Changing Our Relationship to Technology Will Require Collective Action

ملخص مفصل

Many of us are making individual efforts to use our phones less, or to avoid A.I. But we will need to work together.

At noon, at six-thirty, and at ten at night, before I shuffle off to bed, my phone automatically shuts off access to all social-media sites. If I want to restore my ability to mindlessly scroll, I have to walk sheepishly to my kitchen and press my phone up against a little plastic square that sits on a high shelf. This humiliation device, called the Brick, limits my screen time to the apps that, in an earlier moment of clarity, I deemed essential: text messages and Apple Books, which, during these Bricked hours, I have been using to dutifully reread “The Brothers Karamazov,” prompted more by a sense of shame than by a sincere interest in revisiting the great novels.

I have been thinking and writing about resistance to technology for a while, spurred by an unresolved alarm that Americans have not put up much of a fight against the sense of alienation caused by our growing dependence on screens. It’s increasingly clear to me that we will not survive as a society without some seismic intervention that separates us from our screens, our algorithms, and our little simulacra of social life. I believe that such a rupture will come—but what will it look like? Will it resemble the dropout movement of the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, with waves of young people refusing to abide by convention?

Whatever the solution may be, it feels, at the moment, impossibly far away. In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had glued us all more tightly than ever to our phones, many people, I’m sure, crafted some limp armistice like mine, buying a Brick or muting notifications or stashing their phones in other rooms at bedtime, or even just leaving them on “Do Not Disturb” throughout the day. But, in most cases, that was about the extent of their protests. If there is a local initiative to ban the use of devices in their children’s schools, they will support it, but they will probably not do much to rip the phones out of their children’s hands.

مطلع المقال، مقتطف من The New Yorker. لقراءة المقال كاملًا، افتحه على موقع الناشر.