Screentopia

I’m grateful to Alan for writing this post so I didn’t have to. A few additional thoughts, though. (And by “a few thoughts” I mean rant imminent.)

Let me begin by giving a term to describe, not just smartphones or social media, but the entire ecosystem of the internet, ubiquitous screens, smartphones, and social media. We could call it Technopoly or the Matrix or just Digital. I’ll call it Screentopia. A place-that-is-no-place in which just about everything in our lives—friendship, education, finance, sex, news, entertainment, work, communication, worship—is mediated by omnipresent interlinked personal and public devices as well as screens of every size and type, through which we access the “all” of the aforementioned aspects of our common life.

Screentopia is an ecosystem, a habitat, an environment; it’s not one thing, and it didn’t arrive fully formed at a single point in time. It achieved a kind of comprehensive reach and maturity sometime in the last dozen years.

Like Alan, I’m utterly mystified by people who aren’t worried about this new social reality. Or who need the rest of us to calm down. Or who think the kids are all right. Or who think the kids aren’t all right, but nevertheless insist that the kids’ dis-ease has little to nothing to do with being born and raised in Screentopia. Or who must needs concern-troll those of us who are alarmed for being too alarmed; for ascribing monocausal agency to screens and smartphones when what we’re dealing with is complex, multicausal, inscrutable, and therefore impossible to fix. (The speed with which the writer adverts to “can’t roll back the clock” or “the toothpaste ain’t going back in the tube” is inversely proportional to how seriously you have to take him.)

After all, our concern troll asks insouciantly, aren’t we—shouldn’t we be—worried about other things, too? About low birth rates? And low marriage rates? And kids not playing outside? And kids presided over by low-flying helicopter parents? And kids not reading? And kids not dating or driving or experimenting with risky behaviors? And kids so sunk in lethargy that they can’t be bothered to do anything for themselves?

Well—yes! We should be worried about all that; we are worried about it. These aren’t independent phenomena about which we must parcel out percentages of our worry. It’s all interrelated! Nor is anyone—not one person—claiming a totality of causal explanatory power for the invention of the iPhone followed immediately by mass immiseration. Nor still is anyone denying that parents and teachers and schools and churches are the problem here. It’s not a “gotcha” to counter that kids don’t have an issue with phones, parents do. Yes! Duh! Exactly! We all do! Bonnie Kristian is absolutely right: parents want their elementary and middle school–aged kids to have smartphones; it’s them you have to convince, not the kids. We are the problem. We have to change. That’s literally what Haidt et al are saying. No one’s “blaming the kids.” We’re blaming what should have been the adults in the room—whether the board room, the PTA meeting, the faculty lounge, or the household. Having made a mistake in imposing this dystopia of screens on an unsuspecting generation, we would like, kindly and thank you please, to fix the problem we ourselves made (or, at least, woke up to, some of us, having not been given a vote at the time).

Here’s what I want to ask the tech concern trolls.

How many hours per day of private scrolling on a small glowing rectangle would concern you? How many hours per day indoors? How many hours per day on social media? How many hours per day on video games? How many pills to get to sleep? How many hours per night not sleeping? How many books per year not read? How many friends not made, how many driver’s licenses not acquired, how many dates and hangouts not held in person would finally raise a red flag?

Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “The North Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in practice.” A friend of mine says the same about our society and Brave New World. I expect people have read their Orwell. Have they read their Huxley, too? (And their Bradbury? And Walter M. Miller Jr.? And…?) Drugs and mindless entertainment to numb the emotions, babies engineered and produced in factories, sex and procreation absolutely severed, male and female locked in perpetual sedated combat, books either censored or an anachronistic bore, screens on every wall of one’s home featuring a kind of continuous interactive reality TV (as if Real Housewives, TikTok, and Zoom were combined into a single VR platform)—it’s all there. Is that the society we want? On purpose? It seems we’re bound for it like our lives depended on it. Indeed, we’re partway there already. “Alarmists” and “Luddites” are merely the ones who see the cliff’s edge ahead and are frantically pointing at it, trying to catch everyone’s attention.

But apparently everyone else is having too much fun. Who invited these killjoys along anyway?