The Worst Invention of all Time?
On an anniversary, we wonder what it's wrought.
Atlanta , GA
June 29, 2025
Has any century started worse than this one?
I recently heard someone pose this question, a narcissistic lament typical of our short-sighted, self-centered, attention-seeking age. The answer is obvious, and can be found by looking only a hundred years into the rearview mirror.
There we see…closer than they appear… objects like Theodore Roosevelt, the San Francisco Earthquake, the Federal Reserve, the income tax, the direct election of Senators, Woodrow Wilson, the Great War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Flu, the Treaty of Versailles, the Black Sox, and… to ensure these wounds were suffered as painfully as possible… Prohibition.
The war ended (or, rather, took a twenty-year pause), San Francisco was rebuilt, the flu dissipated, baseball recovered, and prohibition was repealed. But like herpes, most of these disasters didn’t go away, and the effect of all of them echoes in our time.
But let’s give our most recent two decades their ignominious due. They have their own litany of self-inflicted calamity, exacted by meddling sculptors and busybody painters whose only tools are jackhammers and spray guns. And, to be fair, their work isn’t done.
Refrain of Disaster
In retrospect, the 1990s might have been Peak America…the blowoff top of a great bacchanal. The Soviets fell, peace triumphed, and prosperity reigned. History was at an end. The party was on.
The US then succumbed to what economics calls the law of diminishing returns, and approached what Calculus refers to as the limit. After running up the credit card and hitting the casino, it raided mom’s wine cellar and ransacked dad’s liquor cabinet.
Then it passed out on the lawn, empty bottles and smoldering cigarettes strewn across the yard as morning sprinklers sprayed its face. It’s been hungover and searching for its car keys ever since.
Along the way, it tripped and stumbled into several awful errors: rigged markets, stupid wars, universal surveillance, the cult of “Science”, perpetual bubbles, fake wealth, real depression, “transitory” inflation, police brutality, mass immigration, cultural disintegration, mandatory medication, urban riots, tyrannical lockdowns, “climate” scams, LIV Golf, and the designated hitter in the National League.
And many Americans seemed just fine with this refrain of disaster that resembles a classic Bradbury book or a bad Billy Joel song. The Fourth Turning seems to be upon us.
Not only is the pretense of liberty vanishing; the desire for it seems to be as well. To each his own is not for us. Live and let live is dead. We love to mind each other’s business. And, unlike our benighted ancestors of a hundred years ago, we have just the tool to do it.
I’m holding it in my hand, and most of you are holding it in yours. It’s the smartphone, the most iconic example of which was launched eighteen years ago today.
Amplifying the Flames
This century, we have become an hysterical people. Everything is over the top, overdone, overblown, and overreacted to. Even (or especially) regarding people we never met and would never care to meet, or things we know nothing about and about which, in a sane world, we’d not be able to care less.
The smartphone brings such “news” to us the way a magnifying glass transmits sunlight to an ant. It hits us more intensely, and less beneficially, than we initially believe.
The torrent allows little or no time to think, and often leaves us worse off than had we not been exposed at all. We receive so much information that we usually know less than we did before it arrived.
Public opinion can be defined as what everyone thinks everyone else thinks, which inevitably influences what people think they are supposed to think. The smartphone amplifies these flames, which often burn out as quickly as they ignite.
Before smartphones, public opinion was less contagious (and more contained) than it is today. Political opposition, alternative views, and dissident perspectives were more easily quarantined.
But propaganda can no longer be concentrated in a controlled conduit of three networks and a few newspapers. As during the Russia-gate hoax, the climate swindle, the covid con, or innumerable lies that whip-up wars, the smartphone helps dilute, circumvent, and refute fiendish fibs meant to keep us in line.
But we need to be careful. In most cases, we see what we’re supposed to see. In an era of slick editing, selective algorithms, and deceptive AI, we should distrust any text, voice, or video we’re fed electronically… particularly information that affirms “facts” we’re inclined to believe.
Social media and instant news are not conducive to subtlety and nuance, but rather to emotional manipulation, hot takes, and lots of noise. Smartphones stunt reflection and shorten time horizons. Contemplation can wait. Responses are expected immediately. Stupidity thrives, hysteria abounds, perspective retreats.
Push and Pull
It seems appropriate that “silent” and “listen” are spelled with the same letters. But in social settings, our phones facilitate the former while discouraging the latter. They “connect” us superficially from a distance, yet push us apart in proximity.
Isolation reigns, even when we’re together. A random buzz, beep, post, photo, like, link, text, or tweet is sufficient pretext to disrupt a conversation or ignore a friend. The phone in your hand takes priority over the people in your presence.
Digital correspondence takes precedence. The world of the real, the tangible, and the personal fades into the background. And, after wading mindlessly thru the self-selected cheer, artificial abundance, and self-assured certainty of other people’s posts, it often feels inadequate.
Don’t get me wrong. The smartphone is one of the most useful, powerful, consequential, disruptive, convenient, informative, miraculous, and remarkable inventions of all time.
But in some ways, it’s among the worst. Like most anything else, it just depends how we use it. And whether, every once in a while, we opt not to.
JD
Of all the consequences to our way of life caused by the Smartphone, the easiness by which anyone can make hurtful, mean and vicious comments to total strangers ranks high.
When in the last century the telephone allowed effortless communication, if someone said something offensive, then we could always slam down the receiver.
The slam part actually felt good; it was as if we physically hurt the person whose crass, unwelcome comment hurt us.
But we can't slam down our Smartphone when some total stranger gratuitously insults us, even for the most trivial reasons.
At best, we can try to block these strangers electronically. But if they are persistent, they'll find a way to continue conveying their unwelcome opinions, and always hiding behind a pseudonym too.
Makes me wonder what the next century's technological marvel will do to humankind (assuming we're still here)
The changes you attribute to smartphones may be more attributable to the internet and web browsers, but smartphones definitely make access to the web more ubiquitous. It's literally in my pocket all the time, even lying beside me at night, and I sometimes succumb to the temptation to read it while driving ... as insanely irresponsible as that seems. It's definitely a mixed blessing, but I'd be like a heroin addict in withdrawal without it.
Recently, I bought an eInk phone to supplement my Samsung smartphone. The eInk display is black and white, and its video quality makes YouTube much less attractive, but it's fine for reading the news and blogs like this one. The battery life is also much better. I planned to move the SIM card from my Samsung phone to the eInk phone as needed until I realized that my Samsung phone doesn't have a SIM card.
The Samsung phone has an eSIM, only software installed on the phone, and an eSIM is much more difficult to move from one phone to another. Basically, I must take both phones to the AT&T store and have someone there do it. Instead, I plan to take my Samsung phone to the store, where I bought it, and have the store replace my eSIM with a physical SIM card, but I haven't done it yet. Hopefully, they won't give me any grief about it.
Once done, I plan to use the eInk phone most of the time and to severely curtail my use of YouTube. I often only listen to YouTube anyway. I'll leave the Samsung phone in my car most of the time because the eInk phone doesn't play well with Android Auto though it professes to. We'll see if this methadone does me any good ...