What's missing from the initial comparison is the fact that smartphones opened up all sorts of conveniences, which is partly what makes them so addictive. Rock music, D&D, etc, these other things that were crusaded against offered no convenience for all, so a conservative mind saw no value in it and attacked it as something that warps or rots young brains. Smartphones obviously do that and worse, but because they offer all sorts of helpful tools in our daily lives, we let it slide.

When I was in high school in the 90's, the famed Texas Instruments calculators were often banned in some maths classes because, as was said at the time, we were "not going to be walking around with a computer in our pockets all the time," so we needed to learn to do the work. By the time my younger brother passed through the same classes, they were required to have a graphing calculator because it actually helped kids complete the work. And play Dope Wars.

While we do tend to overreact to new tech, ways of thinking, games, music, etc, there's something inherently oily and snakelike about a thing that brings convenience to our lives the way smartphones or cell phones did. They slip in, comfortably at times, settling into our habits and routines while simultaneously altering them. We end up manipulated by it and before we know it, we can't set it down. In the case of smartphones, our data became the commodity, a mere decade or two after we were worried about tracking devices in cars or phone lines being tapped. But the smartphones kept delivering on their promises, which kept us hooked.

As someone who recovering from alcoholism, I struggle to call our love of smartphones an addiction, but if it helps people be aware of the dangers, by all means, use the term. To me, the problem of smartphones is manipulation at the deepest cognitive levels. We started offloading some thinking to them and who could blame us? We had the store of human knowledge in our pockets! We could play a game instead of sitting idle on the train, gamble with online casinos to try and win some extra cash that week, keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or get into a heated debate on Twitter during our lunch break, check banking, stocks and eBay sales, etc. We no longer had to carry a separate device to photograph or record the moment. The list goes on and on. But in the end, it altered our behavior just enough that we allow ourselves to be controlled by it, monitored by it, and bought and sold by it.

Did we ever allow the students to smoke in the classroom?

This.

Schools are not employers that can implement take it or leave it policies. You need coordination and agreement between school leadership, district leadership, staff, and most critically parents to put your foot down on anything while also working to ensure basic safety and decent academic outcomes.

Now that the ills of social media and screen time are mainstream knowledge, it’s easier to make a common sense argument without much pushback.

Ugh this is so tragic but I think correct

> someone somewhere

Must have been a powerful person.

There's so many of these absurd "investing" trends where financially illiterate people are getting tricked in to buying in to schemes where the only way to win is to be one of the insiders. Or more recently, the Counter Strike skin "investing" where a single change from a company can wipe out all of your investment.

Had you bought actual regulated shares you could sue the company for deliberately crashing the value. But since video game skins are not a real investment. You have no protections at all.

> It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares.

This is way too general a claim to be plausibly true, or verifiable even if somehow it was true. There's a lot of tech CEOs, running companies doing lots of different things in the world of computer technology, with lots of different family situations. They do not all have the same philosophy of how to raise their children, that they have publicly and truthfully talked about. Even if you're just talking about, say, Mark Zuckerberg specifically, who I know has mentioned some things publicly about his approach to raising his relatively-young kids, I don't think he claims that he blanket-disallows his kids from using every Meta product. And if he did, why would he say that publicly? Or maybe he did do that at one point when his kids were younger but then they complained a lot about this parental restriction and eventually he relented without happening to inform the world on a podcast that he's now making a slightly different decision in his private life.

I also don't think that any parent's decision about what kinds of computer technology use to allow or forbid for their children should be primarily based on what tech CEOs do with their own kids (and of course, really, what they heard tech CEOs somewhere without actually being able to verify this unless they happen to be close personal friends of a tech CEO).

I'm interested to see where this goes. I don't like how it's likely reducing privacy the internet. But social media is obviously a threat so serious that it might be worth the costs.

I've also been thinking that perhaps social media platforms should start displaying some kind of indicator when a poster is from out of your country. So when foreign troll farms start political posting you can see more clearly they aren't legitimate. I suspect that social media is largely to blame for the insane politics of the world right now.

It absolutely did not. ChatGPT is free to use and most people I know have barely engaged with it beyond a few queries once or twice to try it.

When the iPhone came out, nearly everyone I knew dumped hundreds of dollars to get one (or a droid) within 2 years.

I assumed the OP meant chat agents like Character.ai, not ChatGPT.