A Prison For Your Mind
How Smartphones Erode Your Days
Introduction
I recently visited the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. A place that reminds us of the complexity of imprisonment in our modern world. Set up as a place for reform, the jail was one of the first locations to model the idea of mass incarceration. Its aim was to instill penitence. Instead, it promoted isolation and decadence. As societies try to curb crime, there is no denying that most countries default to punishment over restoration. It is a complex topic after all.
The most salient exhibit for our discussion today was the solitary confinement room. In it, there were plenty of white cards with requests from those currently locked up in this model. These requests ranged from "Kids eating in a fast food joint" to "the pyramids of Chichén Itzá, in Southern Mexico." People in solitary lack human connection or any sort of stimuli. As a result, researchers have found effects ranging from anxiety and depression to paranoia and aggression.1 These factors made me wonder why the opposite is also true. Humans with access to constant stimuli experience similar outcomes.2
Thus my claim for today: Smartphones, designed by tech companies to overwhelm our lives, are generating an erosion of individuality and purpose. I hope it's not too far fetched. Let's explore it.
Purposeful Days
In the early smartphone era (2008-2011), big tech companies touted how their products would make our lives easier. The iPhone would be a central repository of information and unlock productivity for the everyday worker. Moreover, GPS, music players, radios, and other single-purpose gadgets would be supplanted by a single device. The latter claim stands to this day. It is undeniable that task lists, directions, and your favorite tunes are easier to access now than in 2008. The first claim, however, morphed.
While the smartphone revolution brought the potential of ease to work tasks, Silicon Valley prioritized mining our attention for their profits.3 They created frictionless experiences that incentivized constant stimuli for our brains. The outcome is a barrage of notifications, a decrease in productivity, and the dependency on smartphones as everyday companions.4 In other words, a prison for the mind. A place that you want to escape from, but for a "must-have" app or another, you can't. We all have them. Slack, Uber, Spotify, name yours. We want to be free and experience the world, but we can't fathom leaving our phones behind. It's useful, you tell yourself. Others shout that the problem is a lack of self-control. No. It is a prison designed for your convenience.
The research backs it up.5 Books continue to be written about it.6 As Jonathan Haidt, from
, says in The Anxious Generation, “People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.” It is remarkable how those in solitary confinement suffer due to their lack of stimuli. Yet, children and adults in the free world report feeling similar disconnection and depression. Are smartphones causing the erosion of our sense of daily purpose?
After my visit to the penitentiary, I started to look for tales from solitary. I found Six by Ten, a 2018 book telling the stories of those exposed to this inhumane treatment. The word that I noticed the most during my read: “dread.” The experiences recounted in the book navigate through the intense feelings of those imprisoned. They lost hope. Their days blurred. Purpose disappeared. I cannot imagine how hard it is. At the same time, I can’t fail to notice that those outside report the same.
A cursory search through a few subreddits7 reveals anecdotes of “every day feels the same” or “I spend my whole day scrolling.” People who, for one reason or another, don’t have purpose in their lives. Maybe it’s the constant access to dreadful news. Or the fact that a third of our day is now spent in front of a screen. To make our days satisfying, we must have variety.
During my trip to Philly, 14 hours went by from when I took the train from Manayunk into the city, until I finished my meal at Vedge. Time does fly when you are having fun. I visited the Rocky steps, the Reading Terminal Market, Lincoln Financial, and the Liberty Bell. Novelty took over. My screentime for the day: 5 minutes for a work call.
Introducing new experiences into your lifestyle is the best way to curb smartphone overuse. Yet, many people enjoy the prison that big tech created for our satisfaction. Don’t leave. All your needs can be fulfilled here. Food, sex, work, it is all found in this little rectangle.
We are all the same
I know that you have noticed. Houses, cars, coffee shops, gathering spaces, they all seem to be a little flat. It is not a mistake. It’s by design. Sometime around the second wave of smartphone design (2012-2020), algorithms took over. Your feed switched from friends’ pictures, diverse thoughts, and group updates to whatever was most popular and enraging. Social media companies prioritized your engagement and used your data to keep you hooked. Locations that were “Instagramable” were rewarded.
As
states in Filterworld, “Algorithmic recommendations are addictive because they are always subtly confirming your own cultural, political, and social biases, warping your surroundings into a mirror image of yourself while doing the same for everyone else.” Through this subtle manipulation, the highest bidder reaps the rewards. IKEA gets to redirect apartment design with influencers. Poppi somehow convinces you that their soda is healthy. Juul, meanwhile, claims to have never targeted young people with their bubblegum flavor. They used the tools available to them to slowly shift our desires.Smartphones augmented the trend. Manufacturers released larger and larger screens to accommodate the new consumption methods. After all, productivity is accomplished with a stylus to jot down notes, highlight presentations, and create slides on the go. All gimmicks. Pen and paper still remain king.8 In their preoccupation with profit, brands made sure to funnel our desires to the narrow road. Not the road less traveled, but the cattle ranch. By eroding individuality and presenting you with their path of success, dissenting voices fell by the wayside. Alternative lifestyles mocked. Slowly, we all must embrace the QR code.
In the pursuit of “innovation”, monopolizing our preferences was the north star. They targeted our instincts. Scott Galloway explained it best in his 2017 Ted Talk. For information, Google. For connection, Facebook. Survival, Amazon. Status, Apple. New players continue to enter the game, the outcome is the same. Flattening our world, designing uniformity. Thus, we find another path to the same prison. A prison for our minds. Telling us what to buy, think, and create. Not what we desire, but what trends. Not the voice of the heart, but the allure of digital validation.
Conclusion
We are fortunate to have the freedom to move and let our minds wander. Many are denied this basic liberty, confined to a six-by-ten cell that defines their world. Stripped of autonomy, they endure suffering and exploitation without compensation, imprisoned in both body and mind.
Silicon Valley envisions a similar constraint. One that curtails our freedom and stifles our sense of discovery. Not within the confines of a six-by-ten cell, but through the frame of a 16:9 screen.
Futher reading:
So many studies on this. Here are four: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7546459/, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093854808318584, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11524-017-0138-1, and https://www.nmlegis.gov/handouts/CCJ%20102716%20Item%203%20Dr%20Grassian%20Psychopathological%20Effects%20of%20Solitary%20Confinement.pdf
Key word here is similar. Solitary is dehumanizing as a punishment whereas smartphones and constant engagement is more of a choice. I say more due to the reality of big tech explicitly designing their products as a data mining operation. Also, I’d never compare these experiences as equal. Yet, it is remarkable how people with smartphone dependency describe their every day existence in comparison to those in solitary.
Watch this video:
I found this video to be an excellent representation of the smartphone-human relationship:
Three studies on the impacts on productivity, brain drain, and more: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5800562/, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691462, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958821000087
I keep a recommended list of books on the topic here: https://www.dumbphones.org/bookresources
Read a few stories from the reddits below. I found interesting to read the description of similar feelings to those in prison. Two completely different conditions exposing similar human feelings: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfimprovement/search/?q=smartphone, https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/search/?q=smartphone, https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalminimalism/search/?q=smartphone
It's rather frustrating having to use a smartphones just to display tickets; especially when you can't print them out. That's the one really annoying thing about them & also the infinite scrolling feeds on non-social media apps that no one asked for.
Interesting write up, Jose. I enjoyed reading your piece...super insightful.