SMARTPHONES: The End of Humanity
The smartphone is a virus that is killing us off like malware
Thought Experiment:
You’re walking down the street and you suddenly happen upon a young man being beaten brutally. Do you:
A) Intervene
B) Avoid the situation
C) Pull out your smartphone and get a video of it.
Let’s take a toe-dip into the world of evolutionary biology. Certainly no expert in the field, I have spent a few hours reading online articles and watching videos on my iPhone 13 Pro Max and can thus be considered more of an expert than most of you, so why not take my word for it?
Evolutionary biology is the gradual transformation of winning hardware over failing hardware. That’s Evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein’s modern analogy and, given we’re talking smartphones, seems to fit nicely.
A simple example is the peppered moth.
Originally, the vast majority of peppered moths had a light, mottled coloring which was a good camouflage against predators. Before the industrial revolution, a uniformly dark variant of the peppered moth made up 2% of the species. After the industrial revolution, 95% of peppered moths showed this dark coloration. The best explanation as to why this change in the species occurred is that the light moths lost their advantage of camouflage as light surfaces were darkened by pollution, and so light moths were eaten more frequently by birds.
The winning moths that had dark coloring, the losers were the traditional peppered ones. Evolution chose. I mean, the moth example isn’t sexy like how giraffe’s got long necks (evolution) and why birds are basically tiny fucking dinosaurs, but it gets the point across.
Humans, however, have, through technology, bypassed the hardware part of evolution. A thousand years ago, a man who had asthma would just die and a woman with failing eyesight would fall off a cliff. Modern technology created fixes for these conditions and thus we survive without the evolutionary change in the hardware of humanity.
A thousand years ago, there weren’t morbidly obese people everywhere you could see because technology hadn’t improved farming and chemically making food last longer and, after all, Fritos and soda were technological advancements far beyond the possibilities of those in 1018 A.D. But we have Iowan tourists who get around Navy Pier and Disneyland because they have modern scooters and medical technology has advanced to keep their tiny hearts pumping blood through their massive clogged arteries and so evolution has been sidelined.
Where humans evolve now is in the software stage. Our mental processes, our creativity, our social game evolve as our bodies do not. And, as evolution of our software goes, the smartphone is a virus that is killing us off like malware.
Thought experiment:
You have more computing power in your back pocket (a mere few inches from your sphincter) than was utilized to put men on the moon in 1969.
Do you use this extraordinary technology to:
A) Increase your understanding of the world by accessing ideas and news from all over the planet
B) Learn new skills via YouTube and things like MasterClass videos
C) Feed your natural narcissism by taking pictures of your face and meals to get the dopamine hit that comes with mass approval by people you barely know?
Here’s some straight up truth bomb therapy:
Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has a new paper published in Clinical Psychological Science arguing that increased smartphone use with teens is leading to higher rates of depression and suicide.
“In just the five years between 2010 and 2015,” Twenge says, “the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless—classic symptoms of depression—surged 33 percent in large national surveys. Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent.”
Twenge says that they found that increases in depression and suicide occurred among teens across every background. It didn’t matter if the teens with in wealthy or poor families or what their ethnicity is.
“All told, our analysis found that the generation of teens … born after 1995 is much more likely to experience mental health issues than their millennial predecessors…. After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens' lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone.”
We almost forget that fifteen years ago, there were no smartphones, and as recently as 2011, only a third of Americans owned one. Now nearly two-thirds do. That figure reaches 85 percent when you’re only counting young adults. And 46 percent of Americans told Pew surveyors in 2017 a simple but remarkable thing: They could not live without one. The device went from unknown to indispensable in less than a decade. The handful of spaces where it was once impossible to be connected—the airplane, the subway, the wilderness—are dwindling fast. Even hiker backpacks now come fitted with battery power for smartphones. Perhaps the only “safe space” that still exists is somewhere out there without fucking wifi.
All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media. Admittedly, 10 hours a week is a lot. But those who spend six to nine hours a week on social media are still 47 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than those who use social media even less. The opposite is true of in-person interactions. Those who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average amount of time.
Thought Experiment:
You are forced to choose between your spouse, your health or your smartphone.
According to about seven different polls of Americans ages 18 to 54, you’d choose your phone and most of you in this room had to take a pause and think about it.
Back to evolutionary biology.
Aside from our brutal need to create the Other in order to make war, our inability to moderate our consumption of available resource, and our desperate need for personal affirmation, the specific evolutionary quality of homo sapiens that has allowed the species to survive without fur, big ass teeth, speed, and the fact that, unlike most mammals, our offspring is born years before they can function in the world without a constant care taking, is that we are social creatures.
It is our ability to band together and function in tribes and societies, to access hierarchies that enable familial groups to bond with other familial groups and foment societies and agree to common values that become laws, that has been the core survival technique of our species.
The technology that allows us to connect on a global scale, to communicate almost ceaselessly without personal in person connection should be a huge and wonderful advance. It should be the leap that puts us into the very next stage of our software evolution. It should be but it isn’t.
As we continue to rely on smartphones and computing technology to tell us where we are and how to get to the nearest Jiffy Lube, to memorize our essential phone numbers, remember the birthdates of our family and friends, count the number of steps we walk, the less reliant we are on our own software. The Pixar film Wall•E is the dystopia we are entering where humanity is just a series of fat, boneless lumps, content to consume the world via a screen and float around on hovering chaise lounges as our hardware atrophies and our software devolves into Play-Doh versions of brains.
Thought experiment:
Without your phone, can you:
A) Figure out how to get to the nearest hospital?
B) Tell me your mother’s phone number?
C) Describe the plot of any Great American novel?
D) Tell me what you’re doing this time next week?
If not, your devolution is already at hand. When the zombie apocalypse comes, the only concession is that only the poorest among us and the Amish will survive.