Lembke writes, “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.”[60] Her metaphor helps to explain why the transition from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood has been so devastating, and why the crisis showed up so suddenly in the early 2010s. Millennial adolescents in the 1990s and early 2000s had access to all kinds of addictive activities on their home computers, and some of them did get addicted. But they couldn’t take their computers with them everywhere they went. After the Great Rewiring, the next generation of
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