Digi-Addicted by Choice

The crown of her dirty blonde hair reared above her close undercut. Her back was hunched over, her body arced downward, as she affixed her optic nerves with perfect concentration, lenses of her glasses flashing with high-definition imagery, oblivious to the rushing scene outside the subway’s window.

And, natch, a cloth mask gripped her immobile mandible.

What was my fellow straphanger goggling at with the intensity of a grandmaster competing in the Grenke Open finals? You’ve no doubt guessed. It was what all opposable-thumbed, bipedal creatures transfix on at any idle moment in public, of course. Those depthless portals to our collectively tailored, modified, augmented, synthetic existence: a smartphone.

“We all have a lot of gut-level hang-ups about our addictions to our phones,” Jesse Singal wrote with a sharp bit of self-awareness. Note bene how he lassos all of us in his contention: not just the weak-willed or attention-fried. An outsized number of studies and books have been published on the neurotoxicity of the ubiquitous “dumbphone”—particularly for impressionable youth. “How Gen Z Became the Most Gullible Generation” ran one recent Politico headline, the subject of which was the algorithmic hacking of young minds. Jonathan Haidt has written a best-selling tract about how the tiny squares in our pocket are to blame for skyrocketing social anxiety among teenagers. States—from ruby-red Arkansas to sea-blue California—have prohibited students from possessing phones in class. The federal government is suing Mark Zuckerberg and his claque of coders for cornering the market on vanity apps. (Really, Zuck should be forced into destitution for changing his company’s name from Facebook to the faux-futurist term “Meta.”)

The reigning consensus is that while we enjoy the convenience afforded by internet-anchored phones, we know they’re addictive, insalubrious, and a yoke on our mental health.

And, to summon Mrs. Lovejoy, they’re corrupting our little ones! Those seemingly inert black remotes contain an abstract life severed from the corporeality of authentic living. Online existence is a facsimile of society, a Potemkin village of neighborly connection. There is a uniform wisdom of repugnance over how much eye time is devoted to those pools of depthless binary-coded escape.

Imagine my sense of serendipity when no sooner I was observing a woman my age—a millennial with recollection of the analog world—bent over her phone like Smeagol rocking the ring that I got an inbox alert from The Free Press featuring Tyler Cowen’s latest column “Why I (Often) Choose My Phone Instead of Flesh and Blood.” Mind those synchronicities!

Cowen, the “hottest economist” famous for soaking up thousands upon thousands of books by only reading the first five pages before binning them, pulls that nifty ploy dismal scientists use when they want attention: make a contrarian case. Everyone knows staring at a screen all day fuzzies your brain, putrifies your body, and dulls your very being. To that common concern Cowen croaks “ACHTUALLY.” The internet is a builder of bridges, not a match and kerosene for anime-avatarred shitposters, Cowen contends. He writes with unassuming earnestness: “I believe that by spending time online I will meet and befriend a collection of individuals around the world, who are pretty much exactly the people I want to be in touch with.” Cowen even admits he achieved holy matrimony with a digital matchmaker. This kind of internet-enabled dialogue is “deeply human” for Cowen, who holds his online friends, acquaintances, professional contacts, Twitter interlocutors, anonymous flamers, Nigerian princes, and his spouse as the fruits of Silicon Valley’s circuited crop bedding.

Most people would regard 99% of those online “interactions” as a degree or two less than fully human; or if you’re of the Sartrean disposition, all too human and a pricking annoyance. But Cowen mitigates any simmering charges that if he’s so enthralled with the porgyonal byteverse, maybe he should surrender his consciousness fully to Borg, by pointing out our inner hypocrisy: that despite how much we regret our fingering hours, the numbers don’t lie. Most of our attention has been jacked into the Matrix. It’s futile to object. Check the screen-time measure on your phone—look on your wasted hours and despair! (Your humble scribe would never dare clock the untold minutes I’ve tossed pointing my pupils into my demoniac device. Were I to sneak a glance, my wife and God would sidle behind my shoulders, ready to render judgment. I’m not sure whom I fear more.)

Cowen’s Pollyannish view of instantaneous conference with others the world over is mockable, except for its fundamental insight: most of us lack the willpower to resist the web’s tug. “Technology has always been a part of human being,” observed Adam Kirsch. Insentient tools can only corrupt what’s already feeble, lacking resistance.

Easy, immediate access to the internet does have a neuro-warping effect. We aren’t meant to carry such a frictionless conduit of infinite information. The stimuli overtake: “The brain’s overwhelmed frontal lobes wind down higher-order cognition and defer to its emotional centers, which spark a cascade of stress and pleasure hormones,” is how Rod Dreher describes the neurochemical process by which we cognitively digest the beaming scroll. We’ve ceded our brain stems to the ethereal “cloud” that powers the world, high above in an unreachable firmament, veiled in another dimension.

And we’ve done it by choice. Yes, getting along in the modern economy is nigh impossible without the various phone apps that uncork conveniences: to accessing a parking garage, to unlatching your apartment’s lobby entrance, to managing your bank account, to even being able to read a restaurant menu. For nearly all these activities, a tangible alternative is available, the cost only a bit of nagging.

If you’re still concerned about a river of notifications urging you to check out your friend’s thousandth picture of her baby’s dazed grin, or the latest all-caps rant from President Trump, or Amazon’s reminder that a pair of lycra yoga pants are impatiently awaiting purchase in your cart, you can always spelunk through a series of sub-menus to mute all blips, blings, bleeps, bells, buzzes, boings, and barangs that cry out for our concentration. Or you can simply chuck your phone out the nearest window, and, like Marx’s proverbial workers, lose your chains.

Likewise, you can also tear your stare away from your phone in public, if only for a minute, and cease resembling a drooling zombie. Instead, my Metro mate clapped her retinas to an inane animated feature for 50 long minutes, not once looking up. The choice to touch grass instead of disassociate is still ours.