Lorenz seriously about anything? She is basically Alex Jones just w/o trying to sell shady supplements to her groundlings.
Phone Shmone, I’m just here to jack off your dopamine receptors.
I'm one of those millennials (born in '88) who grew up with unfettered access to what I would call an "open" internet. My main avenue for accessing content was via peer to peer sharing networks. All of those networks are still there and I still use them. From my discussions with folks, boomers, gen-x and younger millennials don't seem to know too much about that space. Those spaces will be incredibly difficult to shut down (just look at Pirate Bay - it's still going strong). Even if gov't could shut it down, things would just revert to what they were like when I was in high school - content was moved around on USB sticks.
My hunch is that any age verification requirements applied to the large tech companies will be a good thing. Many (I'm not saying most) will forgo access to services that require age verification because the price (handing over your ID) will be too great. If I'm right, there will be a large "regulated" part of the internet (big tech) and an unregulated/open part of the internet that will grow over time (particularly if government/big tech cooperate and abuse their power, which is almost certain).
As for the phones, once you start poking around the neuroscience, it becomes obvious that these things are potentially the most powerful drug ever invented. The Las Vegas mob worked out that closing the blinds and putting on fluorescent lights would keep people at the tables - we're very susceptible to addiction when our neural pathways get hijacked. The TLDR on that front goes something like this: the retinal nerve in our eyes connect directly to what is called the " suprachiasmatic nucleus" (SCN) via the retinohypothalamic tract, which is buried deep in the hypothalamus (which regulates the autonomic nervous system - heart beat etc). The SCN is the master circadian regulator in the body. Disruption of that system via artificial light (e.g. phones, particularly at night time) is like putting the conductor of an orchestra on ketamine. The orchestra (i.e. your body) can't function properly. Although I agree that the phone debate is turning into a moral panic, I think the sense of worry is based on something very fundamental that very few people (even a lot of doctors) are aware of.
For anyone who is interested in the phone debate, I strongly suggest you have a look at how disruption of the SCN affects the functioning of the brain and body.
Thanks for this reality check. I think you might be right. I briefly worked at repl.it, and this was a topic in our community spaces-- that there's this whole other part of the Internet that people just don't know exists, don't know how to access, and they don't care to learn.
Also, as I was walking home today, I also realized that I get so bent out of shape about this I forget about other, more fundamental types of surveillance.
I think you are right to be worried about the surveillance risks associated with ID verification laws. I'm in Australia, which is the tip of the spear in terms of internet regulation/surveillance.
IMO the biggest surveillance risk is already so well entrenched into the tech landscape, and I don't see a lot of talk about it: Face ID. Folks send a picture of their face to a server every time they open their phones. With the emergence of sophisticated AI image/video generation tools, that leaves them exposed to fraud/manipulation. I'm deeply concerned by how prevalent Face ID is and the naivety of people who sign up to that. Even though I don't use Face ID, my primary concern is not so much that I may be directly manipulated, but rather (as we saw during COVID) that manipulation of the mob can then be used to limit the freedom of everyone else.
BTW - big fan of your work. I have a habit of only commenting when I have an alternative point of view.
That isn’t how Face ID (TM) works. The biometric scan is completely local to the device, it unlocks a cryptographic key which is used for the challenge response. No one, including the police (including the user) is able to retrieve the biometric data from the device, it’s erased when the phone is wiped, and so on. This was actually incredibly difficult to pull off, it’s impressive technology which makes users safer overall.
Now I could give you the bad news about facial recognition based on photos we’ve all chosen to publicly share, but let’s end on an up note, yeah?
'age verification' is an attempt to gather data on 'who does what'. Or gather a database of faces to match with names. Every problem becomes an opportunity for people to gather data, or pursue their agenda, or spin it to support their opinions. And 'safety' or 'child safety' is a Very common excuse for removing freedoms.
