How smartphones are like marijuana
Keep teens away, then send them off to college to figure stuff out
This week marks the publication of Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. His work on the addictiveness and adverse mental-health effects of Big Phone, as I hereby call it, and social media are, as I read it, pretty hard to contest. The evidence is in studies, and it’s in front of our eyes. And his recommendations are eminently sane: less phone usage, especially for children; limiting children’s use of social media; banning phones in schools. That sort of thing. A lot of it is happening already. More will come.
There is a particular kind of Haidt critic who drives me bonkers, and that is the meliorist, the person who basically agrees that something is off about our relationship with tech—they agree with Haidt—but want to position him as some sort of absolutist. They know children are on phones too much, but they don’t want to take them off phones altogether, even in school. So you get critiques like this, from a Times review of his book:
[I]t’s worth considering the failure of prior absolutist stances. Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No drug campaign? A public health case study in what not to do. During the AIDS crisis, fear mongering and abstinence demands didn’t prevent unsafe sex. Remember the pandemic? Telling Americans to wear masks at all times undermined public health officials’ ability to convince them to wear masks when it really mattered…
Yes, digital absolutism might convince policymakers to change laws and increase regulation. It might be a wake-up call for some parents. But it also might backfire, plunging us into defense mode and blocking our path of discovery toward healthy and empowered digital citizenship.
I’ll point out just two problems with this sort of critique. The first is that the analogies are wack. Banning phones in schools is not like Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” to drugs campaign. Haidt is not talking about saying no to all phones, at all times, like Reagan to crack. Rather, he is saying things like, “No phones in classrooms” or “No phones until you are twelve.” That’s more like saying, “No pot in the classroom” or “No pot until you are 18/21/whatever age.” That his reasonable suggestion strike some as “absolutism” is bizarre.
That’s more like saying, “No pot in the classroom” or “No pot until you are 18/21/whatever age.” That his reasonable suggestion strike some as “absolutism” is bizarre.
Second, the critic has a notion–and you hear this a lot—that you have to let children keep their phones (all the time, it seems) because how else will they develop “healthy” relationships to smartphones? One possible answer to this is, “Well, they can start developing those relationships at age 18.” But the better answer is, “What is this ‘empowered digital citizenship’ you are talking about anyway?” In that phrase, you hear both utopian hopes for smartphones and social media—“When used correctly, they can bring social change!”—and, I think, the cowardice of the addict who is not ready to give up his own addiction. A lot of adults can’t imagine life without their phone or Facebook, so they can’t let themselves follow the evidence about phones and children. They believe themselves to be “empowered digital citizens,” rather than, say, drooling Wordle or FanDuel addicts, taking extra-long toilet breaks at work to place bets; so they tell themselves their children can be empowered digital citizens, too.
Look, we have gotten the power and perils of mobile phones wrong for years now. For a laugh, or maybe it’s a cry, go read this 2013 newspaper editorial demanding schools give students more smartphone usage. An excerpt:
Teachers used to talk about the need for students to develop "study skills," to prepare them for self-directed and lifelong learning. Today's equivalent might include lessons on how to verify information sources on the web and cut through the noise to find information and context about the subject matter at hand. But we can't teach those skills if we are telling students they must turn off or leave at home the devices they use to pursue that learning.
How does that read now? Like it was written by somebody who had joined a utopian cult.
I am actually an optimist on this front. People are breaking free of the cult. Schools are getting the message … slowly. The half-way gesture you are seeing a lot of is to try to keep phones out of classrooms, but allow them in between classes, at lunch for example. (Here is one such policy, in real life.)
That’s not going to work. Sooner or later, schools will realize they have to treat smartphones the way they treat cigarettes: something students may sneak in the bathroom, but would never bust out in front of a teacher. (Here my metaphor shifts from weed to tobacco. Bear with me.)
Here my metaphor shifts from weed to tobacco. Bear with me.
When schools get serious, there will be appropriate penalties—confiscation, suspension—and students will get in line. It won’t mean phones are the next Prohibition, with a 1920s-era Capone mob profiting off a phone black market. It will just mean more smoking in the boys’ room, rather than in the open.
Gamestop, Set, Match: How Donald Trump got richer than ever, beat Tish James, and sold out his own people
The above subhed is not mine—it’s stolen from Jay Michaelson, who gave it as the headline to his new Substack post about how Donald Trump just made $5 billion by bilking his own supporters. I have neither the law nor the math nor the stomach to write so cogently about Trump’s latest scam; I am glad Jay has all three. Read it.
When you’ve made it in HomeGoods…
My mother recently texted me a picture of a book I had written, on sale at HomeGoods. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I am going to go with “good thing.”
Do you know Matt Labash?
I am going to venture that Matt Labash is the best writer who is writing only on Substack. He seems to write no freelance pieces and only occasional books. His brand of center-right, quasi-libertarian, wry, bourbon-soaked, Christian fisherman wisdom—sorta P.J. O’Rourke crossed with the essays E.B. White—basically fit only in The Weekly Standard. And now on Substack. Here he is.
Where did Earth Shoes go?
As a fan of the clunkiest Clarks shoes—I just added the limited-edition Corduroy pair to my collection—I am intrigued by the old Earth Shoes of the 1970s. OK, I will be honest about how I got intrigued. S.E. Hinton (of The Outsiders) was, I was reading, married to a man who owned the last store to sell Earth Shoes. For the deep dive, read this article from an Oklahoma newspaper in 1987. Excerpt:
Shoe salesman David Inhofe figures he represents the end of an era, albeit an era that virtually everyone else in his business would just as soon forget.
As the world’s last remaining seller of Earth Shoes, the ugly, duckbill-toed footwear of the mid-’70s, Inhofe is as much a novelty as his product.
And as much as he hates to admit it, there is no place in the ’80s for Earth Shoes. Like the leisure suit and disco music, Inhofe's lifeblood has been reduced to little more than the butt of jokes about the period.
“I’d really be surprised if they ever come back,” Inhofe said.
“Because they are funny looking.”
Anyway, I got intrigued. You can still find Earth Shoes on ebay, like these:
And, my research showed, the Kalso company has been revived, as one brand of a big shell-company shoe conglomerate. But they don’t sell their signature shoe! From a customer-service thread:
Hello Mark,
Thank you for contacting Earth Shoes.
We no longer carry older styles of Earth shoes. Is there a certain one you are looking for? If you have the name of it I can look and see if we still carry it. I hope that helps.
Please let us know if we can assist you with anything else.
Sincerely,
Vanessa B.
Earth Shoes Customer Care Specialist
So, game over. If I get a few new subscribers today, I’ll get a fourth pair of Clarks.