Sublime

When I grew up, the idea of the “global village” was an abstraction. My daughter lives something concrete. Emotionally, socially, wherever she goes, she never leaves home.

In To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov implores the reader to “inquire into how Facebook mediates the very conditions of authenticity, sometimes by erecting new barriers and constraints but, more often, by destroying them.”

books Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation. She

In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts

say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

His name is Tristan Harris, a former start-up founder and Google engineer who deviated from his well-worn path through the world of tech to become something decidedly rarer in this closed world: a whistleblower.

“This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone.

“How is that a slot machine?” Cooper ask

But over years of study, when given the choice between hanging out with a robot and talking to one of the researchers on the MIT team, most seniors, grateful, choose the person.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.