I don't think (most of the generic blame phones for brain rot etc) is a coordinated attempt to install authoritarian controls on adult habit and political activity, even if that is certainly the aim of things like the Online Safety Bill. As you seem to suggest it's almost more scapegoating by political and social leaders who want or are groping for a "one weird trick" or band-aid solution to longtime social problems most of which are unfolding parts of modern capitalism, and within that some directly caused by policies of previous or current generations of authorities. Note that the general issue of lack of friction as a cybernetic phenomenon beyond a single piece of tech or a few social media sites is avoided by many of these people. The fact that it is so easy for an American to become addicted to credit card consumer spending, the general terms and services handwaving with all sorts of scam products and services, the lack of structure in people's days, and 24/7 disaggregation of life are deeply rooted in everything from the irreversible and inevitable shift to a services economy and technology just making things easier in general. Seeing this only in the form of the final interface ie the phone which is increasingly used to facilitate these things is like blaming a frontline doctor for the state of the entire medical system
Absolutely
Also, the extent to which the subject-position of journalists and academics is driving much of this is underrated probably out of shame. Personal distraction by the author ("phone is ruining MY life") can be sublimated all too easily into "the phones are ruining society," whereas blue-collar employees, medical workers, tech developers, even many finance bros don't have this consume/create bifurcation with the "content industry;" and are read by audiences of retirees (themselves addicted maybe to iPad games and the like or TV) or fellow word people. It's I suspect a displacement activity out of self-loathing.
AGree on this too
As an example of scapegoating just today, phones probably being blamed for coronavirus lockdown-long tail declines of IRL activity and learning loss (the actual cost of the lockdowns to civilisation as a debarbarisation process will never be accounted for)
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/21/nx-s1-5506258/are-covid-kindergarteners-ready-for-school
+1 on this too lol
All great comments
Re: romantasycon fails. Note both are Maryland/DMV region. Might be related.
As a boxing hardcore, one thing I have noticed about is that hardcores (and I suspect anyone willing to go to a Romantasy convention is the equivalent of a boxing hardcore) is that they tend to conflate their own personal zealousness for the pursuit with their being some large fanbase of casuals to support it. No, it's basically just you guys. Plan accordingly. I'm assuming they made the same mistake, and thought there was a massive fanbase to support a small niche community (that nonetheless massively consumes a lot of a specific kind of content).
Also, being unkind, I strongly suspect the people who are into romantasy this much weren't the kind of people planning the prom or in sorority social committees where planning these things out would have been a key skill.
A given bit of tech is the physical and effective sign of a social relationship. Its easy to point to the artifact itself as the problem, real hard to describe the elusive, but more real social structures that the tech is an expression of.
Such analysis doesn't fit on headlines particularly well either.
Isn't this just the slippery slope argument we saw against gay marriage?
I follow your broader point about how “protect the children” rhetoric can be leveraged into wider censorship, but I’m not sure I see how school phone bans fit into that. Isn’t banning phones in classrooms mostly about removing the distraction of the phone while learning, since kids can still use them freely outside of school? Could you clarify the connection you’re drawing between local school policies and the larger authoritarian trend?
Banning phones so people can focus on lectures or reading makes sense. Phones are very distracting and interrupt a lot. Phones are also easy cheating tools, and distract from face-to-face, actual, social contract. And people need to learn that face-to-face social interaction.
Banning phones in school is a very *good* policy and one I support -- but they're happening in a broader context of anti-tech moral panic. It starts with "phones harmed me personally," and balloons. This isn't speculation, it's something we're already seeing happen domestically & abroad
I'm sorry I don't understand, if we agree that phones in schools are harmful, what is the issue? That the phone bans condition children to accept authoritarianism? Or that they condition society as a whole?
What I’m pointing out is how these policies don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re part of a broader cultural moment where ‘tech is corrupting kids’ becomes the justification for *other* restrictions, and where policies that start local and limited can normalize more expansive controls. In other words, the bans themselves are both defensible and necessary, but the rhetorical frame & culture that justifies them is a grift. That's what makes this so complicated! It's hard to disentangle legitimate issues from their weaponization.
Wow,Kat that is a wonderful piece of writing. Are you picking up the mantle for Jell-O beer and the Dead Kennedys is Taylor Lorenz really The New, PMRC and Tipper, Gore ?. I love the call back to gnome Chomsky as well. Manufacturing consent was a phenomenal book that shows how well red and well educated you truly are. It is not the smart phone‘s fault. That’s like blaming guns for gun deaths, you cannot blame an anointed object for society’s woes. This truly lies in the hands of the parents stand up to your children and say no my parents and my grandparents told me no all the time and I turned out pretty darn good maybe the real problem is the parents not wanting to raise her children and wanting the phone and the state through school education raise their kids I made the responsible decision had an abortion. I did not burden society with a problem for those people who chose to have a child then chose to have someone else i.e. the state or the Internet raise your child you might’ve had a child for the wrong reasons maybe get a dog instead of making a child on GenX I was there to gain this technology and have a degree in it and for everyone else read this article cause it is well done and well thought out