#3 : in 351 days, I’m giving up my smartphone…
WE, ADULTS, CAN SHOW THE WAY
Know someone who might enjoy the Cactus Diet? Forward it their way.
There’s undeniably been some progress: it’s finally become a hot topic to consider the harm that social media and smartphones are causing our children. Initiative after initiative, law after law, signal that we want to protect young people from the harmful effects of phones. The very recent EU KIDS Act, which I’m following with particular interest, aims to address not only the legal age for social media users but also—and above all—broader issues, as Reuters notes in this article:
“These include bans on addictive features, profiling-based recommender feeds and personalised ads or algorithms based on past activity. The Act would prevent infinite scrolling without breaks, reward 'tricks', unsolicited contact from strangers and push notifications during sleeping hours, defined as eight consecutive hours between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.
AI companions and chatbots must be turned off by default. Profiles for children must be private by default, with geolocation, camera and microphone access turned off.”
I read this article, then the bill, and I thought to myself:
Exactly.
That’s exactly what we need. And by “we,” I don’t just mean “we, parents of children”—no, I mean “we,”
all of us as human beings.
Because the EU KIDS Act highlights everything that’s wrong with social media and, more broadly, the smartphone as it exists today: it makes us addicted. It profiles and tracks us to sell us useless stuff. It keeps us from sleeping. It pretends to think all our ideas are brilliant. It distorts our interpersonal relationships. It seeks to maximize the time and attention we devote to it, at the expense of what makes us happy (knitting, swimming, having a drink with friends, and so on). In short: it sells us out, exhausts us, dumbs us down, manipulates us, enslaves us, and chip by chip erodes our free thought as well as our will and ability to change the world for the better.
In fact, many people are speaking out to say that it’s not just children who need to be prevented from becoming phone addicts, but all of us, and that it’s time to reflect on
the mechanisms of addictive design themselves.
After all, the companies behind smartphones, apps, and social media are just that: companies that sell us products—and we have the right to say we don’t want them, especially if they prey on our time and attention, we have the right to say, as citizens of the world: no means no.
Our lives would be so much better if the products themselves weren’t designed to be so addictive, wouldn’t they? If we didn’t have infinite scroll, if we didn’t get notifications at night, if we weren’t being suggested—across three different apps—to buy a power saw even though we live in an apartment, just because we looked up how to spell the word “saw,” if all our virtual social interactions weren’t rated with likes, thumbs-ups, and other perverse metrics hiding under a layer of sugar and sunsets.
So, what can we do
while we wait for addictive design to be banned for the good of humanity, while we wait for the EU People’s Act?
Well, here’s a small first step: step away from it to set an example.
And it won’t even be that hard, because we—the older generation, the millennials—have an advantage over our kids: we’ve lived without smartphones.
Yes, really: we’d go somewhere and had to read maps, and we’d end up finding an unfamiliar address—most of the time.
Yeah, yeah: we’d go to a party and talk to people, and sometimes there’d be awkward silences in the conversation, and then we’d either have to let those silences be or leave because, well, we weren’t that interested in that person anymore—or people would leave because, apparently, we weren’t that interesting.
Yeah, yeah: we’d pack stuff in our bags to keep ourselves occupied in the waiting room—paperbacks, magazines, Sudoku books, letters we needed to read, so why not read them now while waiting in line at the DMV.
Yes, yes: we were at work, and so we were—listen carefully, because what an outdated concept this is now—we were un-reach-able!
That era wasn’t so long ago. And I want to believe we can go back to it. In any case, I believe that most of us who experienced it want to go back.
Maybe not to being completely lost in the middle of nowhere and having to ask for directions every three blocks—though, for the sake of politeness...
Maybe not to uncle Tony’s terrifying monologue with no escape route—though, for the sake of patience…
Maybe not to having to fill out paper forms when we can do the same thing with a single click—though, for the sake of caution…
But at least to a world where we use technology, rather than a world where we’re used by it.
We want to protect our children? Great!
Let’s protect ourselves, too: let’s put a potted cactus in the kitchen, let’s put, right next to it, our smartphone, and let’s go out for a walk.
🌵
Translated by Deepl.com and the author