Smartphones manipulate our emotions and trigger our reflexes

I agree. The Internet implementers were too wide-eyed thinking the Internet would "save us" instead of realizing that it would "slave us". The human brain is highly unintelligent emotionally. Look at a toddler's emotional capacity. That all lives inside us just behing a thin facade. The Internet both taps into that and exposes us to untold amounts of emotional taps. Humans evolved to be in relatively small social groups. It's obvious why we are completely overwhelmed by literally everything these days, because everything pushes outside of those small social groups.

What I want (and I suppose this is kind of possible with Island or equivalent application) is a guest mode for my kids. So I can give them my smartphone without my notifications popping up between a game or movie.

[1] https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/268869393266...

[2] https://www.thelightphone.com

Here's what I mean (from an addict's perspective). What makes me hesitate when I reach for a cigarette or another drink, and decide maybe I should call it a night, is not the knowledge that it's bad for me. It's thinking about friends who have died from lung cancer and cirrhosis. As a whole, as a society, we've become more aware of the effects of certain poisons because we've witnessed the results and drawn the conclusions.

So with screen addiction, we're just starting to witness the results on a generational level. Yes - screen use is a little different because it can have good sides as well. The screens are magical devices that can educate us and improve us, too. Someone addicted to watching their diet and exercise with FitBit has a different psychological problem space from someone addicted to watching people put ants up their nose on TikTok.

I agree with you wholeheartedly that all of these things prevent us from focusing and staying present and dealing with real problems. I'm really just saying that removing any or all of them doesn't address that underlying void which causes people to seek consciousness altering substances or mass distraction. There is no distraction or game the human mind won't latch onto to avoid reality - that's the curse of knowing you're going to die. We need immunity against the surface thing that's eating us alive right now. But of course we'll keep playing defense against the next thing, because we have no immunity from it. Changing human nature seems to me like a utopian vision, which has never worked in practice. Yeah, we can romanticize some cultures that seem to be better at managing it. But give them a cell phone, a credit card and an Amazon account and you'll see how long it takes for them to fuck themselves over too. Those that do survive the modern world with things like a Sabbath day of rest or avoiding technology completely, do so because they have very strong communal practices that ensure individuals have little agency or choice - and they also happen to believe in a divine plane of existence beyond the mortal coil, which changes their calculus when making bad decisions. I'm not advocating for either thing. I think changing human nature is impossible, and I think heaven is a placebo. Changing individual human behavior to be more present and more self-aware, I think, is possible. But it's an incremental process. First you have to train each individual to notice a new danger. Then they can develop defenses against it.

I guess I just said something very classically Conservative and yet heretical, but this seems like the way the process has to work, as opposed to wish-casting us to all look inside ourselves and put down that cellphone or that cigarette. We are flawed. We as a species take advantage of each others' flaws in a climb to the top of the monkey barrel. There's no way out, even if Elon thinks there is on Mars, or Zuck thinks there is in Hawaii. Herd immunity amounts to enough of your friends and neighbors gently telling you to wake up and take care of yourself. That's probably how a communally sane society evolves in the end, too - once it reaches some kind of equilibrium with its technology, its drugs, and its environment.

> wasn't the USA founded by... very religious people?

The USA was founded by a mix of people religiously, but many of them were essentially deists. That is, not outright atheists but the closest thing you could admit publicly at the time. It's true that some of them were Christians, like John Jay. Some of them, like Jefferson, retained some Christian belief but rejected many of the core Christian beliefs. Jefferson even literally cut much of Jesus out of the bible. Most of them were committed to religious freedom, and that freedom successfully became the very first enumerated right in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. Relative to the standards of the time, I think the USA was founded by remarkably secular people.

You may be thinking of the Puritans who founded an American colony a century before the founding of the USA. They still remained a powerful community locally during the founding, but the founders of the USA (as we normally consider them) were not Puritans.

The secular roots of the country are written into the Constitution, but the country gradually Christianized over the years. For example, adding "In God We Trust" in the 1860s and adopting it as an official motto in the 1950s.

But at any rate, I agree if your point is that (consistent with my point above) widespread social media in a Puritan colony or similar would have been unpleasant. In literature, the Scarlet Letter and the Crucible raise a similar point.