How we turned into addicts
Silicon Valley’s creations, such as smartphones and social media, have us chasing ‘another dopamine hit’
Last year was Apple’s triumphant 10th anniversary of the iphone’s launch. The device that ushered in our smartphone era and truly made the Internet mobile was glorified for what it had done for us.
But now, in January of the following year, Apple and its iphone are no longer the media darlings they have always been but the new villains in our overconnected world.
Apple did itself no favours after its practice of slowing down older-model handsets was revealed late in 2017, prompting numerous class-action suits in the litigious US.
Apple has been criticised for any number of sins, real or imagined. But this was an active attempt at making its own products inferior — no matter what justifications it offers for preserving battery performance. It was a needless own goal.
It’s the latest scandal to befall Silicon Valley and its creations. Last year we fell out of love with social media, which has been weaponised by trolling, misogyny, intolerance and legions of bots and was used to disseminate propaganda by Russian trolls and the evil Bell Pottinger.
The halo also slipped from Silicon Valley’s shining example of innovation culture as story after story of sexual harassment, a misogynistic bro-culture and endless examples of bad behaviour emerged. This was personified by its most valued startup, as scandal-hit Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick was forced to resign.
Silicon Valley stopped looking like the most innovative place in the world and more and more like the rest of it: where men who were in powerful positions took advantage of women who weren’t.
And by the new year, Apple was facing another, more thorny, problem. First two of its investors, who control about Us$2bn of Apple stock, wrote an open letter to the iphone maker calling on it to develop software tools for parental control and find ways to stop children’s obsession with phones.
Then the man who co-created the iphone and ipod, Tony Fadell, went on a Twitter rant about how electronic gadgets and social media give us “another dopamine hit” and why the big firms need to work on saving us from our “digital addictions”.
Fadell tweeted: “Apple watches, Google phones, Facebook, Twitter — they’ve gotten so good at getting us to go for another click, another dopamine hit. They now have a responsibility & need to start helping us track & manage our digital addictions across all usages — phone, laptop, TV etc.”
This comes as links between our obsessive use of the devices and mental health problems, including depression, in children emerge. From an online nirvana that is always with us through our mobiles we’ve discovered we’re really living in a nightmare, driven by a fear of missing out, in which our children are most susceptible to the disastrous effects.
Sadly, this is the world we have created.
There are calls for Apple to find ways to stop children’s obsession with their phones