Rule of Thumb
According to a growing body of research, smartphones make you dumber, more sociopathic, depressed, and anxious. Apart from that, everything is just fine.
You might think filling one’s ear passages with silicone is an extreme solution to the incessant chatter of the modern world. Obviously, you don’t endure the London Underground. Earplugs don’t work. Threats to firebomb the noise polluter’s family home don’t either. Neither does polite British tutting.
Desperate times demand desperate measures. I will consult YouTube. Surely, one helpful soul has kindly filmed themselves squeezing a tube of industrial silicone into their ears? No such luck.
Not to despair. Help is at hand. Transport for London, the mythical entity alleged to manage the city’s Tube, has revealed its campaign to tackle the smartphone scourge: sickly posters splashed in kindergarten colours.
The campaign targets the “disruptive behaviour” of passengers who were evidently raised by a pack of snarling hyenas. They blast reels, videos, music. They FaceTime their cackling friends. Not so long ago, a fellow passenger revealed to us—her captive audience—that someone named Sarah had caught the clap from someone named Travis. Syphilis? How literary.
Miraculously, researchers at Transport for London discovered a rare tribe thought to be long extinct: Londoners who communicate with their fellow human beings by making noises with their mouths—one thousand of them, in fact.
Researchers approached these strange beings with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. They prodded them with a stick. That didn’t work. After jabbing them with a cattle prod, they looked up from their phones. Several members landed in Accident and Emergency, complaining of neck strain injuries.
Seventy percent of those surveyed said the constant noise screaming out of smartphones drove them crazy. One responder suggested offenders receive forty lashings in public. That is a bit much. Ten should do the trick.
TFL wavered from such brutal and effective methods. Campaign posters politely ask passengers to wear headphones.
I’m afraid that TFL’s well-meaning campaign hasn’t quite restored sanity on the London Underground.
Last week, I sat next to a grown man grinning at his phone like a Hindu cow. On the screen was a captivating spectacle. Someone, somewhere, makes it their daily business to buy gigantic, waist-height glass bottles of soda. This clearly well-adjusted person then rolls the bottles down a flight of concrete steps. Our friend dissolved the journey between Hammersmith and Leicester Square in a trance. Bottle. Roll. Smash. Bottle. Roll. Smash.
This reminded me of the satirical film, Idiocracy. The plot follows U.S. Army librarian Luke, and prostitute Rita.
After signing up for a hibernation experiment, the two awake in America, year 2500. Mountains of trash litter the landscape. Planes fall out of the sky. The citizens drag their gormless faces between Starbucks (which is now a coffee-serving brothel) and shopping malls even more dementing than those today. Over centuries, the dumb have biologically outgunned the smart.
The citizens of this moronic inferno drain their days glued to hyperactive screens. Their favourite content includes the Masturbation Channel and a reality TV show called ‘Ow! My Balls!’ That show follows a hapless man as he gets whacked in the testicles.
They cultivate high culture, too. The profound film, Ass, zooms in on a pair of bare bum cheeks. The sophisticated audience fizzes with laughter as the bum, for two hours, passes wind.
Back in 2006, Idiocracy was a well-done satire which stretched logical extremes. Today, I’m not so sure it is as ridiculous as it once seemed. Just spend ten minutes on the Tube, inhaling the noxious TikTok fumes spewing from smartphones.
Transport for London has a point. But it is far too late. We are a nation of dopamine addicts. Those dopamine crack pipes stitched to our palms are quite literally designed to suck away as much of our time and attention as possible. An intervention, at this late hour, must be drastic.
How about a campaign outlining the terrifying effects of watching brain-rot content for hours and hours each day? A growing body of research suggests today’s smartphone is tomorrow’s lobotomy. Am I rioting in hyperbole? No.
One study found that watching short-form video is more harmful to our brains than soaking them in booze. At least, the latter indulgence might get you laid.
Several studies link smartphone culture with declines in comprehension, literacy, and the ability to reason. Others link smartphones with rising narcissism and collapsing social capital. And then there’s the nascent research suggesting that smartphone addiction may trigger ADHD and Autism-like symptoms in the addicted.
No doubt many will accuse me of overstating the case. But a trial which began in Los Angles this week may reconfigure a few minds.
The plaintiff is a California teen who claims Instagram wrecked her mental health. According to her, the app zeroed in on her insecurities, feeding her “harmful and depressive content,” which led her, eventually, to self-harm. She also claims to be a victim of “bullying and sextortion” on the app she first joined aged ten. Instagram, she claims, didn’t care.
I’m not surprised. Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, wants eyeballs on screens much like a crack dealer wants lips on pipes. After all, they’re not in the social media business. They’re in the addiction business.
That trial is the first of a coming legal deluge in which some 2,000 others will accuse tech titans of intentionally designing their products to addict their users.
Of course, many will pooh-pooh my concerns. But in the background, the evidence swells: smartphones make us dumber, less ethical, more psychopathic. They erode our ability to reason and to think. They rot one’s self-image and corrode one’s mental health.
They’ve even driven a few poor souls to suicide. Apart from that, reader, they’re completely harmless.
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My eldest is a light user of the interweb. He mainly looks up old episodes of Top Gear to watch (petrol head in the making) and cat videos. He's currently deep into A-levels so has minimal spare time, which in any event is taken up with training as he's now in the England karate squad. He's well rounded, sensible and has a quirky sense of humour.
Younger son watches science videos on YouTube plus a fair amount of brain rot. He's highly academic and uses it to destress from school. He's not on Facebook or Instagram but uses discord to connect with mates. He's grumpy, snappy and difficult to talk to at times. 🤷♀️ Both are autistic, but were diagnosed long before they had use of phones.
Ironic that I'm typing this on my smartphone.....
I can see how being disconnected from real life could induce the social awkwardness experienced by autistic people, but autism is much more than that and a full diagnostic process would expose the true autistics from the phone addicts. The problem is in some areas the waiting lists are so long folk have been diagnosed over bloody Zoom by a nurse, which is wholly inadequate. A proper evaluation and dx requires a team of professionals and a full history being taken, looking at earliest childhood right back to babyhood.
There's no doubt social media is addictive. I came off X as it was becoming a problem. I've given minimal details on farcebook and block ads and suggested pages to avoid getting sucked in, my time is precious I'd rather spend it engaged in something with purpose. Also - there are far too many idiots on there. It never ceases to amaze me how the least intelligent person thinks abuse is the perfect response to a perfectly valid comment. "We used to have village idiots. Now with the Internet the fckers have gone global".
Christopher, “the clap” is chlamydia, not syphilis. So, not literary at all!