The problem isn’t the smartphone, as suggested by a flood of articles with titles like “Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?”1 The problem isn’t the internet, which is also routinely accused of ruining the world.2 Something is ruining the world, but it isn’t that we’re connecting with people at a distance using bits, or that we’re staring into little glowing screens. To be sure, you can overdo staring at the little screen,3 just as you can overdo a lot of things, but that’s not an existential problem for our species. There is one particular high-tech thing, however, that is toxic even in
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